True Story 10.10
The graduate student who found everything relevant
The setting for this story
Soheila, a professor at a U.S. university, was teaching a graduate student from rural Kenya, Aasir, to whom she assigned a case study analyzing the recent founding and early months of a small local church.
A story of misaligned minds13
Soheila expected that Aasir would visit the new church, interview the founder and a few congregants, explore the building’s layout, attend a service, and then write a case study discussing his main findings and comparing them with a few principles that she had stated in her lectures. Soheila viewed this assignment as an opportunity to apply academic thinking to a real-life situation. She strongly suspected that Aasir’s dominant mental process was holistic but didn’t worry about it.
After weeks had gone by, Aasir submitted a voluminous case study, a detailed moment-by-moment narrative of his process of data-gathering. It described his family (each member is introduced) departing from a service at their own church (the sermon’s topic is overviewed), looking for a low-cost gas station, then finding the new church. Meticulously described is every detail experienced by Aasir during his visit to the church, including even the state of the founder’s teeth. Included in the story line was commentary on differences between Kenya and the U.S. in terms of race relations, morality, and more.
In spite of the paper’s exhaustive length, it included neither an analysis of the new church’s situation nor a comparison of Aasir’s findings with principles Soheila had stated in her lectures.
Soheila’s question
To what extent will it be possible for me to help Aasir learn how to think and write analytically?
Critique of story 10.10
Soheila’s assignment directed Aasir to study the recently founded church and write a case study analyzing it. To Aasir, writing such a paper meant comprehensively bringing his readers into his complete, contextualized experience of becoming acquainted with the church, including even his preliminary steps like buying gas – which, to analytic thinkers like us, is laughably irrelevant! To holistic thinkers, the account of the whole experience is incomplete if the gas station bit is excluded. In effect, the resulting paper offers an unabridged account of Aasir’s total experience of the local church.
Millions of people grow from infancy largely or entirely experiencing their worlds holistically. Unknown to them are mental gymnastics such as focusing on individual parts; categorizing parts into related types; assigning relative weights or values; comparing and contrasting; counting and statistical calculating; determining cause and effect; creating charts, graphs, or tables; or discussing an experience in relation to abstract principles (such as those stated in Soheila’s lectures) set forth at a time and place that is separate and distinct from that experience.
The ability to focus on and manipulate the parts of a thing or an idea is a learned skill. Like fluency in a language, that skill is far easier to learn during childhood than later in life, especially if childhood includes attending modern schools. Adult holistic thinkers can learn to think analytically. But as in the case of an adult’s learning a new language to fluency (as did Abdiya in story 10.04), doing so is a long, arduous struggle.
For thought
Analytic thinkers do have opportunities to regard experiences in a holistic way. Here’s an example from my own recent experience.
One of my hats gets lots of compliments. It’s a forest green trilby with a sprig of colorful feathers. I wear it during autumn. Picture me on an urban street, pausing for a light at a crosswalk. A woman walks up, waits beside me, and says, “You look great in that hat!”
Of course, I smile and thank her. We engage in pleasant chitchat, the light changes, and we part ways. But what I’m tempted to do is to continue conversing with her, something along these lines:
“I get this reaction all the time, so I’m curious what exactly draws people’s compliments. What do you think? Is it this hat’s deep green color? Is it the gorgeous game-bird feather? Maybe it’s the feathers against the deep green background. Or maybe their combination resonates with autumn. Perhaps there’s something nice but intangible about this hat paired with the cut of my face. Say, do you think it helps that I’m wearing these cool aviator sunglasses?”
If I actually were to carry on this way, the woman very well might form an unflattering conclusion about my mental state!
The conclusion she ought to reach is that I’m being annoyingly analytical in response to her appreciative holistic compliment, which spoke of her agreeable experience of seeing my hat-with-feathers-and-face-in-autumn as one undifferentiated, unanalyzed whole.
Related stories
Story 10.04 tells of a thoroughly holistic adult woman who did manage to learn a new language (German) to fluency.
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Endnotes:
13 Ott, 114.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.