The Prevalence of Mind–Body Dualism in Early China

We present the first large-scale, quantitative examination of mind and body concepts in a set of historical sources by measuring the predictions of folk mind–body dualism against the surviving textual corpus of pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) China. Our textual analysis found clear patterns in the his-torically evolving reference of the word xin (heart ⁄heart–mind): It alone of the bodily organs was regularly contrasted with the physical body, and during the Warring-States period became ever less associated with emotions and increasingly portrayed as the unique locus of ‘‘higher’ ’ cognitive abili-ties 1. We interpret this as a semantic shift toward a shared cognitive bias in response to a vast and rapid expansion of literacy. Our study helps test the proposed universality of folk dualism, adds a new quantitative approach to the methods used in the humanities, and opens up a new and valuable data source for cognitive scientists: The record of dead minds