What Makes Us Human? is a biweekly column from Emi Sakamoto ’28. Sakamoto investigates the question to better understand human-centered meaning in the midst of a rapidly evolving artificial landscape.
“At any given moment, you have billions of bites of information seeping in through your senses. What our brain does is, it tries to filter and make sense of that information. It tries to make meaning out of it. And that’s basically what we do best as humans. We make meaning.” — Alia Crum, professor of psychology and principal investigator at Stanford’s Mind and Body Lab.
The quest for meaning has perplexed philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and the like for millennia. And we, as humans who walk this earth, architect our own kind of meaning. Or at the very least, we try to. But if the history of existence on Earth was quantified by a 24-hour clock, humankind would be in the last three seconds. I’m only beginning to understand the limitations of our nascent yet elusively archaic existence.
As I find myself in Silicon Valley, at the very heart of the global race towards artificial general intelligence, I can’t help but wonder, what does it mean to be human? What lies between our two ears is a roughly three-pound enigma that cloaks our complexity, idiosyncrasy and opacity. Psychologists like Alia Crum, a professor of psychology and principal investigator at Stanford’s Mind and Body Lab, have dedicated their lives to probing deeper and deeper into the mind, testing the limits and steadily unraveling its mental structures and physiological consequences. In attempting to model artificial intelligence after human intelligence, we too often forget we have simply scratched the surface of understanding the structure of wirings, firings, feelings, fluctuations and form. We hardly understand the human mind at all.
In conversation with Crum, I was gifted a glimpse of the mind she has used to advance the field of psychology with a fearless and palpable curiosity and compassion. Our conversation began with one of her guiding questions: “What is the power of the human mind, and how can the human mind transform our experience?”
Crum is a pioneer in studying mindsets, which she defines as “oversimplified, highly evaluative assumptions we make about the nature of something, about what it means and why it matters.”
“What’s fascinating about them is that they change our reality,” she continued. This seemingly mystical, placebo-like power is achieved through four empirically validated mechanisms: mindsets alter our attention, emotional response, behavioral response and physiological response.
Crum explains, “Placebo effects are fascinating and fun to talk about because they showcase the power of the mind. Then, we misunderstand the power of the mind as being just a placebo, but it’s not. The power of mind is the most powerful tool we have.”
From nutrition to oncology, the data debunks this misunderstanding. Her research illuminates the mind’s power to impact our health and physiology, and the consequences are multifold. For instance, our mindsets about milkshakes being “sensible” or “indulgent” invoke our ghrelin response (a hormone which signals hunger). Patients’ mindsets about cancer as “manageable” or a “catastrophic” affect their health outcomes. This isn’t just feeling, it is fact.
What drew me most to Crum’s research is her focus on the nexus of psychology and physiology. In studying the mind and body, Crum’s research illustrates the duality of shaping and being shaped by the world. As we get caught up in the conversation about AI, we forget that, in Crum’s words, “the cool thing about the human mind is that it’s connected to the body. What makes the mind come alive is the extent to which we feel it in our bodies and in our lives. I want to know, how does it change your gut? How does it change whether you get out of bed that morning? How does it change how you feel when you embrace somebody or kiss somebody?”
Our mindsets melt into our physical sensations and bodily experiences. Rooted in our core beliefs, mindsets reflect our beliefs about the nature of various topics through a focally distorted perspective: abundant or scarce, dangerous or safe, etc. Any determination of this dichotomy is not “right or wrong, but they start to change and shape and color our reality.” As human beings, we are continuously trying to survive and make sense of the world through both our mind and body. Crum’s lab is centrally rooted in researching this mind-body connection.
As our conversation came to a close, I had one last burning question: what would she say to young people navigating an increasingly complex and uncertain world? With a warm smile Crum replied, “Stress and struggle is inevitable. But that too is a part of the human experience. And it’s particularly inevitable if you have anything in your life that you care about. The minute you care, there is going to be stress and struggle.” Crum explained that because our generation has been taught that stress is “bad” for you, we have inadvertently learned to avoid stress. In turn, we shy away from that which we may care most about.
I left our conversation with feelings that I won’t be able to articulate fully in just this article, but they resembled something like this: we, as human beings, have everything we need. Life is labored and languished by forces which we too often cannot control. But — it is also beautiful and bountiful with human beings who care to make what is controllable somehow more meaningful. Crum, generously sharing her time with me for nothing in return, is a testament to this. You, spending time reading this, is another. AI may be more efficient, and perhaps maybe someday more “intelligent,” but as Crum says, “AI is still trying to be like us.”
So, who are we? What makes us human?