WEBVTT - Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works 0:00:02.240 --> 0:00:06.399 This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg 0:00:06.480 --> 0:00:10.360 Radio this week on the podcast Really, I have a 0:00:10.520 --> 0:00:13.119 super extra special guest. Everybody makes fun of me for 0:00:13.160 --> 0:00:16.160 saying that each week, but I have an extra special guest. 0:00:16.480 --> 0:00:20.120 I was fortunate enough to go to a dinner one 0:00:20.200 --> 0:00:23.680 night that Annie Duke was hosting, and each person at 0:00:23.680 --> 0:00:27.400 the table was more fascinating and accomplished than the next, 0:00:27.520 --> 0:00:31.520 from Mike Mobison, a Josh Wolf to Danny Kahneman. And 0:00:31.640 --> 0:00:33.720 at the end of the evening, one of the women 0:00:33.760 --> 0:00:38.640 at the table pulls me aside to discuss my interview 0:00:38.680 --> 0:00:41.920 with Michael Lewis, and that turned out to be Barbara Tversky, 0:00:42.400 --> 0:00:47.960 a experimental psychologist, publisher of hundreds of research papers, oh 0:00:47.960 --> 0:00:51.280 and also the spouse of a Moost Tversky. And she 0:00:51.320 --> 0:00:54.840 told me how much she enjoyed my conversation with Mike Lewis, 0:00:54.960 --> 0:00:57.960 and we started chatting, and it took me, I don't know, 0:00:58.080 --> 0:01:01.040 maybe four seconds to say, oh my god, this woman 0:01:01.120 --> 0:01:03.440 is fascinating and I have to sit down and have 0:01:03.520 --> 0:01:06.360 a conversation with her. But she's back and forth between 0:01:06.360 --> 0:01:09.959 Stanford and Colombian, and it took us a while to 0:01:10.040 --> 0:01:12.680 hone in on a time, and I'm really glad we did. 0:01:12.840 --> 0:01:17.000 She wrote this fascinating book on how the brain works, 0:01:17.040 --> 0:01:21.160 how we perceive things, whether it's language or spatial perception, 0:01:21.600 --> 0:01:26.960 and why action shapes thoughts and how motion impacts cognitive processes. 0:01:27.440 --> 0:01:32.440 It's not drying clinical, It's really a very fascinating abstract conversation. 0:01:33.040 --> 0:01:37.000 And we just babbled. At least I babbled for two hours. 0:01:37.040 --> 0:01:40.160 It really was an intriguing conversation. If you're at all 0:01:40.280 --> 0:01:45.120 interested in cognitive psychology, how the brain works, the way 0:01:45.520 --> 0:01:49.520 language affects thought and vice versa, the way thought affects language, 0:01:49.880 --> 0:01:54.520 as well as her nine laws of Cognition, you're going 0:01:54.600 --> 0:01:58.280 to find this to be absolutely fascinating. So, with no 0:01:58.360 --> 0:02:05.640 further ado, my conversation with Barbara Taversky. This is Masters 0:02:05.680 --> 0:02:10.320 in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My extra 0:02:10.400 --> 0:02:13.720 special guest this week is Barbara Tversky. She is a 0:02:13.720 --> 0:02:17.720 professor of psychology at Stanford University. She also is a 0:02:17.800 --> 0:02:23.359 psychology and education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. 0:02:23.680 --> 0:02:30.200 She has published more than two hundred articles on cognition, psychology, memory, 0:02:30.880 --> 0:02:34.320 all sorts of fascinating topics. Her new book is called 0:02:34.440 --> 0:02:40.880 Mind in Motion, How Action Shapes Thought. Barbara Taverski, Welcome 0:02:40.880 --> 0:02:44.080 to Bloomberg. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So 0:02:44.200 --> 0:02:49.440 let's talk a little bit about cognition and psychology. How 0:02:49.440 --> 0:02:53.040 did you find your way to that field. I'm a 0:02:53.080 --> 0:02:57.200 bit of a contrarian, and when I entered the field, 0:02:57.480 --> 0:03:01.560 the cognition revolution was well in progress, so you could 0:03:01.600 --> 0:03:04.840 open up the mind if you were clever, and find 0:03:04.919 --> 0:03:10.040 ways of revealing how people thought. But I thought at 0:03:10.080 --> 0:03:15.480 that time was heavily dominated by language, by propositional thinking 0:03:15.520 --> 0:03:21.919 that came from philosophy and linguistics, and people thought at 0:03:21.919 --> 0:03:24.919 that time. The way we thought about the spatial world, 0:03:24.960 --> 0:03:29.320 the visual world, was by putting it into propositional format. 0:03:29.680 --> 0:03:34.120 Explain what that means is So proposition is in philosophy 0:03:34.280 --> 0:03:38.400 is a minimal statement, like the cup is round or 0:03:38.600 --> 0:03:42.600 the desk is flat. Their minimal statements where you attribute 0:03:42.680 --> 0:03:47.200 something to something else. And it felt to me like 0:03:47.400 --> 0:03:52.080 you could never begin to describe faces that way. We're 0:03:52.240 --> 0:03:56.559 very bad at describing faces. Emotions are difficult to describe, 0:03:57.040 --> 0:04:01.520 fairly easy to detect. Spaces that were in our heart 0:04:01.600 --> 0:04:06.520 to describe, So thinking about reducing that to propositions, to 0:04:06.640 --> 0:04:11.280 these simple, minimal statements didn't make sense to me. It 0:04:11.400 --> 0:04:14.680 made sense to me that the spatial world and the 0:04:14.800 --> 0:04:19.479 visual world had its own logic, and that logic came 0:04:19.560 --> 0:04:24.920 first evolutionarily, because you know, babies don't talk. It takes 0:04:24.920 --> 0:04:27.320 them a while to talk, and even when they talk, 0:04:28.080 --> 0:04:32.760 everything sounds like bah buss banana bottle and they aren't 0:04:32.800 --> 0:04:37.240 saying very deep things for a long time. So they 0:04:37.279 --> 0:04:42.599 do very intelligent things. Animals do very intelligent things without speech. 0:04:43.240 --> 0:04:45.839 So it felt to me that, if anything, the spatial 0:04:46.000 --> 0:04:52.039 visual world preceded evolutionarily and in development and had a 0:04:52.160 --> 0:04:56.040 richness of its own and that needed to be explored 0:04:56.200 --> 0:04:59.960 independent of language. So let's talk about language for secon 0:05:00.040 --> 0:05:03.719 and because it's funny, I first wrote this question how 0:05:03.720 --> 0:05:07.719 did people think before language? And then I kind of said, well, 0:05:07.800 --> 0:05:10.680 now that's the wrong way to think about it, based 0:05:10.680 --> 0:05:12.200 on some of the things you wrote in the book. 0:05:12.279 --> 0:05:14.560 The better way to ask that question is how has 0:05:14.680 --> 0:05:18.480 language changed the way we think? That's a great question 0:05:18.520 --> 0:05:21.880 and that's one that people grapple with, and you know, 0:05:21.960 --> 0:05:25.760 people want simple answers. It is probably complicated. Let me 0:05:25.839 --> 0:05:29.640 start first with how we speak, and a lot of 0:05:29.680 --> 0:05:33.640 the way we speak about thinking is as if they 0:05:33.640 --> 0:05:37.760 were actions on objects. And I think that that kind 0:05:37.800 --> 0:05:42.160 of thinking of acting on objects got internalized to think 0:05:42.240 --> 0:05:47.320 about thoughts as objects. So we raise ideas, we pushed 0:05:47.360 --> 0:05:50.880 them forward, we tear them apart. All of those are 0:05:51.080 --> 0:05:53.960 the ways we talk about thinking, and there is if 0:05:54.000 --> 0:05:57.840 we were having actual objects and doing it. So I 0:05:58.279 --> 0:06:01.679 don't think that's metaphor. I think we have no other 0:06:01.760 --> 0:06:06.640 way of talking about thinking except as if there were actions. 0:06:06.720 --> 0:06:10.520 So those are things we do with our hands, with 0:06:10.600 --> 0:06:14.000 our fate. We go from place to place, and our 0:06:14.080 --> 0:06:19.320 thoughts go from idea to idea along conceptual paths, the 0:06:19.400 --> 0:06:24.360 way our feet go from place to place along spatial paths. 0:06:24.400 --> 0:06:28.480 And it now turns out that the same brain structures 0:06:28.520 --> 0:06:32.520 in humans are coding both of them. They're both coding 0:06:32.920 --> 0:06:38.080 our paths in actual space and our paths in conceptual space. 0:06:38.200 --> 0:06:41.520 Explain that a little bit. When you say that we're 0:06:41.600 --> 0:06:44.520 coded in in conceptual space when we go from thought 0:06:44.560 --> 0:06:49.719 to thought, are you suggesting our thought processes are somewhat predestined? 0:06:50.080 --> 0:06:53.560 We all have the same approach to solving the same 0:06:53.600 --> 0:06:57.000 problems more or less, at least structurally. What do you 0:06:57.000 --> 0:07:02.039 mean by that? It's again a great question. It's really associations, 0:07:02.080 --> 0:07:05.359 just the way you'll walk from A to B in 0:07:05.400 --> 0:07:07.680 a different way than I might walk from A to 0:07:07.800 --> 0:07:10.800 B for different reasons, but it's still a to be right. 0:07:11.040 --> 0:07:13.880 And some of the problem with thinking is we don't 0:07:13.920 --> 0:07:16.760 know where be is right. We start off with a 0:07:16.880 --> 0:07:19.960 and we're trying to solve a problem maybe or we're 0:07:20.040 --> 0:07:23.760 just letting our minds wander. No. I think, if anything, 0:07:23.880 --> 0:07:27.960 we're gonna If you look at human beings were incredibly 0:07:28.000 --> 0:07:32.720 diverse and thinking in different ways, and our associations are 0:07:33.280 --> 0:07:38.800 built from experience, from many different experiences, So thoughts go 0:07:38.960 --> 0:07:44.160 from association to association, and those associations are going to 0:07:44.240 --> 0:07:48.040 be wildly different. So I'll give you a small example. 0:07:48.560 --> 0:07:52.160 When my husband and I used to walk in streets 0:07:52.240 --> 0:07:57.680 in cities that yours being a most of our right. 0:07:57.880 --> 0:08:01.840 This is years ago, because unfortunately he's hasn't been with 0:08:01.920 --> 0:08:05.800 us for all too long. But we would walk in Paris, 0:08:05.880 --> 0:08:10.600 in New York, places where we were tourists at the time, 0:08:11.280 --> 0:08:14.720 and when we'd come back, um, he would say, did 0:08:14.760 --> 0:08:19.960 you see all those prostitutes. I didn't pick up a 0:08:20.080 --> 0:08:24.119 single one, And you know, I was looking at other things, 0:08:24.160 --> 0:08:28.720 the architecture, maybe what people were wearing. Um I didn't. 0:08:28.760 --> 0:08:32.320 I wasn't seeing that. But you also noticed, and I 0:08:32.360 --> 0:08:36.439 picked this up from the book, the way the structure 0:08:36.440 --> 0:08:39.840 of the cities were lying. You talk about how Japan 0:08:40.160 --> 0:08:44.040 has there very it's very confusing to foreigners, but they 0:08:44.080 --> 0:08:48.119 break cities into quadrants, and those quadrants are pretty consistent 0:08:48.200 --> 0:08:51.920 from Japanese city to Japanese city. It becomes very helpful 0:08:52.320 --> 0:08:56.200 if you know the code, but anybody who doesn't, it's 0:08:56.280 --> 0:09:00.120 just a perplexing mess. Yeah. And and that again is 0:09:00.160 --> 0:09:04.160 illustrating different ways of thinking and different ways of designing. 0:09:05.040 --> 0:09:08.040 But both are designed. And I think one of the 0:09:08.080 --> 0:09:10.480 points are trying to make in the book is that 0:09:10.880 --> 0:09:14.640 we design the world the way we design our minds. 0:09:14.679 --> 0:09:18.040 So both Japan and the US New York with its 0:09:18.080 --> 0:09:22.240 grid system and many other cities with grid systems, even 0:09:22.280 --> 0:09:28.239 the Romans had grid systems, and some Chinese have grid systems. 0:09:28.880 --> 0:09:32.000 In fact, Japan has grid systems, they just labeled them 0:09:32.040 --> 0:09:38.080 differently from the way we do. But that those designs 0:09:38.160 --> 0:09:44.120 are go across cultures with with variations, but they have 0:09:44.280 --> 0:09:48.120 to do with the way we design our minds. Um. So, 0:09:48.120 --> 0:09:50.480 so let me ask you this question, since since we're 0:09:50.640 --> 0:09:55.560 talking about visual cognition, how does our sense of spatial 0:09:55.760 --> 0:10:02.160 understanding and visual cognition affect the way we think? It's so? 0:10:02.320 --> 0:10:07.200 One way is is I think? Okay? How to how 0:10:07.240 --> 0:10:10.320 to answer that? One way are things that I've already 0:10:10.400 --> 0:10:15.200 said that we think about actions on ideas, the way 0:10:15.240 --> 0:10:18.400 we think about actions and objects, and we go from 0:10:18.480 --> 0:10:23.200 place to place, the way we go from idea to idea. 0:10:23.440 --> 0:10:30.000 UM that probably affects the structure of language. That's my hunch, 0:10:30.080 --> 0:10:34.440 and I didn't work that out very well. You asked 0:10:34.480 --> 0:10:39.200 earlier how does language bootstrap our thinking? And I think 0:10:39.280 --> 0:10:43.439 language isn't one of many cognitive tools that we use. 0:10:43.679 --> 0:10:47.439 We can then use language to reason about other things, 0:10:47.480 --> 0:10:51.200 the way we can use math to reason about other things, 0:10:51.400 --> 0:10:55.000 or or logic or computer programming. We have a number 0:10:55.040 --> 0:10:58.800 of these cognitive tools that we have built through culture. 0:10:59.280 --> 0:11:02.800 Their cultural evolved. We don't we're not born with them, 0:11:02.840 --> 0:11:07.440 and they enable leaps of thought. We now have computers 0:11:07.440 --> 0:11:10.800 that do help us think and help us design, and 0:11:11.400 --> 0:11:16.319 so we we've developed a number of these cognitive tools 0:11:16.360 --> 0:11:21.920 that help us structure our thinking and will leapfrog are thinking. 0:11:22.040 --> 0:11:25.560 We can use them to think farther. So I don't 0:11:25.679 --> 0:11:30.280 need to compute square roots anymore. I have them amount calculator. 0:11:30.640 --> 0:11:33.680 I can use that to leap frog and go to 0:11:33.760 --> 0:11:38.720 other um levels of understanding. So so last question on 0:11:38.720 --> 0:11:44.920 this topic, what is cognitive collage? I love that phrase. Okay, 0:11:44.920 --> 0:11:48.720 thank you. So we did some work on how people 0:11:48.840 --> 0:11:53.199 understand the environments that they walk through every day, and 0:11:53.480 --> 0:11:56.920 there are a number of distortions that people have that 0:11:57.000 --> 0:12:01.559 indicate that people are constructing their images of environments. So 0:12:01.760 --> 0:12:05.160 the grid pattern, we tend to line things up in 0:12:05.160 --> 0:12:12.480 in in parallel and perpendicular lines and ignore um ignore diagonals, 0:12:12.520 --> 0:12:17.480 and ignore five sided things like the Boston Commons. People 0:12:17.600 --> 0:12:22.080 often act as if it were four sided kind of quadrilateral, 0:12:22.280 --> 0:12:26.240 not a pentagon, and it's not really a pentagon, so 0:12:26.520 --> 0:12:29.520 we we distort. So some of the distortions are really 0:12:29.600 --> 0:12:34.480 quite remarkable. The most remarkable is probably that people think 0:12:34.559 --> 0:12:39.400 that distances to a landmark are smaller than distances from 0:12:39.440 --> 0:12:44.640 a landmark. Explain that because that sounds so obviously incorrect. Exactly, 0:12:45.320 --> 0:12:48.200 So a number of studies have been done where people 0:12:48.559 --> 0:12:53.680 on college campuses pick landmarks. They have the students picked 0:12:53.720 --> 0:12:57.080 the landmarks, and then another group of students is asked 0:12:57.080 --> 0:13:01.920 about distances and you get those a symmetric distances. So 0:13:02.000 --> 0:13:04.920 the example I use is that people think that Jacques's 0:13:04.960 --> 0:13:09.160 house is closer to the Eiffel Tower than Eiffel Tower 0:13:09.240 --> 0:13:13.560 to Jacques's house. And one explanation for that might be 0:13:13.760 --> 0:13:19.520 that the Eiffel Tower defines a neighborhood. Columbus Circle is 0:13:19.559 --> 0:13:22.840 a neighborhood, the village is a neighborhood. We tend to 0:13:22.880 --> 0:13:26.880 form neighborhoods around these landmarks, and we say, if someone 0:13:26.920 --> 0:13:29.480 says where do you live, you can say I live 0:13:29.600 --> 0:13:34.600 near Columbus Circle and that tells people the environment. And 0:13:35.880 --> 0:13:39.800 so the neighborhood is quite expanded. It includes Jacques's house, 0:13:40.040 --> 0:13:45.240 but Jacques's House only includes itself, so you get that asymmetry. 0:13:45.559 --> 0:13:50.080 And these are these are This is research I didn't do. 0:13:50.280 --> 0:13:53.400 I pointed to it, but it's very related to research 0:13:53.559 --> 0:13:58.160 that my husband had done earlier, showing that people this 0:13:58.280 --> 0:14:01.000 is going way back in history. People think that North 0:14:01.080 --> 0:14:05.720 Korea is more like communist China than communist China like 0:14:05.880 --> 0:14:09.600 North Korea, or the son is more like the father 0:14:10.000 --> 0:14:13.160 than the father like this son. So we have these 0:14:13.280 --> 0:14:18.640 landmarks or prototypes and they draw similar things into them. 0:14:19.320 --> 0:14:22.840 Eleanor Rosh had earlier done work showing that people think 0:14:23.160 --> 0:14:28.440 magenta is more like red than red like magenta, so 0:14:29.440 --> 0:14:33.120 I could see that. Yeah, they are defining categories really, 0:14:33.280 --> 0:14:41.280 and these peripheral instances don't. So those are spatial ideas. 0:14:42.560 --> 0:14:46.120 The distance, whether it's distance and color, or distance in 0:14:46.160 --> 0:14:51.040 political leanings, or distances in some kind of psychological or 0:14:51.040 --> 0:14:54.840 physical similarity, the son to the father, those are all 0:14:54.960 --> 0:15:00.120 spatial concepts. But and and we can show them in 0:15:00.200 --> 0:15:04.720 space two. But they are affecting our thinking. We're spatializing 0:15:04.880 --> 0:15:10.680 those concepts of North Korea, red and magenta and communist 0:15:10.800 --> 0:15:16.960 China and and thinking about other things in relation to them, 0:15:17.000 --> 0:15:22.160 but in relation to spatial distance. So everywhere I look, 0:15:22.440 --> 0:15:28.240 I can find spatial distortions that are reflected in conceptual ones. 0:15:28.960 --> 0:15:31.680 In group out group would be one. We tend to 0:15:31.720 --> 0:15:36.160 think that that if we're in one political leaning, that 0:15:36.280 --> 0:15:40.960 everybody in another political they're all alike. My group is 0:15:41.000 --> 0:15:44.440 highly differentiated, but it's because it's close to me. And 0:15:44.480 --> 0:15:48.400 I can see the differences. I don't see the differences 0:15:48.440 --> 0:15:51.800 in those others, so we tend to think of them 0:15:51.920 --> 0:15:56.080 is all alike, but our group is differentiate. That's quite fascinating. 0:15:56.280 --> 0:15:59.200 One of my favorite parts about the book was the 0:15:59.320 --> 0:16:02.960 nine law of cognition. And I have to ask you, 0:16:03.400 --> 0:16:06.560 how did you develop nine rules? And how long have 0:16:06.640 --> 0:16:09.600 you been working on these? You know? I started writing 0:16:09.640 --> 0:16:13.920 the book and I realized that certain of the things 0:16:14.040 --> 0:16:18.200 that I was saying, again, many of them about space, 0:16:18.320 --> 0:16:22.880 had generality to thinking in general or behavior in general, 0:16:22.960 --> 0:16:27.400 and I wanted to point to those and encapsulate them 0:16:27.480 --> 0:16:31.240 in a way. Then it became laws. And I have 0:16:31.440 --> 0:16:34.960 a good friend who comes from medical science, very hard 0:16:35.040 --> 0:16:38.280 noised researcher. After the book was written, and I couldn't 0:16:38.320 --> 0:16:41.640 change anything. Sounds confused by that because she was thinking 0:16:41.680 --> 0:16:46.160 of physics laws, which are laws, and and you can 0:16:46.280 --> 0:16:49.560 compute them and get answers that will in fact hold. 0:16:50.160 --> 0:16:54.400 So these are not like that. They're generalizations, and I 0:16:54.440 --> 0:17:00.160 think that fits with the way social sciences see laws 0:17:00.320 --> 0:17:04.360 kind of generalizations. Okay, let's go over some of these generalizations. 0:17:04.600 --> 0:17:08.920 Will start with rule number one. There are no benefits 0:17:08.920 --> 0:17:14.120 without costs, meaning creativity versus learning. How do they set 0:17:14.160 --> 0:17:17.879 each other? Interesting? And I mean it's a nice example. 0:17:18.440 --> 0:17:21.840 So I think again, the mind is quite simple. We 0:17:21.880 --> 0:17:25.840 want simple, straight answers. Things are always this, and things 0:17:25.880 --> 0:17:30.320 are always that. And we categorize because the number of 0:17:30.400 --> 0:17:33.240 things in the world is huge. If we had to 0:17:33.320 --> 0:17:38.040 think about each chair individually, each cup individually, it would 0:17:38.080 --> 0:17:42.720 be overwhelming. So we categorize things as chairs and tables 0:17:42.840 --> 0:17:46.440 and dogs and cats, and that enables us to know 0:17:46.560 --> 0:17:50.200 how to recognize them and how to behave towards them. 0:17:50.200 --> 0:17:55.159 Now we can miscategorize, and that happens often tragically and 0:17:55.359 --> 0:18:00.760 certain situations, but we forget that we need those categories 0:18:01.280 --> 0:18:05.240 on some level because we have to behave very quickly 0:18:05.800 --> 0:18:08.720 and we have to respond very quickly. Is someone throwing 0:18:08.840 --> 0:18:12.719 something at me to hurt me, as someone throwing something 0:18:12.760 --> 0:18:16.000 at me so I can catch it, and our behavior 0:18:16.119 --> 0:18:18.160 is going to be very different. So when you say 0:18:18.160 --> 0:18:23.240 cost versus benefits, sometimes the trade off is speed versus 0:18:23.280 --> 0:18:29.280 accuracy or making a defensive decision because it's a matter 0:18:29.320 --> 0:18:33.920 of existential survival versus Hey, I may not be accurate here, 0:18:34.080 --> 0:18:36.400 but better safe and sorry? Is that what you mean? 0:18:36.520 --> 0:18:39.560 By the forces of these decisions. Well, I mean it's 0:18:39.600 --> 0:18:43.520 a cost benefit. I think economists understands that everything is 0:18:43.560 --> 0:18:48.920 a trade off. I'm not sure that psychologists understand that 0:18:48.920 --> 0:18:54.200 that well, So then they'll say people miscategorize. Somebody had 0:18:54.240 --> 0:18:57.959 a toy gun, not a real gun. That this is 0:18:58.080 --> 0:19:01.199 we shouldn't be categorizing at all. And I want to 0:19:01.240 --> 0:19:04.320 say we have to we do it's it seems to 0:19:04.320 --> 0:19:09.200 be the way we think, occasionally with tragic consequence, exactly 0:19:09.560 --> 0:19:14.320 right and missteps. So on creativity and learning. We have 0:19:14.480 --> 0:19:18.520 to learn routines to get through the day, and otherwise 0:19:18.560 --> 0:19:21.320 if everything is a new problem, it's going to take 0:19:21.359 --> 0:19:23.480 too long. How do we get a key in a door? 0:19:23.600 --> 0:19:26.399 And how do we make toasts in the morning. So 0:19:26.480 --> 0:19:29.439 we have to get into those routines. But once we 0:19:29.520 --> 0:19:33.600 have those routines, it's hard to change them. So creativity 0:19:33.680 --> 0:19:38.480 requires thinking in new ways, meaning outside of the routines exactly, 0:19:38.640 --> 0:19:41.000 and thinking of a new way to build a teacup 0:19:41.119 --> 0:19:43.320 or a new way to design a chair. These are 0:19:43.359 --> 0:19:46.640 what designers have. A new way to design a school, 0:19:46.720 --> 0:19:50.440 maybe the old way of designing schools isn't as good 0:19:50.440 --> 0:19:54.400 as it could be. Libraries have changed enormously now that 0:19:54.920 --> 0:19:58.120 in a little while there'll be no paperbooks. I mean, 0:19:58.400 --> 0:20:01.639 I'm happy so further hanging. They are hanging out, and 0:20:01.680 --> 0:20:04.840 I'm glad to see because I'm a fan. So in 0:20:04.920 --> 0:20:07.719 order to design, we have to get rid of those 0:20:07.760 --> 0:20:12.280 old ways and thinking new. And we just finished an 0:20:12.320 --> 0:20:15.680 experiment asking people to think of new ways to use 0:20:15.880 --> 0:20:21.560 old things, and the good answers come about the ninth answer, 0:20:21.960 --> 0:20:25.920 meaning it takes that long before they overcome their natural 0:20:26.200 --> 0:20:30.920 tendency towards routine. Exactly, quite quite interesting. What's I think 0:20:31.080 --> 0:20:34.320 interesting also is the way we got people to generate 0:20:34.359 --> 0:20:37.960 new ideas for these old things. How do you use 0:20:38.000 --> 0:20:42.440 an umbrella? And creative ways? Well, it can be sticks 0:20:42.480 --> 0:20:46.440 to hold kebab, but that was the ninth idea, right, 0:20:46.640 --> 0:20:50.120 and it's clever and cute. But the way we got 0:20:50.160 --> 0:20:54.840 people to think creatively was to ask them to think 0:20:54.880 --> 0:20:58.719 about different roles of people. So how would a doctor 0:20:58.960 --> 0:21:02.239 use this? How would a gardener use it? So we 0:21:02.320 --> 0:21:07.280 ask people to put themselves in mindsets of other professions. 0:21:07.320 --> 0:21:10.640 And professions are something we know a lot about. We've 0:21:10.840 --> 0:21:13.720 since we were three. People ask us, what do you 0:21:13.760 --> 0:21:16.600 want to be when you grow up and we interact 0:21:16.680 --> 0:21:19.560 with people with different roles, so we know a lot 0:21:19.600 --> 0:21:24.119 about what those roles do, and that help people generate 0:21:24.280 --> 0:21:28.560 new uses. So there's a television show that focuses on 0:21:28.680 --> 0:21:32.480 improv called Whose Line Is It? Anyway? And as you 0:21:32.520 --> 0:21:35.879 were speaking, I can only think of the segment they 0:21:35.960 --> 0:21:39.600 do with props where they give each group a different 0:21:39.640 --> 0:21:44.600 set of props, and it's amazingly creative, and it seems 0:21:44.640 --> 0:21:49.320 some people really have a skill set for applying these 0:21:49.560 --> 0:21:53.200 in unexpected ways. Yeah, and improv is exactly the right 0:21:53.280 --> 0:21:57.439 example for that, for that kind of creativity. I have 0:21:57.560 --> 0:22:01.080 a former grand with student who talks about art making. 0:22:01.160 --> 0:22:05.400 She's an artist. An excellent one is improvisational and you 0:22:05.440 --> 0:22:08.800 have to keep your mind open to new ideas. And 0:22:08.840 --> 0:22:11.680 I think you're right, you couldn't develop really good skills 0:22:11.760 --> 0:22:15.800 for doing it. Let's let's go to another rule number three. 0:22:16.200 --> 0:22:22.000 The mind can override perception, really cognitive dissonance, And is 0:22:22.040 --> 0:22:24.400 the way I was looking at that. If you're perceiving 0:22:24.480 --> 0:22:27.879 something and you're not going to believe it, how is 0:22:27.920 --> 0:22:30.960 it that we ignore what's in front of our very 0:22:31.000 --> 0:22:33.920 eyes if we're not happy with what we're seeing? Well, 0:22:33.920 --> 0:22:35.800 I don't know if it's not happy, it doesn't fit 0:22:35.840 --> 0:22:40.040 our hypotheses. So that's really more confirmation biased than anything, 0:22:40.160 --> 0:22:44.560 or exactly or disconfirmation exactly. We don't want to see 0:22:44.600 --> 0:22:48.959 that which disconfirms our existing but exactly. And one of 0:22:49.000 --> 0:22:51.840 the early studies that was done on that was by 0:22:52.040 --> 0:22:55.440 Jerry Brunner, an old friend, and Molly Potter, and they 0:22:55.480 --> 0:22:59.800 showed out of focused photographs of odd things like if 0:22:59.800 --> 0:23:03.200 I or hydrant at an odd angle, and they gradually 0:23:03.240 --> 0:23:06.600 brought them into focus and asked people to keep guessing 0:23:06.760 --> 0:23:10.359 what they were and compare them to a group that 0:23:10.520 --> 0:23:14.280 saw them in focus. So these odd angles, like an 0:23:14.359 --> 0:23:17.280 odd angle of a fire hydrant, people came up with 0:23:17.359 --> 0:23:21.160 wild hypothesis and when it was in full focus couldn't 0:23:21.200 --> 0:23:25.000 identify it because they already anchored to that previous And 0:23:25.040 --> 0:23:28.320 then let me go to my favorite question, my favorite rule. 0:23:28.720 --> 0:23:32.840 The mind fills in misinformation. I have a pet theory 0:23:32.880 --> 0:23:35.760 that we're walking around with the model of a universe 0:23:35.800 --> 0:23:39.080 in our head that's just wildly wrong, and that we 0:23:40.240 --> 0:23:44.040 it's mostly misinformation. I'm curious what your thoughts are on 0:23:44.480 --> 0:23:48.280 the mind fills in misinformation? Is it just little patches 0:23:48.520 --> 0:23:52.760 behind our vision that's filled in, or is our world view? 0:23:52.920 --> 0:23:56.719 Is our model of the universe completely wrong? Well, I 0:23:56.760 --> 0:23:59.239 don't know that. I would say it's one of the 0:23:59.280 --> 0:24:02.840 other around there's something in between. But sure we're filling 0:24:02.880 --> 0:24:05.960 in all the time. There are some lovely experiments on 0:24:06.160 --> 0:24:10.400 our worldview now where you show a photograph and then 0:24:10.440 --> 0:24:14.040 another photograph where something has changed, like even an engine 0:24:14.160 --> 0:24:18.760 is often a jet plane, and show them in rapid succession, 0:24:18.960 --> 0:24:21.840 and people think they've seen the whole scene, but they 0:24:21.840 --> 0:24:26.080 cannot identify what's changed. And those are that you can 0:24:26.119 --> 0:24:30.280 find them online their wild So you don't know what's changed, 0:24:30.320 --> 0:24:34.040 but you know you've seen a jet plane, people going 0:24:34.119 --> 0:24:37.240 up on it, cargo being loaded the background. You get 0:24:37.280 --> 0:24:40.160 this feeling that you see a rich scene. But it's 0:24:40.200 --> 0:24:43.719 because we're refreshing it all the time, internally refreshing it. 0:24:44.040 --> 0:24:47.920 And I'm sure we're filling in the gaps. So if 0:24:47.960 --> 0:24:50.320 in a series of photos, in one of them the 0:24:50.359 --> 0:24:53.760 engine is missing from the plane but it should be there, 0:24:54.359 --> 0:24:57.399 do we visually fill that in in our own minds? 0:24:57.920 --> 0:25:00.679 I think we just don't even notice that missing. We 0:25:00.800 --> 0:25:05.120 see airplane, we're coding it on that level and adding 0:25:05.240 --> 0:25:08.719 those details. So this is an example from Scott McCloud, 0:25:08.760 --> 0:25:11.800 who wrote a brilliant book on comics, and he says, 0:25:11.960 --> 0:25:14.160 you know someone sitting at a desk. You can't see 0:25:14.200 --> 0:25:16.840 their legs because the desk is covering it up, but 0:25:16.920 --> 0:25:20.560 you know they have legs. So we're filling in in 0:25:20.560 --> 0:25:23.400 that way. We fill in on language, We fill in 0:25:23.520 --> 0:25:28.440 all the time, missing information, we're guessing, and usually it's 0:25:28.520 --> 0:25:32.719 right because we've learned those contingencies in the world. I 0:25:32.720 --> 0:25:37.040 think almost everybody has at some point experienced an argument 0:25:37.080 --> 0:25:41.439 with someone that they're close to and say misinterprets what 0:25:41.560 --> 0:25:46.359 they're saying emotionally, and that can lead to the disastrous 0:25:47.359 --> 0:25:50.720 escalation of an argument. I mean you were angry. No, 0:25:50.880 --> 0:25:54.159 I wasn't angry. I was sad, And we get to 0:25:54.280 --> 0:25:58.080 those sorts of impasses. So the most I have to 0:25:58.080 --> 0:26:01.440 share something with you because I hadn't experience with filling in. 0:26:02.000 --> 0:26:05.840 That was just astonishing and it stayed with me many 0:26:05.880 --> 0:26:10.679 many years ago. I would occasionally ride a motorcycle and 0:26:10.720 --> 0:26:14.600 when the time came to get the motorcycle license, the 0:26:14.640 --> 0:26:18.000 state requires you go through this training program, most of 0:26:18.040 --> 0:26:21.359 which if you're an experienced writer you don't need, but 0:26:21.600 --> 0:26:24.040 they fill it in with a lot of safety things. 0:26:24.640 --> 0:26:28.040 And the one thing that stayed with me probably why 0:26:28.080 --> 0:26:32.520 I don't ride motorcycles anymore, um, is they wanted to 0:26:32.680 --> 0:26:36.680 explain to you how limited your field division is. And 0:26:36.760 --> 0:26:39.639 when you're looking straight ahead, you have about a three 0:26:39.680 --> 0:26:43.400 percent range of vision and everything around you is more 0:26:43.480 --> 0:26:47.080 or less a reasonable guests your brain constructing a model. 0:26:47.440 --> 0:26:49.760 But that means if something enters that field and you 0:26:49.760 --> 0:26:53.320 know you're not aware of it, it's a danger. And 0:26:53.359 --> 0:26:56.360 the way they showed this to you was they put 0:26:56.440 --> 0:27:00.800 us in a room, regular square, rectangular room, and you 0:27:00.920 --> 0:27:05.439 stand on one wall, and then a person um stands 0:27:05.480 --> 0:27:09.720 directly opposite you, about twenty ft away, and then in 0:27:09.800 --> 0:27:13.080 your peripheral vision on your same wall in the corners, 0:27:13.119 --> 0:27:17.280 someone holds a reasonable size playing card and they walk 0:27:17.359 --> 0:27:20.520 along the wall towards the person opposite you, and you 0:27:20.600 --> 0:27:23.800 have to say, you have to guess when you can 0:27:23.880 --> 0:27:27.080