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Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, remote reaches of the Soviet Union were forced through social and economic changes that would normally take generations. Individual farmers in isolated areas of what is now Uzbekistan had long survived by cultivating small gardens for food, and cotton for everything else. Nearby in the mountain pasturelands of present-day Kyrgyzstan, herders kept animals. The population was entirely illiterate, and a hierarchical social structure was enforced by strict religious rules. The socialist revolution dismantled that way of life almost overnight. The Soviet government forced all that agricultural land to become large collective farms and began industrial development. The economy quickly became interconnected and complex. Farmers had to form collective work strategies, plan ahead for production, divvy up functions, and assess work along the way. Remote villages began communicating with distant cities. A network of schools opened in regions with 100 percent illiteracy, and adults began learning a system of matching symbols to sounds. Villagers had used numbers before, but only in practical transactions. Now they were taught the concept of a number as an abstraction that existed even without reference to counting animals or apportioning food. Some village women remained fully illiterate but took short courses on how to teach kindergartners. Other women were admitted for longer study at a teachers’ school. Classes in preschool education and the science and technology of agriculture were offered to students who had no formal education of any kind. Secondary schools and technical institutes soon followed. In 1931, amid that incredible transformation, a brilliant young Russian psychologist named Alexander Luria recognized a fleeting “natural experiment,” unique in the history of the world. He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds

When Luria arrived, the most remote villages had not yet been touched by the warp-speed restructuring of traditional society. Those villages gave him a control group. He learned the local language and brought fellow psychologists to engage villagers in relaxed social situations—teahouses or pastures—and discuss questions or tasks designed to discern their habits of mind. Some were very simple: present skeins of wool or silk in an array of hues and ask participants to describe them. The collective farmers and farm leaders, as well as the female students, easily picked out blue, red, and yellow, sometimes with variations, like dark blue or light yellow. The most remote villagers, who were still “premodern,” gave more diversified descriptions: cotton in bloom, decayed teeth, a lot of water, sky, pistachio. Then they were asked to sort the skeins into groups. The collective farmers, and young people with even a little formal education, did so easily, naturally forming color groups. Even when they did not know the name of a particular color, they had little trouble putting together darker and lighter shades of the same one. The remote villagers, on the other hand, refused, even those whose work was embroidery. “It can’t be done,” they said, or, “None of them are the same, you can’t put them together.” When prodded vigorously, and only if they were allowed to make many small groups, some relented and created sets that were apparently random. A few others appeared to sort the skeins according to color saturation, without regard to the color. Geometric shapes followed suit. The greater the dose of modernity, the more likely an individual grasped the abstract concept of “shapes” and made groups of triangles, rectangles, and circles, even if they had no formal education and did not know the shapes’ names.

The remote villagers, meanwhile, saw nothing alike in a square drawn with solid lines and the same exact square drawn with dotted lines. To Alieva, a twenty-six-year-old remote villager, the solid-line square was obviously a map, and the dotted-line square was a watch. “How can a map and a watch be put together?” she asked, incredulous. Khamid, a twenty-four-year-old remote villager, insisted that filled and unfilled circles could not go together because one was a coin and the other a moon. The pattern continued for every genre of question. Pressed to make conceptual groupings—akin to the similarities questions on IQ tests—remote villagers reverted to practical narratives based on their direct experience. When psychologists attempted to explain a “which one does not belong” grouping exercise to thirty-nine-year-old Rakmat, they gave him the example of three adults and one child, with the child obviously different from the others. Except Rakmat could not see it that way. “The boy must stay with the others!” he argued. The adults are working, “and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.” Okay, then, how about a hammer, a saw, a hatchet, and a log—three of them are tools. They are not a group, Rakmat replied, because they are useless without the log, so why would they be together?

Other villagers removed either the hammer or the hatchet, which they saw as less versatile for use with the log, unless they considered pounding the hatchet into the log with the hammer, in which case it could stay. Perhaps, then, bird/ rifle/ dagger/ bullet? You can’t possibly remove one and have a group, a remote villager insisted. The bullet must be loaded in the rifle to kill the bird, and “then you have to cut the bird up with the dagger, since there’s no other way to do it.” These were just the introductions explaining the grouping task, not the actual questions. No amount of cajoling, explanation, or examples could get remote villagers to use reasoning based on any concept that was not a concrete part of their daily lives. The farmers and students who had begun to join the modern world were able to practice a kind of thinking called “eduction,” to work out guiding principles when given facts or materials, even in the absence of instructions, and even when they had never seen the material before. This, it turns out, is precisely what Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests. Imagine presenting the villagers living in premodern circumstances with abstract designs from the Raven’s test. Some of the changes wrought by modernity and collective culture seem almost magical. Luria found that most remote villagers were not subject to the same optical illusions as citizens of the industrialized world, like the Ebbinghaus illusion. Which middle circle below looks bigger?

If you said the one on the right, you’re probably a citizen of the industrialized world. The remote villagers saw, correctly, that they are the same, while the collective farmers and women in teachers’ school picked the one on the right. Those findings have been repeated in other traditional societies, and scientists have suggested it may reflect the fact that premodern people are not as drawn to the holistic context—the relationship of the various circles to one another—so their perception is not changed by the presence of extra circles. To use a common metaphor, premodern people miss the forest for the trees; modern people miss the trees for the forest. Since Luria’s voyage to the interior, scientists have replicated his work in other cultures. The Kpelle people in Liberia were subsistence rice farmers, but in the 1970s roads began snaking toward them, connecting the Kpelle to cities. Given similarities tests, teenagers who were engaged with modern institutions grouped items by abstract categories (“All of these things can keep us warm”), while the traditional teens generated groups that were comparatively arbitrary, and changed frequently even when they were asked to repeat the exact same task. Because the touched-by-modernity teens had constructed meaningful thematic groups, they also had far superior recall when asked later to recount the items. The more they had moved toward modernity, the more powerful their abstract thinking, and the less they had to rely on their concrete experience of the world as a reference point.