Chariots of the Mind

Ancient Parables & Modern Paradigms

Two famous ancient metaphors use the chariot to explain the mind, coming from different traditions and perspectives.

One is the Socratic chariot from Plato’s Phaedrus, which presents a tripartite soul:

? Logistikos (charioteer) represents the reasoning and ordering faculty.

? Thumos (the light horse) signifies spirited force, linked to courage and higher motivation.

? Epithumia (the dark horse) embodies the appetitive force, driven by baser desires.

This metaphor, though nuanced in Plato’s time, was simplified over centuries. Christianity reduced it to body versus soul. Enlightenment thinkers overemphasized pure reason. The 20th-century cognitive revolution framed cognition in mechanistic, rationalist terms. Kahneman’s System 1 & 2 sought to challenge that ideal but instead introduced a new, still too-rigid, separation of cognitive processes.

Earlier still, the Katha Upanishad’s chariot of the mind, from the late Vedic tradition, offers a far more integrated model:

? ātman (passenger) is the true self, observing and experiencing.

? Buddhi (charioteer) functions as holistic intelligence, not mere rationality.

? Manas (reins) controls attention and the mind’s immediate responses.

? Indriyas (horses) represent the senses, pulling in different directions based on stimuli.

? Vi?ayām? (path or objects) forms the world of sensory experience, shaping perception.

Unlike Plato’s tension-driven model, the Upanishadic chariot seeks harmony. It describes a continuous interplay between self, cognition, and environment, showing how perception extends through the senses into the objects and phenomena encountered in the world beyond.

Why does this matter?

The Western tradition, since Plato, has favoured dissection, dichotomy, and pulling things apart without necessarily putting them back together or even accounting properly for all of the parts and their interconnections. Some of the necessities of empiricism have reinforced this habit.

Strategy based on this tradition clings to a deeply problematic supposed dichotomy of "Rational vs. Emotional". It imposes a dis-integrative choice where, for example, it is assumed that the rational must drive sales activations while the emotional drives longer-term brand equity. This framing is not just an oversimplification. It is a misrepresentation of how decisions are made and what matters contextually in a moment.

Cognition is modular, integrated, and dynamic.

Change the metaphor, change the worldview

Changing minds should not mean changing the science of how minds work.

There is an explanatory muddle in most accounts of how our minds approach the world and, therefore, how they are influenced by brands, advertising, and wider communications. This is true at an individual level and also in relation to the concept of fame. Fama in Latin, ultimately borrowed from Pheme in Greek, represents public voice and shared perception, shaped through the act of speaking and reinforced through the scale of social transmission.

Even attempts to redress this imbalance sometimes risk reinforcing the same structural separation. Orlando Wood draws on Ian McGilchrist’s advocacy of a holistic understanding of cognition by integrating the roles of the brain’s right and left hemispheres. Wood’s work highlights the importance of right-hemisphere engagement in creativity, context, and emotional richness, which is appealing, valuable and well-founded. The risk, however, is that this emphasis can still imply an absolute preference for one mode of thinking over another, rather than a fully integrated cognitive process with shifting contextual focus. In practice, it too often defaults back into the same dichotomy of Rational versus Emotional.

Understanding advertising’s impact in terms of explicit and implicit processing and transmission makes far more sense. Research on priming shows that initial evaluation, based on affective responses, shapes perception and therefore shapes conscious deliberation. Rather than that invented rational-emotional split, cognition is a layered process where implicit and explicit influences continuously interact. Studies in implicit cognition demonstrate that decision-making is guided by prior experiences, learned associations, and immediate stimuli but this is integrated rather than occurring in separate tracks and it's also dynamic and constructed, not just 'stored' and then 'accessed'.

Advertising research reflects and supports these insights, but still invariably frames them within outdated models. Studies on brand-building and sales activation highlight implicit and explicit effects, yet they continue to describe them in terms of "emotion versus reason" (based on predefined categorisation) or "System 1 versus System 2". Advertising does not work through distinct appeals to "emotion" for brands and "rationality" for sales but through a continuous reconstructive loop, where perception and action emerge from an integrated process rather than competing influences.

The issue is not just that the traditional rational-emotional model is an oversimplification. It misrepresents how thinking, perception, and motivation actually work.

From a theoretical perspective that informs worldviews, we would be far better off adopting a more Vedic approach to this whole area rather than continuing to follow modern variants of Plato.