stand it, in some abstract way, but they just did not "feel" the
anger. After a few weeks of driving their own cars in the city
they displayed the same emotional reactions as the locals. It
is not that their abstract "conceptions" of what matters and
what does not had changed. But they had acquired the infor-
mation that a parking space is a very scarce resource, and
their emotional systems had adjusted to that information.DECOUPLING AND CONSTRAINTS
[129]A human mind is not condemned to consider and represent only what
is currently going on in its immediate environment. Indeed, human
minds are remarkable in the amount of time they spend thinking
about what is not here and now. Fiction is the most salient illustra-
tion. Reading the above anecdote about the thief, the dog and the
police officer, you probably entertained precise notions about the
thief's and the police officer's mental states, although there was
nobody around, only marks on a sheet of paper. But the capacity is of
course much more general. One of the easiest things for human
minds to do is to produce inferences on the basis of false premises,
such as, "If I had had lunch I would not be so hungry now." This can
focus on future possibilities too. Worries about what would happen if
the roof caved in and came crashing down on your head do not
require the usual input (e.g., seeing the roof coming down) and do
not produce their normal output (an attempt to dash off as fast as
possible). This is why psychologists say that these thoughts are decou-
pledfrom their standard inputs and outputs.
Decoupled cognition is crucial to human cognition because we
depend so much on information communicated by others and on coop-
eration with others. To evaluate information provided by others you
must build some mental simulation of what they describe. Also, we
could not carry out complex hunting expeditions, tool making, food
gathering or social exchange without complex planning. The latter
requires an evaluation of several different scenarios, each of which is
based on nonactual premises (What if we go down to the valley to
gather fruit? What if there is none down there? What if other mem-
bers of the group decide to go elsewhere? What if my neighbor steals
my tools? and so on). Thinking about the past too requires decoupling.
THEKIND OF MIND ITTAKES