Ernest Hartmann MD Webcast : Read the Summary

Boundaries between Fields and Boundaries in the Mind

Fields of human knowledge are our inventions. They are regions in our minds and brains. Human psychological capacities such as thought, feeling, memory are likewise regions in our minds and brains.

Fields lie next to other fields with some sort of boundary between them – a wall, a fence, a dotted line. The fields of knowledge, the regions, have been studied in great and ever-increasing detail, but the boundaries have been neglected. The assumption has been that the boundaries are simply imaginary lines.

But no, boundaries can be studied. My colleagues and I have done a whole series of studies over the past twenty years on various types of boundaries in the mind. Studying boundaries begin with the realization that boundaries are not one-dimensional lines. They can be relatively thick ( solid, impermeable) or relatively thin. We can assess the thickness of boundaries psychologically using the well-validated Boundary Questionnaire ( taken by about 10,000 people by now) and we have recently developed brain/biological measures of boundaries as well.

Boundaries studied include boundaries between sensory modalities, between thought and feeling, between sleep and waking, between dreaming and waking, between the body and the outside world, between men and women, between our own groups and other groups, and many others. Thick boundaries imply separation, solid distinctions, serial thinking, black/white thinking. Thin boundaries imply the opposite. Statistically there is surprising coherence ( correlation) between different kinds of boundaries. People who score thick on one kind of boundary tend to score thick on others too. And people with thick boundaries differ markedly from those with thinner boundaries in their approach to science, art and philosophy, as well as questions such as relations between nations. As a simple example, art students tend to score very thin overall, military officers and lawyers very thick. We also have a great deal of data on the relationship of boundaries to dreaming and to creativity.