Branding USA #3 Book

Harvey Whitehouse explores how the human mind is formed by the rituals and stories of their communities. He focuses on religious communities, but the rituals and stories are far more a cultural construct. He focuses on the way that the mind receives information and makes memories. The core of is argument is the making of implicit (habitual, non-cognitive) memories and explicit (cognitive, storied memories). Implicit memories give a normative exegetical/meaning-making baseline to understanding stories and experience. Explicit memories create cognitive dissonance with extreme experiences that imprint themselves fully on the mind. These memories create spontaneous reflection and exegesis that is uncontrolled, but creates deep meaning-making.

Whitehouse creates a solid argument. However, after reading much more about neurological development and cognition, I think that Whitehouse latches onto one mode of cognition in memory making, but he does not consider the full neural mapping of memory making and how it creates and recreates experiences in the mind.