Barbara Tversky: Action Shapes Thought

0:00 I'm listening to when the boiling of the rice, I'm smelling the olive oil on the saucepan and I'm picking up the dangerous on gotta lower the heat. That's only from a great deal of experience and paying attention to the smell and the sound. of those cues and that isn't in the recipe. the abstraction you get either in a diagram or verbal instructions isn't going to enable you to be a great cook. You can make satisfactory things.

0:32 And you need to know. Not just it adding so you need to know when to throw it in the trash and start all over again. Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out.

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1:25 Slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Today I'm speaking with Barbara Tversky. Barbara is a professor of psychology at both Stanford and Columbia. Barbara has published more than two hundred scholarly articles about memory, spati, design, and creativity.

1:42 She's the author of Mind in Motion. How action shapes thought. If you're interested in cognitive psychology, how the brain works. The way that language shapes thought and thought shapage, you're in for a real treat with this episode. We cover her nine laws of cognition.

2:00 Why movement, not language, is the foundation to thought. How language changes how we think. gestures and their relationship to language. Why she dove into the work of Leonardo da Vinci and the importance of perspective taking. It's time to listen and learn.

2:24 What get you interested in how the mind works? I think Everybody is puzzled by the mind. Ветер то прсує орна. Із антипос.

2:40 When I got into newly birthed cognitive psychology I had been interested anyway in the visual spatial world. Um we are constantly experiencing it and so it's a large part of our lives. And most of the Theories at that point were based on what philosophers called propositions on language like

3:07 representations and attempting To reduce everything in the visual spatial world to these propositional statements which are minimal statements that About truth conditions and And that struck me as odd. Because the visual spatial world

3:27 precedes language evolutionarily and it takes up far more of the cortex than language. And it has to have its own logic. not logic based, not a logic or a structure Based on language.

3:46 If anything, I thought maybe language is based on the way we perceive and interact with Perceive space and interact with things in space. So I began looking at various aspects of the visual spatial world looking for its own own structure and own logic. And that brought me back to language, and

4:11 because we use language to describe and talk about the world and spatial language seems both primitive and primitive in the sens of its origins both ontologically and phylogenetically, we talk about where things are, where to look, what to do. Those are all about our interactions with space and they seem crucial in Lives. So it brought me back to language, but it also got me interested in understanding

4:45 How we uh Perceive and understand space and interactions with things in it. And If you think about actions in space

4:57 the pr most basic action is whether to approach something or avoided. To go forward, we like something, we're attracted to it, we must interact with it, or we avoid it in one way or another. And that simple basic action that even one celled creatures must take Seems

5:19 inherently Value laden, emotional. So is it it's fair to say that space uh and movement have changed How we describe things, is that fair to say? Yes, and it in fact it's I I think it's fair to say that uh

5:37 All our spatial representations depend on on interactions. They're a coupling. of what we do and how we per perceive it and Those studies go way back um a hundred and fifty years within when Stratton and later others put Lenses on people's eyes that move the visuals system.

6:02 or the visual perception. left words or right words so you can do it upside down. And it people adapted by moving, by grasping things, and if they didn't grasp Things. and recalibrate uh how space was represented in the brain.

6:21 Then they didn't learn. to behave in the new situation. And it's undoubtedly something we're doing continuously all our lives. is recalibrating um our Uh many visual spatial systems to

6:39 the way they allow us. to behave in the world. Has language changed how we think too? The language that we use to communicate is also, I would assume, somewhat the language that we use to think in. Right, and and that I think goes deep, um, on how So th there's beautiful work on r on rodents and other primates on how space is represented, the larger space that we move in, not space of hand interaction, but the larger space we know

7:14 And this won the Nobel Prize for uh the Mosers and John O'Keefe. The combinations of their work were So O'Keefe with Nadell and other people had found in the Hippocampus of rats Single cells. that respond when the rat is in particular places.

7:36 And what's beautiful about these cells is the a single cell brings together information about vision, smell, touch, and um the movement of paws on the on the ground and so forth, all this multi-sensory information into a single cell, and that encodes a place. z they thought in fact they wrote a book called The Hippocampus is a cognitive map. However, those place cells weren't arrayed spatially. So the problem was still open. How do you get all these place cells related one to another? And the motor is working in O'Keefe's lab, and found grid cells one synapse away in entrynal cortex that arrayed the place cells relative to one another, essentially a spatial array,

8:29 Not uh um and Later work work that came quite a bit later, beautiful work showed that place the s single cells and hippocampus also encold people events in time conceptual relations And that grid cells map them in temporal space, conceptual space, social spaces.

8:54 So that It shows quite beautifully, elegantly, that the foundation for spatial thought is also the foundation for conceptual thought for conceptual relations Because what the grid cells are doing is mapping

9:12 um relationships among single items. So that that is one cornerstone of the of the claim I've been making that spatial thinking is the foundation of all thought. And I qualify that by saying it's just the foundation, not the entire edifice. So language

9:35 I I'm going back a long way to your question. Um Rats don't talk. They communicate but not abstract ideas or so we think um and e even a more what we would call advanced primates don't seem seem to

9:55 communicate in language or gesture more abstract. So Chimpensey's gorillas will will point But C members of the con species won't look at where they're pointing. And nobody so far has seen a a gorilla or an orangutan or any of these uh uh other primates make a map in the sand.

10:19 to explain to somebody else how to get somewhere or even just your directions So language does affect in humans the Does affect the way we conceive of space. we're all wandering around now with Google Maps trying to get us to all kinds of places.

10:38 Um, and we tell people how to get to places. So that gives human beings another layer or two layers if we include three layers if we include maps. Gestures and um language For understanding space. and for understanding conceptual relations that are spatial.

11:02 So our language reflects our spati. We say somebody's on the top of a heap. And we gesture up, or we say someone's fallen into a depression and we gesture down in our body. Goes down to indicate up and down correspond to to being happy versus being depressed. We've created a dimension, it's vertical. Um and

11:29 So again the the way we was supposed To communicate to other people, to think ourselves. um is layered with these gestures and language and diagrams. that themselves have a basis in spatial thinking. But they give us additional tools to um navigate the world, to do things in the world.

11:57 like set a table or or operate a bicycle, um, all the more manual activities that humans uh engage in, play a piano. I wanna get into some of the implications of that in a second. The question that came to mind is is that people tend to think of themselves as a visual or verbal or mathematical thinker. Is there any evidence behind that? Or can you be good at more than one of them? Or how does that work? Yeah, I mean the the disappointing is that you can be good or bad at any of them, more or less independently.

12:38 So that's d discouraging in in some way. You think if you're a visual person i if you're not very good at visual maybe you're better at verbal and maybe you are because uh uh we do tend to compensate and use use media that um and channels that we're be we feel more at home and we're more adept in, but they do seem to be pretty independent. And I should say that a lot of our spatial thinking is really not visual.

13:12 Um, the taxi drivers in London that get you to any of these obscure streets aren't imagining a map as they're navigating. They simply have a spati of where things are relative to each other that may not you might not necessarily always have uh conscious experience of them. Blind people navigate quite well, many of them, and it's spatial, not visual. And they'll navigate by other cues, Acoustic cues, smells, wind, the texture of the ground. These are all kind of landmarks and cues that keep People without sight oriented and I know many people who've been blind from birth who who or blind later who have amazing spati. They can be excellent mathematicians

14:11 and get get around space better than I can. So space is not just visual in in fact the areas of the brain that Capture space are multi modal, they're uh they get input from many different modalities and output to them. Now each modality is gonna have its special characteristics, but to some extent they're compensatory. Let let's talk about some of those modalities, I I guess in the sense of like how does this change how we

14:43 write or how we present material and maybe we'll keep Zoom separately and some of the implications for that, but when w we're writing an email or we're writing a document at work or we're giving a presentation, what are some of the impacts of this? I don't have direct information. I can describe some studies that we've done where you're learning. And how your learning is And there we put people alone in a room, they're not talking to anyone. And they're alone in a room and we've given them complicated material to learn.

15:17 And they're going to be tested. And these are students, so they're used to learning and being tested. And they're good at it. And i the material we gave them is varied. W we started with descriptions of environments, so describing where four or eight landmarks were in a gym or in a small town or a museum. and describing incidental information about the environments to make them more vivid. And we uh told them that they would be tested and they

15:52 Could read these descriptions four times And We filmed them as they were reading. And as they were reading they were making gestures.

16:05 So they're not talking. The gestures are from themselves. And for the the environments they were drawing lines for the paths in the environments and p and points, dots for the various landmarks. And they were doing it over and over the way you might rehearse a phone number. So they were rehearsing that, checking it. and doing it in different ways, but for the environments Just about seventy percent of the people did this spontaneously. We never it suggested uh that

16:41 That gestures would be helpful we never gave them a hint that We were interested in their gestures. But about seventy per cent made lines for pairs and dots for four places, the way you would do if you were drawing somebody a sketch map of how to get from one place to another. And when they did it

17:04 They remembered better. And when we took a new group of people, we've run this now four or five times, a new group of people had them sit on their hands. And that group did worse. On the memory test. And some of them even said that

17:23 I can't think without my hands, said So this was spontaneous. We we tried it with other material, how a car break works, it's quite complicated. Um and you can again see people making models of the how the car break works. And here a smaller percentage did it, but it again helped their memory. Those who did it remembered better. We've we've tried it with

17:53 Time scheduling multiple events that happen at the same time, and people made matrices, sometimes with the knuckles on their hands, sometimes on their tables, sometimes in the air. So people model them differently. Um, but they make models. Again, it's somewhere around sixty percent of the people make these models spontaneously. And when they do they remember better. So those models are a spatial motor.

18:25 For the most part, people weren't looking at their hands. Um, some were every once in a while, but for the most part their eyes were on the screen reading the material and their hands and their body were translating what they were reading into thought. Or that's the way we conceive of it, and when you watch it, you can't help but feel you're watching somebody think I mean you see them tilt their head, think, look at the screen, gesture. going back and forth in that way that we do when w we're thinking.

19:02 But the models were special motor and So they were a separate channel from language. And they're a redundant channel, they're another way of representing. The same information and the gestures are representing And there

19:20 Representing in a more direct way than language. A a line on a map is analogous to a path in the road or a line and that your fingers draw, and a point is analogous to a place. And so that that representation is is more direct. Then saying path.

19:43 Or road. or saying place or landmark. So i i uh we think it gets to meaning more directly. And the fact that we use spati to describe these things like line and dot seems to again indicate

20:03 That Our thinking about it is spatial visual and based on the spatial that were representing abstract ideas in these simple geometries. Of lines and dots and boxes. So you see that in diagrams as well? I mean people make uh i i if if I take the rudiments of a sketch map that it's lines and places, well those are lines and nodes or links and nodes.

20:34 And we can use links and nodes to describe decision trees or conceptual hierarchies or phylogenetic hierarchies, office hierarchies. So we use that same way of conceptualizing which is spatial. um for describing for representing abstract things in a diagrammatic form, but also in language. So does that have implications for how we present? Like should we be presenting in uh more graphically in terms of bullet points and maps and diagrams and relationships explaining them in in a spatial sort of way to people? I I think it's a good idea and there's more and more of it. Now that Pixels don't care

21:23 If they're representing words or diagrams, and we do have access to many, many, many pixels, so that in making diagrams it's certainly easier digitally, and then it's easier in printing books. um before books were typeset and that gave an advantage to language, whereas diagrammatic things had to be done differently and integrated in a different way, in a m a far more work intensive way. So there's still a bias, I think, in publishing towards language. rather than toward diagrams. The bias isn't simply the ease of printing. There are all kinds of reasons. But I mean language is great. So I I I use it quite frequently. So i i but I do think that diagrams go a long way to conveying conceptual information. There's reams of experiments supporting that.

22:24 Now diagrams in science, even in history for showing time and and dynasties and so forth. Th they can be well crafted. Just as text can be well crafted or poorly crafted, it So you have to take that into consideration, but well crafted diagrams are superior to language for explaining many, many, many um kinds of information more directly, more succinctly. Diagrams also allow huge numbers of inferences.

23:04 So i I mean Venn diagrams for logic, uh you have intersecting circles, and you can make a great deal of uh a huge number of inferences just from that diagram that would take many sentences. To describe and even w those sentences you have to put into a conceptual framework and The Venn diagrams, the intersections give you that conceptual framework just like uh a hierarchy uh phylogenetic tree will give you those inferences directly, they're compact ways

23:42 of incorporating huge amounts of information. So f certainly on the teaching side. Um it diagrams can help enormously in almost any field. Again, they have to be well thought through, certainly in data. in this line uh bar charts and line diagrams and so forth go a long way. to allowing many inferences about data and to allow

24:12 It's a direct more direct way of expressing it. But we've found That producing diagrams is a good way to learn. uh study with Eliza Bobick looked at junior high students learning chemical bonding. And she taught them she was a teacher. She inqu she asked many other teachers

24:35 who were teaching the same sort of material to participate. So she taught the material in the normal way, you have text and diagrams and animations and explanations, teaching chemical bonding. After a couple of days of learning She divided she tested the class to see how they were doing and And then divided them into two groups, the groups were equal on that test.

25:02 Half the students were asked to give a verbal explanation and of chemical bonding, which is the normal way of testing. The other half were asked to give a visual explanation. And it then Everybody was retested.

25:19 What's interesting is that everybody does better on the second test. Even though they're not learning. new material. The fact that they have to create An explanation Helps consolidate and make sense of

25:35 the information in their own minds So that everybody's doing better. On the second test than the first test, even though they haven't had access to to study materials. But what interested and excited us

25:52 was that the group that had made visual explanations Did far better. Then the group that had done verbal explanations and And we expected this. for the structural information. We divided the information into information about the structure of the of the molecules and

26:13 En the function the action the causation And uh we thought making a visual explanation requires you to put down the structure. Um s surely students will put more of that information into the visual explanation. than the verbal and we found that but to our surprise we also found better representations of the behavior, of the function, of the causality,

26:44 in the system in the visual explanations than the verbal So we started thinking, why does this happen? And one reason we think is that making a diagram is gives you a platform for inference. you can make inferences about the the behavior from the structure. So you've got the structure you can make inferences.

27:09 Another is that it gives you a check for completion. you know all the parts are there because it's it is if they weren't it wouldn't be coherent. It wouldn't make sense. So having the diagrammatic representation gives you a check for the coherence and the completeness. of the information. One word after another doesn't do that as easily. um the check for coherence and completeness. So we thought those were the reasons that the visual explanations did so well. They're a check for coherence, a check for completeness, and a platform for inference.

27:50 They also force you to abstract. To uh find the essentials and put those down Now in some sense language can do that too. But it apparently doesn't do it as well. that that getting things in this diagrammatic form

28:10 really does force you To be more abstract. So that abstractness has been found by other people in other situations. Dan Schwartz did a number of studies again with junior high students And they were supposed to be diagramming something like the nitrogen cycle and And many of them put in lily pods and frogs and

28:35 that sort of decorative features they made these lovely little diagrams you often see them in books. But when two people were working together Those individual decorative features disappeared. And the more abstract stayed in. The diagrams can get you to the essentials.

28:56 Better than a verbal explanation. This is so interesting. There's three rabbit holes I want to follow up with here individually before we even talk about Zoom. So the the first sort of rabbit hole that I I wanna explore a little bit is you you talk about relationships and used Venn diagrams as an example And some of the relationships that come to mind that I think you also used vocabulary around are structure and comparisons. What are the other type of relationships that visual tends to draw out for people?

29:30 in a way that's sort of almost three D And allows us to see something that was previously invisible. Yes, structure is important. um for physics, for chemistry, for social relations, for corporate relations, for business getting the structure down and only the structure can be really important. the relations you're right, compare and contrast, and we do that quite nicely with gestures, we can set up a spatial sc uh a spati on the one hand, on the other hand, and then I can keep pointing left or right and you know that I'm referring to

30:09 to that sort of compare and contrast. I can order things So I'm deciding which automobile to buy or which vacation to take and I can order the criteria. f the most important things at the top. um and less important things um lower down. I can order things left to right in reading order. And we typically do that. We put time going in reading order.

30:39 uh which is left to right in most Western languages, right to left in some other languages, uh top to bottom in in more traditional versions of Chinese and Japanese So and I don't really know how they they also have horizontal ways of ordering time. So we can order things we can order things, we can group things into these networks, categories and subcategories. Um we can make dimensions.

31:11 And we do that. So we can have ordinal scales which are just ordered. We can have interval scales where the the difference between items uh is meaningful and we can certainly do that on a line or either vertical or horizontal, and then more absolute scales where there's an absolute zero. As in temperature. money

31:37 Um and we can make so we can make scales. So we c we can diagrammatically represent many of the ways that we order the world, organize the world, and measure world. I think probably all of that can be done in a diagrammatic way. Certainly math and statistics do it that way. If you look at even Formulas in in math they have a diagrammatic aspect. Things like equal signs are arbitrary characters, we put two sides that balance on on either side of the equal sign, so that's a spatial

32:20 array of of equality So we see those spatial visual aspects even In writing we indent for paragraphs. We space between words.

32:36 We make m more important ideas and bigger font. Um so that we're using those features that are visual spatial even in print. where it's almost strictly linguistic. Of course there are analogies analogies in the way we speak. We use intonation, we raise our voices, lower them. We pause

33:00 in dramatic places, those are all kind of almost spatial devices that we use To convey meaning. And more effectively. That's fascinating. I I think as you were talking about the text, it's really interesting'cause we use the space to draw attention, maybe not to relationships, but to heighten our focus on what's important or what the author thin is important and wants to convey or communicate. with bold, with sort of fonts, with

33:30 spacing. Right, and we make tables even in text, and the tables again are are diagrammatically displayed. Um Truth Tables, this was an observation by Reviel Nets, who's a a a really brilliant creative classic scholar. Has studied Greek mathematics, but he pointed out that truth tables in logic, which were developed by the ancient Greeks.

33:57 are are tables, that things are lined up in in in columns and rows, and that that enables you to see the relationships much more clearly than if they were in continuous text. So does that mean that when we're writing in continuous text or we're writing a book or a document that we should use some sort of visual to summarize or reinforce what we've written not only allowing the reader to sort of scan and find the relationship and then reinforce that with maybe more detail and nuance in the writing, but also to allow a bit of spaced repetition between what we just told them in words. And allowing them to see it visually. Oh yes. And and again we it it's there anyway. Chapter headings are usually lower

34:45 um and paragraphs have some sort of parallel structure um in them or were taught to use paragraphs in that way. So that the the visual devices are there anyway, but using them more to advantage. is probably a good idea. I've become a huge fan of graphic books. Exactly because they integrate so beautifully text of various forms, not just words. Um there are there are all kinds of

35:19 uh textual components to comics that aren't traditional words, but also visuals of many types, and they can be integrated seamlessly. And I've tried to do that when I write articles to not have Table one, table two, each with a caption and But to have it integrated into the text and editors never let me do it.

35:43 So it will c it it's gonna happen soon because there are more and more graphic books and I think people are Oh seeing how beautifully they can be designed and and what artistry both conceptual and visual go into it. Um

36:02 It's so One of my favorites is Larry Gonick, who's written cartoon guides to uh m to m vario forms of math, to the environment, to chemistry. to calculus, to physics, and so forth, anything where there's An accepted body of knowledge he'll do a graphic guide to and And uh and the the books are enchanting. He uses diagrams in ways that textbook authors never thought of, building them up from concrete to

36:33 to more abstract than using bits of the diagrams as icons throughout the book to remind you and bring you back. They're mnemonic devices, they're b there are conceptual. And bring you back. So I think more and more books will be crafted this way. I see more and more young people.

36:56 learning the rudiments of drawing because the drawing That you need to do for for explanations or even for narratives are quite different from the paintings you see on the wall or the drawings you see on the wall that are standalone. They have to be integrated and they have to abs again abstract the essentials and Convey it in in an appealing way.

37:22 So what Graphic books do. is what ordinary conversation has. And that ordinary conversation is multi-modal. We're using words, we're using gestures, we're using intonation, pauses.

37:40 All many, many devices beyond words in a row. to um convey meaning. We interrupt ourselves, we interrupt each other. Um and all of that multi modal conveys a message. And if you look at people's spontaneous explanations in conversation and take out

38:04 the visuals, so you're taking off the gestures, a lot of the meaning goes. If you take out the intonation, a lot of the meaning goes. If you turn it just into words, a lot of the meaning goes and And uh because we're so used to learning from words and explaining in words written ones not Once in conversation or And we get quite good at that.

38:31 I think we become uh blind. to the ways that these the multimodal ways that we convey information. And graphic books use that. in in they can convey music, they can convey smells, and they do it all through Uh kinds of symbols

38:53 And and so forth. I have I can't do it now, but I've collected Along with John Bresman, who was a former student who was a comic geek, just brilliant with comics, we've got a huge collection of innovative ways that graphic books can convey, meaning they're poetic and inspirational and um and multi modal in this way.

39:21 Did gestures override language too? Like I I'm thinking of a scenario where somebody says yes, but they're shaking their head no. Right. And and my husband who was a parotroper and had an an uncanny sense of direction Um right and left um in a in any language eluded him, as it does many people. Many people d uh confuse right and left for good reason. And he would point one he'd say, go right and point left And I knew follow the gesture. Um it's not um the language is not

39:57 It comes later. Gestures precede language. Um and they're more l more in tune because they're more direct. Susan Golden Meadow and some of her colleagues, she's done gorgeous work on gesture, especially in children, looked at children on the cusp of of um conceptual thinking. They're going from this sensory motor. So there are there

40:23 It you get Two cups, one is thin and one is fat, and and pour water from one to another, and children who are small think that uh pouring the water changes the amount in the glass. And i you asked them to explain and children on the cusp. of getting that idea will gesture something like pouring before they can articulate it. So they've got the concept of conservation That pouring water doesn't change the quantity. They've got the concept. They can't say it in words, but they can show it in gesture.

41:03 So their understanding i is ahead of their ability to articulate it, which makes sense even for us. um not just for children. The articulation is an additional layer that's really quite difficult. Do gestures also help us remember? And I'm thinking like the last time I was lost when somebody explained directions to me, I I'm just remembering the the two things that happened when I was lost. I turned down the volume to increase my focus sort of on what I was doing. But the second thing when somebody explained directions is I was actually like Okay, so up and right. And and you know, sort of like I was using a gesture to help me remember.

41:44 No, absolutely they help you remember and part of it is a different code and adding codes adds redundancy and that adds retrieval ways of retrieving information. And so certainly adding another code, but again because it i your gestures are rep directly representing going up and turning. in a way that language doesn't. And I found Getting lost in many places places and asking for directions in languages that I don't really know. Watch the gestures helps. And people don't say things in words that they do in gesture, like

42:26 going up or turning. Slightly that a road bends, they won't say that. They might neglect saying that. But it'll be there in their gesture, but certainly mimicking and And there's some evidence from the neuron war mirror work that we're mimicking even without

42:45 externally showing that we're mimicking. So i there's a lot of work on understanding through enacting. There was old work on language. that people d uh people understood language by by evoking it internally in themselves, I have a good friend who now repeats what I'm saying.

43:10 in order to understand it. Now he doesn't do it out loud, it's very softly, but uh and I've seen other people do that, that as they're listening they're doing a little bit of talking. So they're externalizing that internal and information But there's beautiful work on brain work on watching dance. Videos of dance. And you can take experienced dancers either say ballet or cappare

43:40 This very acrobatic South American dance and have them watch videos of ballet or cappare and And the the In both cases the motor areas of the brain will be active, but they'll be far more active for the dance that you can enact. than the one you can't again indicating that something in the body in the brain and probably in the muscles, there is evidence from other work in the muscles.

44:10 is resonating. with the action that you see and incorporating into your body And probably when you're watching someone giving directions You're doing that. Certainly for th direct physical activity, um you know, a tennis serve or a dive, um that you're going to be um

44:34 incorporating that into the muscles and Your brain. One of the things that as you were saying that just your sort of override language W I mean you're using the example of giving directions, but Um and your your late husband in terms of pointing one way and saying a different way and

44:53 realizing that gesture was more that was it was more right, it was more true because it was lower language sort of in your in your In your sense. or your body or your brain than language. So it comes before language. And and that speaks to the whole notion of body language when people are communicating when they're saying one thing, but their physicality is saying something different. To some extent, we do learn.

45:21 not to express certain emotions. Um because we know that people can read them and people read them very quickly, almost and in many cases without awareness. So we do learn to suppress some of that, not not to show that were afraid or unhappy or upset or depressed. We we learn to

45:49 To suppress that. Um at some cost, probably. And how much how good we are at it, I varies with people, how good we're how much we want to suppress it, but I there is an awareness, I think, on the part of most people that that

46:10 The body language does communicate. And sometimes we don't want to communicate certain aspects of the body language. Some of that. you know I I become more and more aware of it as I study gesture.

46:27 And you know, someone wants a meeting to end. They stand up. And that's a signal. If you're around a table Who you look at next gets the floor. And women aren't looked at.

46:42 So this is um the so there are there are aspects like that of that are social of how we interact socially um that that again have effects um in the body language has effects on the conversation, on the speaker. Or the communicator and I'm the Communicate T.

47:07 So so as you were saying that, two things stuck out. One, you said that we don't tend to look at women. I'm interested in sort of um exploring that a little bit. And the other thing is how how does Zoom change this? So what are the positive and negative aspects of communication over something like Zoom? versus face to face and how does communicating over video which sort of changes our spatial perceptions affect what's communicated and what's understood. Like face to face communication uses our whole body and even the language we use, right? We say this or that, or we look at something to draw attention to it.

47:44 Yeah, no, I'm with you completely, and the research needs to be done and probably is being done. And obviously it depends on what's being communicated. A big thing for me is that we're only seeing face and shoulder. So we don't have a shared work space. And if you look at designers or planners or any kind of committee, you often have a whiteboard. or something that's central on the table that everybody can point at.

48:15 and add to and subtract from, and that a great deal of the communication and the un the the joint understanding is externalized. In that way. And we've done a s small amount of work and others have too on collaborative design and found that when people can work over the same diagram, the communication is much more successful. People are looking at each other's hands on the diagram, not at each other's faces.

48:49 The words are annotating the diagram. Um, they aren't independent. So people are more they're the communication is better, the result is better. Um the product is better. People are happier with the collaboration. when they can do that when than when it's just over the phone and we have um separate diagrams. So I think for any kind of collaborative work.

49:16 And teaching is often collaborative. Uh conversations certainly are. Um, but in many cases we need that External representation of our shared understanding

49:30 And there's a huge amount of research and practice on um dissolving conflict that way. That if you take conflicting power parties in an organization, between organizations, put everything up on a whiteboard. with a facilitator. And then you realize the points where you misunderstood each other. You use the same words to refer to different things. You can come to a consensus much better and feel better about it.

50:02 then if you don't have this external space. that you can uh all your joint thinking space out there in the real World. a a a real drawback of Zoom Now I can talk and lecture with with with my uh PowerPoint.

50:23 But I can't animate it as well as I can in a classroom. where I'm standing and moving and pointing and and gesturing big. I mean you make big gestures and they look like these giant hands and they're they're disturbing. Whereas the you don't have that in real life. So these are some of the disadvantages, not seeing the nuances of facial expression.

50:49 not hearing the nuances of vocal expression But I also found in teaching students I have many students for whom English isn't the first language. So it was easier and being in a classroom with masks I couldn't have understood them, they couldn't have understood me. So Zoom for the pandemic had that help. I could also put up transcription.

51:16 so that if i I didn't understand their accent and they didn't get all my words, they at least have that other code. It I mean transcription is funny sometimes, but it is self-correcting. It's quite remarkable. So that helped and Um what also seemed to help interestingly I had my classes were around twenty, so uh everyone If I wasn't speaking from a PowerPoint, everybody was there on the screen. We're each a bucks and

51:47 We're equal. So it seemed to encourage more discussion from the students. Everybody could see everybody's faces, whereas in a classroom everybody's facing me. And um I'm facing them, but they don't see each other. And I'm standing there sitting and

52:08 So it i I get a primacy as a teacher that I don't have. If I'm a box and a screen. So it seemed to have equalized, democratized, encouraged the More students to just treat me as another box. I think other instructors had a similar experience. If your class is a hundred and forty, that doesn't work.

52:33 Um the breakout sessions worked. Again for teaching. I don't know in corporate situations they might work. But it allowed the students, in fact, it gave them more in opportunities to interact with each other. than the um being in class would. And that was enormously facilitary, the breakout. So there were features in Zoom that I could use teaching

53:01 Again I can't speak for the corporate experience, um, I should ask my sons, both of whom had you know lived from one Zoom meeting for another for several years. Um but um Yeah, it it is fascinating. And I think

53:21 The need for gestures and a shared work space. is something that I hope designers of these media know about and will make efforts to correct. There's only so much you can smash into a screen.

53:39 So then just having the smaller space Is in un until we can do with surround and in VR um Then

53:51 That will go a step further. Sounds like one of the important aspects of of Zoom. I I guess the two sort of um things that we can take away from that are one uh it hopefully it encourages more um diversity of opinions to be expressed rather than the same people expressing um opinions over and over. And the second thing that I took away from that was that if we're going to uh communicate or facilitate over Zoom then a shared visual space is super important.

54:21 uh allowing people to not only focus on something but also see and r uh View representation. Right. The second rabbit hole that I wanted to I I promise three rabbit holes before we get to the sort of like next big theme, but we did we did explore Zoom, which was good. You mentioned that we w when we create a diagram or a visual representation

54:44 What we're doing is we're consolid I'm trying to use your words here, we're consolidating and we're creating an explanation and What that drew attention to in my mind was the process by which we learn I I call it the learning loop. And so my my belief on this is that we don't learn from experience. We learn through reflection. So we have an experience, we reflect on that experience.

55:09 And from that reflection, we draw abstractions relationships, and those abstractions and relationships become an action that we take the next time we're in a certain situation. The underrated part of that is the reflection, because the reflection is the distillation of all of this information into its salient points, into the relationships that matters, the variables that matter. And maybe this sort of goes to my my third point. Which was a third rabbit hole, which was it forces us to abstract

55:42 I I'm curious as to how you think about that ref the reflection component in terms of not only learning But in terms of how we encode this information in our minds

55:56 Yeah, no, I think all your observations are astute and couldn't agree more. And there has been some research on that. So Sheer rehearsal? of material we're trying to learn isn't as helpful as trying to draw implications, make comparisons, do the sorts of reflections that you're Referring to and there again. Just as you asked me what can you put in diagrams and I said u categories and hierarchies and themes and um one and cor one to one correspondences and and much more.

56:36 Orderings. In the The those are the sorts of reflective processes. that we might undertake There's been research showing that if we want to transfer learning, and of course that's one of the goals of learning, is

56:53 it taking more than one case That are similar. and abstracting what's similar about them. is going to help you transfer. A single case isn't gonna help you. Two cases are better and two cases and a diagram indicating the relationships is even better. So that that

57:17 I in making those uh Abstractive that can then get applied to new situations. It's hard to go from abstractions to instances. It's even hard to go from instances to abstractions, but probably from abstractions to instances is even harder. Um I've seen so many phenomena in cognitive psychology be shown over and over again in particular situations because until they're in a particular situation no one believes them. And part and I see them and I say it's just the same as X.

57:54 What's new here because I've got the abstraction But other people need the concrete showing that particular thing in this situation. Same in politics, same in history, we have it all over. So Going from instances to abstractions is one thing. It's not that easy. And more than one case.

58:17 drawing the similarities And it diagramming the abstraction helps you Get to that abstraction. But getting from the abstraction to the particular is Is still

58:30 A challenge and I can't think of People who've worked on that on teaching. I wanted to say one more thing about education. I most of our education is vicarious.

58:45 We're not encountering you said we learn from situations. The situations for us uh uh schooled people is is classroom in many cases. Sometimes it's actually experiences and of course classrooms that create experiences through laboratories or field trips or whatever are more effective'cause learning from experience is effective, but so much of our learning is vicarious and through language or other math, other abstractions, so making it concrete is important.

59:20 Just to riff on this for a second, experiences don't need to be a physical experience. An experience can be reading somebody else's experience. I'm experiencing it. A conversation is an experience. uh you know, reading a textbook is an experience. Doing something like building a a sauna or a shed or something is an experience. So these are all different ty the the way that we have an experience is very different from how we reflect on it. and how we abstract it. And I I think that the experiences don't necessarily need to even be firsthand. I can learn from your experiences, but this gets to a a different point here, which is When we consume information A lot of the times we're consuming the abstraction.

1:00:03 So so these diagrams are the abstraction. They're they're the salient points, but they're they're one person's idea of what the salient points are. That's not my encoding of it, that's their encoding of it. And I think of consuming other people's abstractions as the illusion of knowledge. I'm the line cook, not the chef, right? To use an example from a friend of mine, Tim Urban, which is, you know, when things go right, I look like a genius. I follow the recipe and everything works out. And because I've consumed the abstract, the recipe in this example, Everything turned out right. I look like it I know what I'm doing, but when things go wrong, the chef Who has distilled the experience, the reflection to create the recipe that has gone through the thousands of trial and errors will taste it and be like, oh, this needs more salt. You use too high of heat.

1:00:50 And instantly they will know what the problem is because they've they've got the abstraction, but they've got the uh it's almost like an earned abstraction versus a learned abstraction. And and that's really interesting because it changes when we're consuming information, we're consuming a lot of these abstractions. We assume they're knowledge and we assume there are knowledge and we put them into practice. And when they don't work, we don't know why. And and the way to go back up this chain. is to actually decompose it and ask people

1:01:21 Well, how did you come to these conclusions? What variables were important to you? And you need firsthand knowledge, not second, third, or fourth hand. So you want to get as close to the person who had the original experience or created the abstraction. And often when you you pull back the onion here, we're two or three layers deep. And it's a very sort of weak relationship. No, no, I you're absolutely right and you think about teaching uh Uh sport. or piano or diving, tennis serve, any of that, you can give verbal instructions, but you've got to do the serve over and over and over again and the dive over and over again because translating that language, that abstraction into the body, into your body

1:02:05 is going to be very different. And a good coach can watch you and see the the tiny place where you're leaning forward too much on the dive or jumping to breaking the jump too quickly so that you're not jack knife fast and high enough. Um it a coach can see those my minute things and tell you and then you have to work. to incorporate it into your body. And a similar thing will happen on cooking. I'm listening to when the boiling of the rice I'm smelling D

1:02:41 olive oil on the saucepan and I'm doing the as it's heating and I'm picking up the dangerous sound, gotta lower the heat. That's only from a great deal of experience and paying attention to the smell and the sound. of those cues and that isn't in the recipe And you would go crazy if you had to pay attention to those details in a recipe or an instruction to dive, you'd give up. the abstraction you get either in a diagram or verbal instructions isn't going to enable you to be a champion diver or a great cook. You can make satisfactory things. And you need to know.

1:03:24 Not just it adding salt, you need to know when to throw it in the trash and start all over again. And you know, potters know that they something doesn't rise properly and they It's hopeless. Go start again. And I think any any creator knows when when things simply can't be corrected. And When they

1:03:48 when they can be corrected. And again a good coach Can tweak, can use language to tweak and abstractions in language to t how does it feel in your body? Um you know, your body should feel this, the muscle tension. Cause a lot of that isn't visible. It's I mean I learned a bit of yoga and that sort of thing. You have to really feel it in your body and which muscles. Are working and which ones aren't to know are you doing a proper stretch? And are you really stretching the muscles you need to stretch? Weightlifting is similar. Um, you have to get it

1:04:27 into your body in that way. So an example I use sometimes in in navigation, so I talked about sketch maps getting you Yeah. So even though sketch maps could be analog They aren't.

1:04:42 They don't give the exact distance and they don't give the exact angle of turn. They're approximate. And they're approximate in the way that verbal instructions are. You say make a right, turn right, you say go to h you get to h this street and then turn. We don't specify either in a in a sketch map or verbal instructions the exact angle or the exact distance, but But those are meant to be used in the environment. So if you come to an intersection and it isn't ninety degrees, it's less or more.

1:05:18 You're gonna go the way the road goes. So you use that information as if it were approximate and you know it's being used in coordination with the world. Same with distance. You're not measuring the distance. It's until you get to that next intersection or highway cut off. And you'll go to there and you know approximately what the distance is, but you don't need That

1:05:44 Complete information'cause it's meant to be used in a context. And I think most instructive have to be that way,'cause again, the detail would drive you crazy. And and you have to assume some knowledge of a coq. um or some knowledge of a of a piano player to for a piano player to read the notes en and translate them into actions of the hand

1:06:13 And again, where it goes wrong, a good teacher can supplement. Or hearing yourself, you can be your own good teacher. Right, you know that dive didn't work out quite right. What were you doing? Um and the piano and you do it over and over again until you get the right sound. We do that speaking, you know, learn a foreign language, what's the accent. And I can make words and sentences in languages that I don't know that well and I know they sound off. And can I get the accent right? And I go over and over

1:06:50 And I can even hear it in my head that I don't have it right. Or the dive right. There's something missing. But then you're reflecting, right? So you're creating your own abstractions, which I think is I I I think one of the takeaways if maybe you can uh challenge or push back if you don't agree, is that abstractions are necessary. We need to consume other people's abstractions. We would get overwhelmed in the detail. U and a different way to think about that is earned versus learned knowledge. So this is learned knowledge versus earned knowledge. uh earn knowledge involves uh, you know, you can't necessarily be taught all the details. You have to sort of do it or embrace, you know, dive into the details. And I think where this becomes important in life is to

1:07:33 Think of decisions, for example, and cost of failure. So when the cost of failure is low, it's okay to use Learned Knowledge. And when the cost of failure is high, you want to make sure that you're not using learned knowledge and you're using earned knowledge.

1:07:50 Uh, or at least if you think of those things on a continuum, you want to be more towards earned knowledge, um the more the higher cost of failure. But I I'm just throwing that out there and sort of pontificating on the spot, but I'd love your reaction. So I wonder about that. Some of the high cost decisions we make, we can't have had experience choosing a spouse Oh, but trust, hold on. You have thousands of experiences with trust with people uh all over your lifetime. Sure, but it's more than trust. It's it's really a huge amount of trust, a lifetime of trust. It's trust about your your physical, your body, it's just about joint decision making, um how we're going to grow each of us. in in life if we haven't had a family, it's how we're gonna do that. W you can't accumulate

1:08:44 Um and enough experiences same with getting a job. You can't get you can't try many, many different jobs and because jobs are so complicated, what you do, how you relate to the people around you, how you relate to your boss, what happens when things change. So And there are things are vicarious. I mean people talk about gossip. is being informative and and hearing about

1:09:13 troubles that other people have gotten into in either in work or love. And trying to map that on your own life. Is i even babies, you know. After our first kit, a friend came over, a guy deeply ingrained in economic theory came over and wanted to tell us details of how to care for this baby and diaper and he said, You learn so much, you want to pass it on. But so all of that, and you know, new mothers, new parents talk endlessly.

1:09:47 about crying and feeding and diapering and and so for things that that that ordinary adults would find boring. So I th I think even on big decisions the vicarious uh you know, how to raise children, uh who you should get involved with, when you should leave, all of those things. We need other people's stories. as as a way of of making the big decisions.

1:10:17 As you're speaking I I'm thinking you're probably right. And there's a huge body of knowledge that comes from avoiding problems that are learned knowledge and not necessarily earned knowledge,'cause you don't want to ex you don't have enough time in life to to earn all the knowledge from all the problems. And so you have to adapt and incorporate learned knowledge and Uh yeah, I think you I think you're onto something there.

1:10:41 Uh oh, I want to switch gears to part of your book you talk about the nine laws of cognition. I think they're more like nine generalizations, but let let's start with the first one. There are no benefits without cost, meaning creativity versus learning. How do they offset each other? So the the big example there I think is one big example is categorizing. So if we awoke anew as a newborn each day and didn't know how to categorize things into animate, inanimate parent, friend, um Chair, table. Um these sorts of things that we do that our brain does quite quickly. If we didn't know how to make categories very quickly and had to depend on new learning every day, we'd never advance uh beyond um that new learning and uh people wonder when they have a baby, what are they looking at, what are they thinking about. Well they're doing a huge amount of learning about what the world looks like and acts like and sounds like and smells like and what happens in time. These are huge things that

1:11:53 A child needs a baby needs to learn some of it. the proclivities are built in and even maybe some of the kinds of knowledge, but a great deal of it, words, um, it have to be learned and if we had to go through that learning every day anew. uh we we remain helpless infants. So th we need to categorize, but can any kind of categorization

1:12:23 has um error. in it we can miscategorize, you know, I'm I've mistaken twins for their sibling. And said hello and wondered why they greeted me so coldly. I think ever that's an experience many people have had.

1:12:40 The extreme leads to biases that, you know, I'm I'm a small woman. So alone at night I'm very alert. to any kind of danger. And because I'm hyper alert to any kind of danger, I can miscategorize what might be dangerous to me. But it's something I need um to survive on the streets.

1:13:06 So we can miscategorise And but we need to do it. And so that's one of the costs and benefits. Of anything in cognition. And there's a reason. For every one of these

1:13:23 biases that is There's an underlying reason that's deeper, more abstract, or broader. that where these things have been useful in one way or another. But Their use is highly limited.

1:13:39 And can lead you into trouble is when Somebody pulls a hand out of a pocket. And a c a cow another person thinks it's a gun. So it can lead to error and sometimes catastrophic error. You can't live with them, you can't live without them.

1:13:58 And there are just many cognitive and social phenomena. that are like that that the efficiency of of say enacting an action over and over and over again that you get very good at it, but but you can apply that action, misapply it to situations where it's not appropriate. And then it'll get you into trouble. I think that's something people often don't see. The the the second generalization is that action molds perception.

1:14:31 Right, and there I gave the example of the distorting lenses. that we don't accommodate to lenses that distort unless we're action uh doing the actions. And the actions actually mold perception. mold our perception that in in that sense. They do shift the world if if we're acting in a shifted world. I mean it it can happen.

1:14:57 In You know, uh in in in a more general form, if we decide that somebody isn't worth interacting with because they just they seem like remind us of somebody Who hurt us in the past then we don't act we don't interact with them so we're taking that um a very action

1:15:21 not only changes it changes our perceptual world, we won't include that person. And that's another kind of error that we can make from From uh the first law of cognition that We get experienced at knowing what kind of people we can trust, what kind of people might hurt us, what kind of people to stay away from, but we can make mistakes. And that's a speed versus accuracy trade off. Yep. And sometimes we have

1:15:49 the opportunity to correct that mistake that certainly happened to me where somebody whom I dismissed and somebody else said no, and and I had new encounters and found that I was wrong and c correct my Impression But i if I'd never had that opportunity to correct, I would have been left with that um mis impression um for a long time.

1:16:17 So uh what we our actions affect the world we experience. In big ways. We move to a new city. We take a new job. All of those things. We have a baby. All of those actions take um change our world completely.

1:16:34 The third generalization is that feelings come first. So that's work of d uh Baum Zions and many others after that that he showed in what seemed like random shapes to people. And God um affect Liking and memory judgments

1:16:55 And people had the more people saw a strange stimulus, the more they grew to like it. So f familiarity is good. Um, and or at least a modicum of familiarity too much might be uh harmful again. But it it they couldn't remember them. So the systems are somewhat independent. Our affective reactions and our memory are somewhat independent, and the affective seems to work faster than

1:17:28 And that again might be uh tied to danger and avoiding danger that if there are things in the world that that are dangerous to us Um we better know it quickly. and act quickly before we mu remember or not that it we might think someone's dangerous and withdraw Before we remember no no, that person looks dangerous, but is fine.

1:17:55 І just because there's such a high cost. To the danger. um responding first to the emotional is probably adaptive and keeping the systems somewhat separate. is probably adaptive in any case, the brain does it. And the fourth, which was one of my favorite ways of of

1:18:15 putting it anyway was that mind can override perception. Yeah, and that's where we know. And that that'll be a kind of system too, as opposed to a system one that that we then the person that looked dangerous we then next time we encounter, next time we remember that as an exception.

1:18:37 when we're this isn't perception, this is action, when we're repressing emotions. Because we don't want we think revealing them will harm the other person or harm ourselves were using our mind to overcome our first reaction which is to burst into tears. And bursting into tears.

1:18:58 Isn't or screaming. Neither of them is gonna help us at this point. uh so that repressing it is um is probably a good idea. D does this work in reverse too, which is like that we we don't Yeah.

1:19:12 You know, we don't wanna see information that disconfirms our existing belief. So our mind blocks out Yeah, so it's you're pointing out nicely that everything has an advantage and disadvantage. And that mind overcoming can Can also lead us to self Delusion.

1:19:33 Because we're trying to fit the world into our beliefs. I should have said that. I think I got it from one of your other interviews for what it's worth when it was doing research for this. So um the the fifth one was cognition mirrors perception. Yeah, and there are I the um uh all of these things other people have pointed out, they aren't my invention. Many of the biases in perception and perception we categorize and cognition we categorize So that many of the phenomena

1:20:04 that we see in perception end up being in cognitive phenomena as well. So studying both is is useful. Um what happens in sheer perception, what happens uh In cognition the borders are are murky. Anyway.

1:20:23 So, yeah. And and l let's just briefly go through the other ones. Maybe we can spend a little bit more time on on the ninth one,'cause I thought that was super interesting. But six was spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought. So there I think I I spoke at length at the beginning on that, that the brain structures, the brain strata that that encode spatial or information and called relational information or spati relational information can be spatialized.

1:20:54 in for time for social relations for abstract And again we've seen it in language, so it's there in brain, it's in language with Somebody's at the top of the heat was people have grown close together. We and we see it in language, we see it in gesture.

1:21:15 Um we see it in diagrams which again are specializations of thinking. And seven is one I think we're sort of all familiar with, but is also invisible to us, which is the mind fills with missing information. The information we get from the world is incomplete. I mean the work on on change blindness where you show two photographs in rapid succession and large things are missing from one, like the engine.

1:21:46 of a jet airplane and people don't even notice it. So I it takes a long time to notice. Even when you know it's an engine, it takes you a while to notice it. So the i i the world that we see is in the head. Not out there. We have the sensation that it's out there, but it's in the head.

1:22:07 And we're filling in when we make errors. We know that. So my vision is going and I will fill in shapes with a uniform color. that it isn't uniform at all.

1:22:21 uh when I get closer and can and get better acuity I can see that it isn't but the mind forms the visual system make shapes. And the colors are added the way you fill in the blank. And so I'm I'm aware of those errors. But we're c uh and again it's one of those things we couldn't function if the mind didn't fill in. We don't know what's behind us.

1:22:47 I mean I do because I can see myself in there. Right. But I i if I'm in my office and my books are behind me, I can reach for a book. I know where it is. Um so the mind is filling in constantly for what isn't there. In understanding sentences we can miss a lot of words and fill in.

1:23:08 Again, making errors makes us aware of how much We're filling in. The the eighth and uh penultimate one was when thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it out into the world. So there i we put our mind and the the world in many ways in language, in action, in gesture, in making lists, we put the things we need to bring f to work or to wherever we're going to By the door.

1:23:36 so that we remember them, uh David Korst pointed out, we lay out the materials for uh a recipe in the order that we'll use them on the counter so that it's convenient to make to enact the recipe. So there are many, many ways that we put the mind in the in the world. Again, I think it's probably uniquely human I don't think that that um gorillas make trail markers. um for how they should go on a path. I grew up in a small town

1:24:11 In a town that had been occupied by Native Americans, and the park I walked through to get to school had various trees. that had been i shapen as trail markers. So there was a huge oak tree that was an age. And there was another one that was bent into the ground and they were trail markers so that People wouldn't lose their way.

1:24:33 So we do it I mean birds mark territory, this I know because I used to run into the territory of a bird and it would attack me. Um which was rather d disconcerting. Um a friend who was an atheologist told me wear a hat. That worked. Um but birds mark territory, but so there are small bits of that kind of externalization of mind bees

1:24:58 Tell each other where to go. But they're very limited. But they're still extremely interesting that that other creatures do put their minds into the world. And partly to communicate. They just don't do it in this enormously plastic way.

1:25:16 w an inventive way that we do. The ninth generalization was we organized stuff in the world. The way we organize stuff in the mind. So we we've talked a little bit about how we organize things in the world. We categorize, we make hierarchies of categories, we order things, we make one to one correspondences and in giving um in place settings and other situations. We organized by themes, our houses, our That way everything for cooking is in the kitchen, everything for

1:25:50 Cleaning is in the bathroom, so these are things from different categories, but they're organized around a common function or a common goal. So and we do that in the world. So w we have um buildings that have one to one correspondences, windows each apartment. We have um we draw lines which are roads in the in the world for the paths we can go on and make intersections

1:26:18 We even diagram the world. so that i if you look at an aerial photograph a city you can see there are lanes for people, lanes for buses, lanes for bicycles where people can go where they c buses can go. Where you have to stop.

1:26:37 Where you can turn, where you can turn, where you can park. The world is communicating to us not just indirectly in these categories but and hierarchies furniture stores are arranged by scene. But so the world is communicating to us not just in categories and hierarchies and themes and orders.

1:26:57 C's for getting into the theater. But it's also telling us how to behave. So it's control it's controlling our actions. by the way it's diagrammed in the world, turn signals and turn arrows.

1:27:13 And if you think about the world that our that we grew up in and that our children are growing up in, it's so different. From the world of hunter gatherers. Mean we've designed the whole world. You fly in an airplane and look down and there's hardly a spot humanity hasn't designed, touched and designed. Now other creatures designed too there are beaver dams and and uh territorial rights of birds and so forth. But by n but we've diagrammed it and we've designed it in much more detail.

1:27:50 And We've designed so mu almost all the inhabitable world. So how about the the inverse of that? How does the physical environment influence how we think? And if the physical environment does influence how we think How can we design that to improve our thinking. No so diagrams are one way to improve our thinking in in in in the small.

1:28:14 Um, there's certainly one and even written text is a way of improving our thinking, making lists. We have so many w all those ways of externalizing mind can help bring it into the mind and improve it, especially if it's well designed. When you think about the world the You know, I can go into a supermarket in any country, buy food and put it on the counter. And that's a communication to the to the person at the cash register that I wanna purchase those items. I don't have to talk.

1:28:48 It's it's um the way the world is designed and it's universal. Now I have to go to the it automatic cash registers and find the barcode and scan it. And the I can do that now in any country except China because I can't pay. Because I don't have the right app on my um on my phone. It does change our actions in many ways that makes it more efficient. I can't help but think that babies growing up in a world where where their homes are organized by themes are And where books are on a shelf in an order, where toys are kept in different categories and so forth, that that can help but influence their minds.

1:29:32 And I wish someone would study that. Um You know, I remember my own children and if they're in the living room everyone's talking and playing and I'd pick up a child And walk toward the bedroom, they'd scream because they knew they were being taken away from the social environment and put to bed.

1:29:52 And so they knew from the organization of the house, uh what was going to happen. If they were brought to the kitchen, they would calm down because they knew they were going to be fed. It children growing up with that kind of organized designed world. uh are certainly using the way the space is designed, the way that hunters and gatherers used The natural design of the world.

1:30:21 And people use the environment as a way of of organizing their behavior or what to approach and what to avoid. Um but uh the the design world now seems to communicate so much more. Where's the door to a building? Where do you put your car, your bike, or your stroller? And where is the food and and so forth? So all of that.

1:30:47 It seems to me is Із чангів когні. Of everyone around. You know, when So I I I have had the pleasure of visiting Japan many times and there are huge roads that intersect and at first you sort of go along them, but they're unpleasant, and then you learn everything's done in quadrants and quadrants inside quadrants.

1:31:14 So you start walking inside the quadrants and And it it's completely different world. And then in Japan you see a Torie gate. And you know that's gonna lead to a temple. Now that won't happen in New York City or Paris. So then you have to navigate differently.

1:31:32 Uh you you spent a lot of time diving into the work of Leonardo da Vinci. I'm curious as to what you learned. Ah, that was a wonderful opportunity. An incredibly talented musician friend. World and opera. and Da Vinci for the five hundred year of his birth Unfortunately the performances the pandemic

1:31:54 interfered as it did. with many so much of our lives Uh it's Jonathan Berger and Jonathan's at Stanford and he whenever he has a new Up And his operas are non fiction based on

1:32:12 real lives and really enormously moving. There was one on hallucinations that stays with me years later on personal experiences. with hallucinations that were gripping And he turned them into opera, and one of the people whose experiences he turned into opera. said afterward Jonathan Conveyed my

1:32:37 Anguish better than I could have. So very moving. He made an opera on Da Vinci And whenever he m does an opera like that, he has a symposium. Where he invites people with different views on the topics to speak. And I had the honor of being invited and used the opportunity to talk about Da Vinci's sketches.

1:33:00 And there are millions of them, not millions, but thousands of them. You can find them thankfully online. In many cases,'cause in many cases they're in libraries all over the world. And he invented uses of sketches that weren't reinvent until many years later because his His sketches were unavailable.

1:33:21 So compare and contrast, you've talked about that. He did a great many Like that of s of heads and then skulls and then the brain structures inside. He was looking for the soul. And that was the kernel of the opera. was looking for the soul and looking for the soul in the brain. So in thought he found it at the confluence of of sensory pathways.

1:33:51 So there are cutaways, there are compare and contrast. You see him, and this is a phrase I'm borrowing from a catalogue on an exhibit of Rafael that's currently at the National Academy of Arts in London. Whereas somebody pointed to V Rafael's sketches as thinking out loud. And that's what Da Vinci's sketches were. You can see on the same page many sketches from different perspectives. He's thinking out loud. How to prepare the painting.

1:34:23 So he used these sketches in especially the colourways and And the compare and contrast um in ways that that again medical uh illustrators didn't come up with till centuries later. And were truly inventive.

1:34:40 Now I haven't seen sketches of other Creators. At the same time, but Da Vinci was unique in being a creator of art and a creator of of architecture creator of implements Um and and so forth. So he was an engineer and an artist and

1:35:03 of a a qu he created events. He was The talent was explosive. So and similarly the use of sketches to inform him because they were for him. not for show

1:35:20 Although in many cases they're as beautiful as the paintings, um because of It was his way of understanding. Exactly. Thank you. Yeah, it's this way of making sense. And you can certainly see that today, many people making sketches, it's their way of making sense of things. of data you display it in different ways to make sense of it. Yeah.

1:35:43 And and then eventually how to show it, how to use it to communicate. In your writing you've used the term cognitive Collage. What what did you mean by that? So people have talked about cognitive maps. And i the term that came from Toma who who showed that uh it rats

1:36:04 learning roots could put those roots together into a map of where things were relative to each other. And of course the beautiful work on place cells And grid cells has shown that. Um Conclusively that rats have ways of organizing places in a space that's viewpoint independent.

1:36:26 and and then navigating in it and or using that to navigate. So we studied along with many other people various errors that people make systematically. in in making judgments about spatial relations, distance and direction in particular. So uh people think that Philadelphia is is north of Rome.

1:36:52 when it's actually south of Rome, and it's seems to be because people line up Europe and North America. And Europe is actually farther north. than North America, and anyone who goes to Europe at this time of year knows the sun sets very late. in Paris and Rome compared to uh to northern American cities

1:37:16 So people line them up and then they see that Philadelphia is northern part of America and Rome is sort of south in Europe and things use that. To and for the direction between Philadelphia and and um and Rome.

1:37:34 People think that An ordinary building, say Jacques House, is closer to the to a landmark Eiffel Tower. Then I f to Jacques house. And that violates any metric assumption. And it seems to be because the Iflow Tower defines a neighborhood.

1:37:53 You might say I live near the Ifo Tower. You wouldn't s unless somebody knew Jacques, you wouldn't say I live near Jacques house. So landmarks in any city Um, will tell you I live neur NYU Um, or I live near Columbia I can say from New York and people will know about where I'm living and

1:38:15 So Colombian NYU for academics. Define a a a neighborhood. So Ordinary things are drawn into the space of a neighborhood, of a landmark And that defies uh any any metric representation. Eleanor Roche has shown that in judgments of color. Magenta is closer to red than red to magenta. And again, it's similar. Magenta is a form of red. Red includes many shades of red.

1:38:46 So she'd shown that in in uh prototypes. That the the things are more similar to the prototype than vice versa. My husband show that in social political situations people think a son is more similar to a father than a father. to a son. People think or thought in years ago probably think again now that North Korea is more similar to the PRC than the PRC to North Korea.

1:39:16 So those asymmetry so that you have those Asymmetries in conceptual relations as well as in spatial relations and So if in there are many other errors like that, Milgram, famous for his work on punishment, spent a sabbatical in Paris. And found people straighten the sin. Which makes them take longer routes,'cause the Seine actually forms a kind of upside down crescent in Paris if you orient the north the m map north.

1:39:47 So there are many errors like that. that have been documenting and if you put them all together you don't get a coherent map. You can't. If you add to that maps that we know about environments for maps and use them to navigate or memory of maps, To navigate, we use verbal instructions, go up and that street.

1:40:08 Until another street turn right. We we're mixing all that information and coming up with a judgment of how far things are, what directions things are. Um, how long it will take me to get there, which is Confounded by means of transfertation Um so

1:40:28 Any of those judgments were pulling together disparate information. How do we combine it? And it's not gonna be combined in a two dimensional or even three dimensional map, nor do we have them stored in our heads. We have partial information stored in our heads and Making it coherent isn't by no means easy, but Um and um

1:40:54 So I called it I said the analogy is probably to a collage It's multi modal. It isn't coherent in a metric sense. But maybe more beautiful. than a map.

1:41:07 I w I wanna explore one final topic today, which is the the importance of perspective taking in terms of how we interpret things. And I know you've done some work where you get people to think creatively. And one of the ways that you get them to think create creatively was to ask them to think about the different roles of people. So like how would a doctor use this? How would a gardener use this? Uh I wonder if you can talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. We've done a lot of pr work on perspective taking, starting with with the map situation, are we taking an overview perspective or embedded in the environment? And that is really hard?

1:41:45 We work with Google Maps and we're seeing something, how do we reconcile them? There's been beautiful work on the brain on that and how the brain might do it, by Russ Epstein and Penn. Um and undoubtedly others. So there's perspective taking there, there's perspective taking in Should I take your perspective or my perspective when I'm describing things? And if you're in front of me, I generally take your perspective because I understand and your cognitive load is higher. But um

1:42:19 So changing perspectives key in many many places in in our lives. We found that even in situations that are non communicative or where you and I have the same perspective and we're looking at somebody else acting. We take the perspective of the actor. instead of our own perspective, and I think it's a way of understanding their action. um is taking their perspective and we do that more quickly and automatically than taking our own perspective. So that was surprising to many people who assume that an egocentric

1:42:58 perspective was primary and overcoming it. was difficult, but by now that experiment has been replicated by many people in many cases. We talk about social perspective taking and taking the perspective of others. It's probably it seems to be different from spatial. perspective taking and there we found it useful in creativity.

1:43:22 So there's been a lot of work on how to get people more creative, and some of the work has been Done by a group. Advocating mind wandering. Just let your mind go.

1:43:36 And we thought thinking about creative people and how they work with their own minds. that they don't completely let their mind go. Um and that mind wandering can help you get out of fixation. Which is a real problem in design that you keep designing the same way, you can't see new uses.

1:44:00 For old objects. And even experienced designers. fall prey to um to fixation. Mathematicians, product designers, architects fall prey to that. And it's it's partly that first cognitive law. Those old design tricks work. And they've worked over and over again. And

1:44:24 And i learning depends on learning those old tricks. But if you want to do something differently, then you have to get out of those old tricks. So they're all you're learning has a cost and you want to get out of it. So mine wander can release you from fixation, partly because it brings in new stimuli. with no responses

1:44:47 But it doesn't give you a productive way of coming up with new uses. So the test that's typically used in creativity and even in engineering design courses and graphic design courses is to come up with new uses for a brick. And it's a kind of warm up exercise like doing scales on a piano. And it's often used in in design situations, come up with new uses, how do you do that? So we s we we started thinking deeply about how people come up with new uses. We looked at sketches and that is one way that active way that designers come up with.

1:45:29 New uses is they make a sketchy sketch. They look for one reason, they look at it. And because it's full of ambiguity they can reinterpret it. And they see new things in it. So they're designed for one reason and the messiness allows them to see no things. So we knew that would help.

1:45:50 Ен за ну с тюрьма тобі неу перспективs. No no really ways of organizing the visual whatever you're seeing visually. So we thought maybe that would be a way of increasing um finding new uses that just letting your mind go. might help you release you from fixation on

1:46:14 these various objects, bricks, um umbrellas, ping pong balls, and so forth. But that they wouldn't be a productive way of coming up with new uses. And then we started thinking what are normal ex what are natural experiences in life. So we experience people.

1:46:33 We experience places We experience events. And all of those seem to lead to new uses. But what

1:46:42 seem to combine all of them are roles. So a adopter is a different person or a particular person in a particular place for particular events. Um a musician, same thing. A garden or a same thing. That each of these roles in life is associated with particular events and

1:47:04 particular equipment, people, places And forms of interaction. capture a huge amount of information that we know about just from living. Children are asked from the an early age, what do you want to be when you grow up? So then their books are filled with firemen and policemen and doctors, roles they might encounter. So We know people knew a lot about roles.

1:47:33 So we gave people different objects, asked them to think of new uses. There were things again like umbrellas and ping pong balls. We pre-tested them to make sure that people could think easily of new uses. And one group we said, just let your mind go, we use the instructions from the previous work. Another group we just told Think of no uses, we didn't give them any particular instructions. That's the normal.

1:48:04 Ta task and the third group we said Think of different roles. Think of what an artist might do with it. Think of what a gardener might do with it. Think of what a policeman might. So we gave them a list of roles and said think use these, think of new uses and Think of their roles. And then we looked at what we got. We ran this on mechanical turk several times. And that gives us a broad range of humanity than college students, and we did get a broad range.

1:48:35 And The most effective strategy was roles, by far. In fact, the mind wandering didn't differ from the No instruction group? And when we ask people how did you do it, the no instruction group said, Well, I just let my mind go.

1:48:53 But the A rose group came up with far more. No use They came up with far more new uses that were unique or rare. So we tabulated all this is work with Julia Chow and she was

1:49:11 just a beautiful eye for data. So she tabulated all the uses. She looked at the number of people who came up with them. And is for the the the uses that only one person or only three came up with the they were in the Role group. Um the role group persisted more.

1:49:33 Their ideas came later, the unique ideas, and in doing the task, it's almost as if you have to get rid of all those ordinary ideas before you can think of the unique ones. And then once you're thinking of the rarer or unique ones, you can You need a way to go back and try again, and a way to go back and try again and And Juliet was able to show F At least half

1:49:59 of the ideas they came up with were connected with the roles that we gave them. They also invented roles. They got the idea. Think of new roles and they invented roles. uh often imaginary creatures or creatures from stories or animated cartoons. Or movies. And thought about how those creatures might

1:50:22 use the new objects. So they were doubly productive. It wasn't just the roles, it was inventing roles and using roles. to come up with new ideas. So th and that Perspective taking. It seems to underlie a great deal of creative behavior not just in design.

1:50:46 But is i Phil Tadlock has studied um super forecasters. These are people who year after year Are able to predict outcomes of world events better than most people. So they have certain skills. that other people don't have. It isn't like predicting the stock market where the good predictors one year aren't the good predictors the next year because it's There really aren't many skills there. Um but they are skilled. So what are their skills?

1:51:19 Um they are knowledge junkies. They love information. They are numerate, so they can distinguish between ten percent probability and fifteen percent probability, and they can change their predictions by a percentage point or two percentage points. So they're well calibrated in their um pro use of probabilities. But most of all they seem to change perspective. They challenge their own perspective. So this is I think what you were saying about confirmation bias and conforming Um i looking only at evidence that conforms to your views, you want to look at evidence that challenges your views.

1:52:02 Um, in order to be calibrated with the world. Um otherwise you fall prey to wishful thinking and to error. So they challenge their own perspective. They also deliberately dis think of perspectives of other people. So if you're a liberal, how would a conservative see this? If you're um Zel Zelensky, how would Putin Putin see it? And how would the the Chancellor of Germany see it? How would different viewers see it? Challenge your perspective, take other perspectives.

1:52:37 So we we see that in social decision making, in political prediction, in economic prediction. So taking other perspectives. seems to be a useful way of Of coming up with other ideas. I sometimes worry though that

1:52:58 That Certain stubborn people Don't Take the perspective of others. Some of them are bullies.

1:53:08 Um we can all think of examples. Um, and I wonder if that doesn't do them G allow them to get their way. The fact that they will not change perspective, nor will they see yours. And so that worries me. But I d choose to think that on the whole, perspective taking enlarges the mind and increases possibilities. If you if you think about a lot of the the cognitive biases, they sort of come down to frame of reference.

1:53:41 And we only have our own frame of reference. And the example that sort of comes to mind is standing on a train and holding a ball. And the train is moving at sixty miles an hour. And relative to you, the ball is not moving'cause you're standing on the train, but relative to the somebody watching the train go by, the ball is moving at sixty miles an hour. And we have so many blind spots because all we see is what we what we see in front of us, right? And we think that's all there is to the world. And one of the advantages to to perspective taking or changing your frame of reference into a problem. is that without any additional sort of information um that you you're coming across, you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes and you can change your lens into the situation, and that will reveal a little bit of your blind spots that you have from your own perspective if you let it.

1:54:30 And by by walking around a problem almost in a three dimensional way, if you want to conceptualize it, you you can sort of begin to eliminate the blind spots. And if you think of decision making the source of all bad decision making is blind spots because you you're only acting on things that you feel are rational. So you're blind to some piece of information or some implication or or some sort of future um that you can't see and by walking around and changing your frame of reference or taking a different perspective, you can learn to reduce those blind spots quite a bit. No, absolutely. And it's again they benefit of vicarious stories. of vicarious learning is that's one way of getting different perspectives, reading the newspaper and not just reading your news. But other people's nose. Um prospective taking a loud Einstein.

1:55:20 to take the different temporal and spatial perspectives that allowed Newton to take So it it it also helped for leaps. of um of advances in science and math, as well as these small sorts of things of taking a spouse's perspective on your own behavior instead of getting defensive and screaming.

1:55:45 Um but just saying oh or your child's perspective, they see it that way, and of course if they see it that way. So it's it it's useful on a personal level on and national level on creative level just everywhere is frame of reference taking different ones and seeing and it's not always easy. I mean we we don't we didn't jump to the insights that Einstein did.

1:56:17 So it's by no means easy. And but as you say with examples like your ball on the train It can be really insightful. You can say all of a sudden wow. Um I get it. And then whether how much transfer that is, we again talked about how you transfer. And tell people to take different perspectives probably can help in some situations. Providing them with perspectives to take can help even more. So it's it

1:56:50 It's it's Capturing a deep phenomenon, but instantiating it can still be difficult, although I think it's midway between really abstract And really specific it

1:57:04 perspective taking changing is is something in the middle that people can Grasp. I think that's an excellent place to sort of wrap this up. One one final question. Wha what does success mean to you? Oh, it's so personal, isn't it? And it keeps changing it's dependent. Am I successful as a parent? Am I successful as an academic? Am I successful as a friend? There are different

1:57:33 Have I professionally achieved what I hope to achieve, but th what I hope to achieve keeps changing. I certainly went beyond wo what I hope for. Um when I was a small child, um, I hoped for an interesting life. I certainly had an interesting life.

1:57:56 And I hope for a life that had friends and intellectual i excitement. I certainly wanted to be a parent and have a family. So I hope for all those things I think I've been very fortunate. to have even more, but there's more I could have had. And time is running out. So at some point I th you know, I think Life cycles.

1:58:20 do that to there are periods when you're hungrier and there are periods when you need to reconcile. Um I think being female Yeah I I look at what our opp opportunities are open to women now and they're incomparable.

1:58:39 Both familial, my parents had no expectations for me. They thought being smart was um dangerous. It led to insanity. And they certainly didn't have any aspirations for their two daughters other than successful marriages.

1:58:58 They certainly had other aspirations for their sons. So it and That was there all along, and I think again opportunities for women Now I look at my

1:59:11 children, I look at my grandchildren, I see what they What's what's expected of them and what they can aspire to is Oof. Climate change doesn't kill us all. That's the pessimist in you coming again. Well, I you know, you look at the data. You can't be self deluding.

1:59:32 So but uh you know, I am hoping for um even more enriched lives. I've been very lucky to have an extraordinarily rich life. And I can see that they're even better prepared. for a rich life. than I was. Both the world is better prepared for them and they are better pre

1:59:56 They're they're enabled. In wonderful ways. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today, Barbara. Well thank you. It's been a um a real pleasure. Thanks for listening and learning with us.

2:00:17 For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more. Go to fs dot blog slash podcast. Or just Google the Knowledge Project. Until next time.

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