In General Intelligence and Context Switching, we examined how the brain brings to bear different operational strategies depending on the requirements of a given situation, and discussed how that flexibility gives rise to general intelligence (vs. the narrow intelligence exhibited by computers today). The argument focused mainly on more academic activities such as physics and chess, but while reading The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris I realized the concept of context switching goes far deeper. In her book, Harris looks to dispel the idea that the way parents raise their children is the primary driver of how they turn out, instead pointing to peer groups as the main influencer (at least on behavior outside the home). As part of crafting this argument, Harris takes a look at the two environments children spend time in (the home and outside the home) and the code-switching (or context switching) these two environments require:
It is common for immigrant children to use their first language at home and their second language outside the home. Give them a year in the new country and they are switching back and forth between their two languages as easily as I switch back and forth between programs on my computer. Step out of the house – click on English. Go back in the house – click on Polish. Psycholinguists call it code-switching.
Code-switching is sort of like having two separate storage tanks in the mind, each containing what was learned in a particular social context. According to Paul Kolers, a psycholinguist who studied bilingual adults, access to a given tank may require switching to the language used in that context. As an example, he mentioned a colleague of his who had moved from France to the United States at the age of twelve. This man does his arithmetic in French, his calculus in English. “Mental activities and information learned in one context are not necessarily available for use in another,” Kolers explained. “They often have to be learned anew in the second context, although perhaps with less time and effort.”
It is not only book-learning that is stored in separate tanks. “Many bilingual people,” reported Kolers, “say that they think differently and respond with different emotions to the same experience in their two languages.” If they use one language exclusively at home, the other exclusively outside the home, the home language becomes linked to the thoughts and emotions experienced at home, the other to the thoughts and emotions experienced outside the home.
It seems context switching goes “all the way down”, so to speak. In General Intelligence and Context Switching, the below diagram was used to highlight the hierarchical nature of contexts and the type of switching which occurs.
However, based on Harris’ points, it seems that view may not have done full justice to the flexibility our brains demonstrate when engaging with the world. The “two separate storage tanks” in the bilingual mind, with their different emotions and capabilities, can almost be viewed as two separate “I”s. This compartmentalization is made more clear in bilingual people, but it exists in all of us – we can be very different people (and feel like very different people) at home with our parents vs. presenting at a board meeting vs. on a romantic vacation. All these selves are tied together by shared memories and knowledge (with varying degrees of access, as demonstrated by Kolers’ example), which are the glue that make them the same person, but their ways of engaging with the world (and of how it feels for them to engage with the world) can still vary to great degree.
It seems our brains aren’t designed for us to be “unitary beings”, consistent across space and time. Instead, our intelligence hinges on our ability to be a variety of distinct, fluctuating beings, constantly shifting to put our best face forward for the task at hand. In extreme situations, we recognize this differentiation quite readily (the phrases “I don’t know what came over me” or “I didn’t feel like myself” are frequently uttered after these moments), but in the day-to-day the overlap between selves is generally wide enough to prevent us from noticing. This is likely for the best (a world with rampant dissociative identity disorder sounds like a confusing one), but it does raise interesting questions about the degree to which we can / should hold ourselves (or others) responsible for behavior exhibited in other contexts.