Last week, I found myself explaining the Burning Man tradition of “tutu tuesday” to my Algerian mother, then an hour later debating theories of consciousness with a fellow nerd on the internet. I wasn’t just switching languages – I was switching entire ways of thinking. And I was doing it without realizing it.
Most people think multiculturalism means passport stamps and foreign languages. But there’s a more powerful kind happening right in your head: cognitive multiculturalism: the mental flexibility and fluency you develop from experiencing different worlds.
Not different countries necessarily, but different neighborhoods, friend groups, books, jobs, or communities. It’s what happens when you’ve navigated a wide enough variety of contexts that your brain gets good at switching between ways of thinking depending on the situation.
Switching Between Worlds
When you’ve been exposed to different contexts, situations and perspectives, your mind develops multiple models and learns to pick the right one for the situation.
Your brain is essentially learning different codes for thinking and progressively becoming fluent enough to switch between them automatically.
For instance, people with diverse social networks develop better perspective-taking abilities. They become skilled at reading how others think and feel across different contexts.
You probably notice something similar when you consume different types of content. Think about how you adjust when switching between a philosophy book and a comedy podcast, or between watching a documentary and reading fiction.
Each requires you to adapt to different conventions and ways of understanding the world.
Studies also find that people who belong to lots of different groups and consider they have many identities are less prejudiced and more mentally flexible (which psychologists call “social identity complexity”).
When you see yourself as many things at once – whether that’s your profession, your neighborhood, your hobbies, your generation – you become more nuanced and flexible as a person.
And this kind of cognitive multiculturalism translates into real creative advantages. People with multicultural experiences are better at insight problems, making unexpected connections, and generating new ideas. Different experiences expand how you view the world, making it easier to combine ideas in new ways. So, how can you nurture your cognitive multiculturalism?
Practicing Cognitive Multiculturalism
Cognitive multiculturalism gives you the mental agility to better navigate workplace dynamics, understand global events, or simply connect with people different from yourself. And you don’t need to move abroad or learn a new language. You just need to intentionally diversify three things:
1. Your inputs. That includes books, media, and ideas. Don’t just stick to your comfort zone. Read authors from different eras, geographies, or disciplines. Choose media that challenges your assumptions rather than confirms them. Each new way of thinking you encounter expands your cognitive map.
2. Your people. Expand and mix up your social circles by seeking out relationships across generations, professions, and backgrounds. Each person will offer a different mental model of the world, and exposure to these models will diversify your own.
3. Your identities. Don’t limit yourself to one role. Try on different versions of yourself. Experiment with taking up hobbies, joining new communities, or working in unfamiliar environments. Notice how your behavior shifts, and use that metacognitive awareness to expand your sense of self.
Most of us already cross more borders than we notice. We move between work and home, different groups of friends, different media diets. Just pay attention to those borders and push them a little further. That’s what cognitive multiculturalism really is: being deliberate about the diversity of experiences that shape how you think.