22 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
The Effects of Environment
I have tried to make a distinction between the house of the mind and
the contents of each mental room. In computer terms, I have separated the
hardware of the brain from the software of the mind.A This addresses the
old question of „nature versus nurture.‟ Researchers often ask which
personality traits are inborn and which are acquired. I suggest that the
model of the mind presented in this book provides a way of sorting through
this confusion: On the one hand, nature appears to be responsible for the
wiring and construction of the mind. There are seven mental rooms, they
are connected together in a fixed pattern, and each room deals with
information in a specific way. In addition, the brain seems to be wired up
so that each cognitive style is conscious in one of these seven rooms. This
wiring pattern forces thinking to develop along certain paths; it is the
channeling of nature.
This explains, for instance, why the Exhorter person is constantly
pushing for change: His conscious room is fed with emotional memories; it
has mental access to what could be; it gets pumped up chemically with the
power of excitement when something new flashes upon the screen of inner
vision. With this type of conscious hookup, it is inevitable that this room,
and the person who lives in this room, would become a pusher and a
prodder.
On the other side of the balance, we find nurture. A human baby is
born with a specific cognitive style. The mode of thought in which he is
conscious has already been determined. But he is also born with a mind
which is practically empty. The house is there and the wiring is finished,
but nobody is home and the lights are not on. As the senses of the baby are
exposed to the external world, the mind starts to fill up—mental
programming occurs and the rooms in the house cease to be just bare walls.
When enough information fills a certain part of the mind, then this
mode of thought becomes „alive‟ and begins to operate; the lights come on
in that room. Parents notice that the child has graduated from food
processor to person: Not only do lights come on, but someone is home.
Environment, parenting, culture, gender, and birth order all influence this
process of mental development—they determine what is fed into the mind.
A Technically speaking, this is not completely accurate. Brain software
does contain an aspect of hardware: Memories are formed as new physical
connections grow between one brain neuron and another. We will also see
that there is a strong mental connection between memories and thinking.
However, these physical changes are always limited, and those who study
linguistics will tell you that the brain is prewired to interpret input in
certain ways.