photo by bfraz
by :: Anamaria
Every morning at 7 am you will find me in my car, driving to work and listening to NPR. Recently, I heard an interview with science writer Shankar Vedantam, about his new book The Hidden Brain.
The more I listened to the story, the more I wanted to read the book. So I put it on my long list of books to purchase, and, eventually, read. In the meantime, I wanted to talk about it here.
Although this is not a cross-cultural communication book, many of the things Vedantam addresses in the book could explain why cross-cultural interactions are so tricky. And incredibly challenging. And exhausting.
Let me explain.
In his book, Vedantam talks about how our brains have two modes: one conscious and one unconscious.
Pilot and autopilot, he calls them.
And Vedantam believes that people are constantly switching back and forth between the two. This makes perfect sense to me, I thought as I was driving to work.
And then I started thinking about Vedantam’s theory from a cross-cultural perspective.
When we live in our own culture, I do believe that we switch back and forth between pilot and autopilot all the time. But what happens when we move to a different culture? Does this switching back and forth continue at the same frequency? Should it?
It’s difficult to stop the autopilot part of the brain from taking over, sometimes. However, in a cross-cultural context, it is very important to minimize the autopilot mode - as much as possible.
When your brain is on autopilot, it makes assumptions which, in a cross-cultural context, it should not be making.
These assumptions will result in cultural misunderstandings, frustrations, and miscommunications. Being on autopilot when we shouldn’t be is what leads to “unsupported snap judgments about people in the world around us” – as Vedantam points out in his NPR interview. How true!
A good cross-cultural communicator is one that suspends the autopilot mode as much as possible when interacting cross-culturally. But not being able to freely switch to autopilot mode can be exhausting for a person.
And this is why living or working abroad is so tiring. This is also why interacting with people from other cultures can be so exhausting. And this is why foreigners will happily look for the company of other fellow country men and women: to give their brain a break, and allow the autopilot to take over. Even if for just a little while.
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