It’s going to be a surreal spring of 2016 for Bentley University’s Dean of Arts and Sciences Daniel Everett.

While the University of Chicago Press releases his latest book, Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (2016), which examines the culturally-constructed nature of the individual mind and sense of self, Everett will be taking his seat in a London theatre to view a literally constructed version of himself in the Simple 8 production of “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,” based upon his book of the same title which recounts his life-changing experiences among the Pirahã people of central Brazil. He’ll also be teaching a course on the history of human evolution, inviting business university students to consider the interrelated forces of biology and society that shape our language, our cultures, and our conscious and unconscious minds.

Everett’s work in Dark Matter of the Mind focuses in new ways on the old “nature vs. nurture” debate, contending, ultimately, that there is no such identifiable thing as “human nature” or even of an “individual self” that is not shaped by culture. “There is no ‘self,’” Everett observes, “but a combination of culturally-influenced experiences held together by memory.” When you delve into the knowledge that we can’t or don’t consciously talk about, the things that we do not know that we know, you encounter “the dark matter of the mind” and discover the symbiotic relationship between the self and culture.

Dark Matter of the Mind is, at times, a history of the philosophy of the unconscious from Plato and Aristotle through modern neurobiologists. As fascinating as this is to those in Everett’s fields of linguistics and anthropology, one may wonder how it applies to a business university education, even to one wherein business curricula and liberal arts are fused at the deepest level, as at Bentley.

As Everett points out, studying the aspects, advantages, and limitations of business cultures is all the rage, with an increased focus these days on everything from ethnographies of Wall Street to holacratic business models, which are those without middle management. Everett’s students get to grapple with the questions of how one really studies what a business culture is, and how one traces the gaps between what businesses and companies say they are and how they may actually act. Being able to understand how cultures form, and how they shape individuals, is essential to any business student who wants to have a fully informed sense of management philosophies.  As students seek out their career and life paths, studying Everett’s theories empowers them to be “participant observers” in the various cultures and sub-cultures they enter—and may seek to change. Even Everett’s management style as a Dean has been informed, he says, by his understanding of the formation of cultural norms.

Everett’s work has been challenging some cultural norms within the fields of linguistics and related disciplines for some time. In contrast to what Everett has called theories ultimately based on “human rigidity,” such as Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar, or E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology studies, or those of various evolutionary psychologists, all of which posit the existence of some essential human nature, knowledge, or capacity, Everett’s work seeks to highlight the combined effect of “hard-wired, rigid neural limitations and abilities, along with tremendous cognitive flexibility” that allows humans to adapt, learn from, shape, and be shaped by culture. The human self is thus that which emerges from the sum total of one’s experiences, viewed through cultural values and individual interpretations.

In Everett’s view, both individuals and cultures are “flexible,” shaped by each other, capable of deploying tremendous adaptability in response to changing circumstances. His next book, How Language Began, will examine the evolution of language for a general audience. His dynamic, even dramatic, view of human nature and culture is borne out in the adaptations of his work, which include the documentary “The Grammar of Happiness” by Essential Media. In Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes, he recounts his own transformations among the Pirahã, along with the evolution of his anthropological and linguistic theories; this transformation has now found its way to the stage and has been optioned as a movie. In the ongoing interplay of the self and culture, who knows what forms Everett’s work may be transformed into next?