Speaker 1: This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Radio this week on the podcast Really, I have a
Speaker 1: super extra special guest. Everybody makes fun of me for
Speaker 1: saying that each week, but I have an extra special guest.
Speaker 1: I was fortunate enough to go to a dinner one
Speaker 1: night that Annie Duke was hosting, and each person at
Speaker 1: the table was more fascinating and accomplished than the next,
Speaker 1: from Mike Mobison, a Josh Wolf to Danny Kahneman. And
Speaker 1: at the end of the evening, one of the women
Speaker 1: at the table pulls me aside to discuss my interview
Speaker 1: with Michael Lewis, and that turned out to be Barbara Tversky,
Speaker 1: a experimental psychologist, publisher of hundreds of research papers, oh
Speaker 1: and also the spouse of a Moost Tversky. And she
Speaker 1: told me how much she enjoyed my conversation with Mike Lewis,
Speaker 1: and we started chatting, and it took me, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe four seconds to say, oh my god, this woman
Speaker 1: is fascinating and I have to sit down and have
Speaker 1: a conversation with her. But she's back and forth between
Speaker 1: Stanford and Colombian, and it took us a while to
Speaker 1: hone in on a time, and I'm really glad we did.
Speaker 1: She wrote this fascinating book on how the brain works,
Speaker 1: how we perceive things, whether it's language or spatial perception,
Speaker 1: and why action shapes thoughts and how motion impacts cognitive processes.
Speaker 1: It's not drying clinical, It's really a very fascinating abstract conversation.
Speaker 1: And we just babbled. At least I babbled for two hours.
Speaker 1: It really was an intriguing conversation. If you're at all
Speaker 1: interested in cognitive psychology, how the brain works, the way
Speaker 1: language affects thought and vice versa, the way thought affects language,
Speaker 1: as well as her nine laws of Cognition, you're going
Speaker 1: to find this to be absolutely fascinating. So, with no
Speaker 1: further ado, my conversation with Barbara Taversky. This is Masters
Speaker 1: in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My extra
Speaker 1: special guest this week is Barbara Tversky. She is a
Speaker 1: professor of psychology at Stanford University. She also is a
Speaker 1: psychology and education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University.
Speaker 1: She has published more than two hundred articles on cognition, psychology, memory,
Speaker 1: all sorts of fascinating topics. Her new book is called
Speaker 1: Mind in Motion, How Action Shapes Thought. Barbara Taverski, Welcome
Speaker 1: to Bloomberg. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about cognition and psychology. How
Speaker 1: did you find your way to that field. I'm a
Speaker 1: bit of a contrarian, and when I entered the field,
Speaker 1: the cognition revolution was well in progress, so you could
Speaker 1: open up the mind if you were clever, and find
Speaker 1: ways of revealing how people thought. But I thought at
Speaker 1: that time was heavily dominated by language, by propositional thinking
Speaker 1: that came from philosophy and linguistics, and people thought at
Speaker 1: that time. The way we thought about the spatial world,
Speaker 1: the visual world, was by putting it into propositional format.
Speaker 1: Explain what that means is So proposition is in philosophy
Speaker 1: is a minimal statement, like the cup is round or
Speaker 1: the desk is flat. Their minimal statements where you attribute
Speaker 1: something to something else. And it felt to me like
Speaker 1: you could never begin to describe faces that way. We're
Speaker 1: very bad at describing faces. Emotions are difficult to describe,
Speaker 1: fairly easy to detect. Spaces that were in our heart
Speaker 1: to describe, So thinking about reducing that to propositions, to
Speaker 1: these simple, minimal statements didn't make sense to me. It
Speaker 1: made sense to me that the spatial world and the
Speaker 1: visual world had its own logic, and that logic came
Speaker 1: first evolutionarily, because you know, babies don't talk. It takes
Speaker 1: them a while to talk, and even when they talk,
Speaker 1: everything sounds like bah buss banana bottle and they aren't
Speaker 1: saying very deep things for a long time. So they
Speaker 1: do very intelligent things. Animals do very intelligent things without speech.
Speaker 1: So it felt to me that, if anything, the spatial
Speaker 1: visual world preceded evolutionarily and in development and had a
Speaker 1: richness of its own and that needed to be explored
Speaker 1: independent of language. So let's talk about language for secon
Speaker 1: and because it's funny, I first wrote this question how
Speaker 1: did people think before language? And then I kind of said, well,
Speaker 1: now that's the wrong way to think about it, based
Speaker 1: on some of the things you wrote in the book.
Speaker 1: The better way to ask that question is how has
Speaker 1: language changed the way we think? That's a great question
Speaker 1: and that's one that people grapple with, and you know,
Speaker 1: people want simple answers. It is probably complicated. Let me
Speaker 1: start first with how we speak, and a lot of
Speaker 1: the way we speak about thinking is as if they
Speaker 1: were actions on objects. And I think that that kind
Speaker 1: of thinking of acting on objects got internalized to think
Speaker 1: about thoughts as objects. So we raise ideas, we pushed
Speaker 1: them forward, we tear them apart. All of those are
Speaker 1: the ways we talk about thinking, and there is if
Speaker 1: we were having actual objects and doing it. So I
Speaker 1: don't think that's metaphor. I think we have no other
Speaker 1: way of talking about thinking except as if there were actions.
Speaker 1: So those are things we do with our hands, with
Speaker 1: our fate. We go from place to place, and our
Speaker 1: thoughts go from idea to idea along conceptual paths, the
Speaker 1: way our feet go from place to place along spatial paths.
Speaker 1: And it now turns out that the same brain structures
Speaker 1: in humans are coding both of them. They're both coding
Speaker 1: our paths in actual space and our paths in conceptual space.
Speaker 1: Explain that a little bit. When you say that we're
Speaker 1: coded in in conceptual space when we go from thought
Speaker 1: to thought, are you suggesting our thought processes are somewhat predestined?
Speaker 1: We all have the same approach to solving the same
Speaker 1: problems more or less, at least structurally. What do you
Speaker 1: mean by that? It's again a great question. It's really associations,
Speaker 1: just the way you'll walk from A to B in
Speaker 1: a different way than I might walk from A to
Speaker 1: B for different reasons, but it's still a to be right.
Speaker 1: And some of the problem with thinking is we don't
Speaker 1: know where be is right. We start off with a
Speaker 1: and we're trying to solve a problem maybe or we're
Speaker 1: just letting our minds wander. No. I think, if anything,
Speaker 1: we're gonna If you look at human beings were incredibly
Speaker 1: diverse and thinking in different ways, and our associations are
Speaker 1: built from experience, from many different experiences, So thoughts go
Speaker 1: from association to association, and those associations are going to
Speaker 1: be wildly different. So I'll give you a small example.
Speaker 1: When my husband and I used to walk in streets
Speaker 1: in cities that yours being a most of our right.
Speaker 1: This is years ago, because unfortunately he's hasn't been with
Speaker 1: us for all too long. But we would walk in Paris,
Speaker 1: in New York, places where we were tourists at the time,
Speaker 1: and when we'd come back, um, he would say, did
Speaker 1: you see all those prostitutes. I didn't pick up a
Speaker 1: single one, And you know, I was looking at other things,
Speaker 1: the architecture, maybe what people were wearing. Um I didn't.
Speaker 1: I wasn't seeing that. But you also noticed, and I
Speaker 1: picked this up from the book, the way the structure
Speaker 1: of the cities were lying. You talk about how Japan
Speaker 1: has there very it's very confusing to foreigners, but they
Speaker 1: break cities into quadrants, and those quadrants are pretty consistent
Speaker 1: from Japanese city to Japanese city. It becomes very helpful
Speaker 1: if you know the code, but anybody who doesn't, it's
Speaker 1: just a perplexing mess. Yeah. And and that again is
Speaker 1: illustrating different ways of thinking and different ways of designing.
Speaker 1: But both are designed. And I think one of the
Speaker 1: points are trying to make in the book is that
Speaker 1: we design the world the way we design our minds.
Speaker 1: So both Japan and the US New York with its
Speaker 1: grid system and many other cities with grid systems, even
Speaker 1: the Romans had grid systems, and some Chinese have grid systems.
Speaker 1: In fact, Japan has grid systems, they just labeled them
Speaker 1: differently from the way we do. But that those designs
Speaker 1: are go across cultures with with variations, but they have
Speaker 1: to do with the way we design our minds. Um. So,
Speaker 1: so let me ask you this question, since since we're
Speaker 1: talking about visual cognition, how does our sense of spatial
Speaker 1: understanding and visual cognition affect the way we think? It's so?
Speaker 1: One way is is I think? Okay? How to how
Speaker 1: to answer that? One way are things that I've already
Speaker 1: said that we think about actions on ideas, the way
Speaker 1: we think about actions and objects, and we go from
Speaker 1: place to place, the way we go from idea to idea.
Speaker 1: UM that probably affects the structure of language. That's my hunch,
Speaker 1: and I didn't work that out very well. You asked
Speaker 1: earlier how does language bootstrap our thinking? And I think
Speaker 1: language isn't one of many cognitive tools that we use.
Speaker 1: We can then use language to reason about other things,
Speaker 1: the way we can use math to reason about other things,
Speaker 1: or or logic or computer programming. We have a number
Speaker 1: of these cognitive tools that we have built through culture.
Speaker 1: Their cultural evolved. We don't we're not born with them,
Speaker 1: and they enable leaps of thought. We now have computers
Speaker 1: that do help us think and help us design, and
Speaker 1: so we we've developed a number of these cognitive tools
Speaker 1: that help us structure our thinking and will leapfrog are thinking.
Speaker 1: We can use them to think farther. So I don't
Speaker 1: need to compute square roots anymore. I have them amount calculator.
Speaker 1: I can use that to leap frog and go to
Speaker 1: other um levels of understanding. So so last question on
Speaker 1: this topic, what is cognitive collage? I love that phrase. Okay,
Speaker 1: thank you. So we did some work on how people
Speaker 1: understand the environments that they walk through every day, and
Speaker 1: there are a number of distortions that people have that
Speaker 1: indicate that people are constructing their images of environments. So
Speaker 1: the grid pattern, we tend to line things up in
Speaker 1: in in parallel and perpendicular lines and ignore um ignore diagonals,
Speaker 1: and ignore five sided things like the Boston Commons. People
Speaker 1: often act as if it were four sided kind of quadrilateral,
Speaker 1: not a pentagon, and it's not really a pentagon, so
Speaker 1: we we distort. So some of the distortions are really
Speaker 1: quite remarkable. The most remarkable is probably that people think
Speaker 1: that distances to a landmark are smaller than distances from
Speaker 1: a landmark. Explain that because that sounds so obviously incorrect. Exactly,
Speaker 1: So a number of studies have been done where people
Speaker 1: on college campuses pick landmarks. They have the students picked
Speaker 1: the landmarks, and then another group of students is asked
Speaker 1: about distances and you get those a symmetric distances. So
Speaker 1: the example I use is that people think that Jacques's
Speaker 1: house is closer to the Eiffel Tower than Eiffel Tower
Speaker 1: to Jacques's house. And one explanation for that might be
Speaker 1: that the Eiffel Tower defines a neighborhood. Columbus Circle is
Speaker 1: a neighborhood, the village is a neighborhood. We tend to
Speaker 1: form neighborhoods around these landmarks, and we say, if someone
Speaker 1: says where do you live, you can say I live
Speaker 1: near Columbus Circle and that tells people the environment. And
Speaker 1: so the neighborhood is quite expanded. It includes Jacques's house,
Speaker 1: but Jacques's House only includes itself, so you get that asymmetry.
Speaker 1: And these are these are This is research I didn't do.
Speaker 1: I pointed to it, but it's very related to research
Speaker 1: that my husband had done earlier, showing that people this
Speaker 1: is going way back in history. People think that North
Speaker 1: Korea is more like communist China than communist China like
Speaker 1: North Korea, or the son is more like the father
Speaker 1: than the father like this son. So we have these
Speaker 1: landmarks or prototypes and they draw similar things into them.
Speaker 1: Eleanor Rosh had earlier done work showing that people think
Speaker 1: magenta is more like red than red like magenta, so
Speaker 1: I could see that. Yeah, they are defining categories really,
Speaker 1: and these peripheral instances don't. So those are spatial ideas.
Speaker 1: The distance, whether it's distance and color, or distance in
Speaker 1: political leanings, or distances in some kind of psychological or
Speaker 1: physical similarity, the son to the father, those are all
Speaker 1: spatial concepts. But and and we can show them in
Speaker 1: space two. But they are affecting our thinking. We're spatializing
Speaker 1: those concepts of North Korea, red and magenta and communist
Speaker 1: China and and thinking about other things in relation to them,
Speaker 1: but in relation to spatial distance. So everywhere I look,
Speaker 1: I can find spatial distortions that are reflected in conceptual ones.
Speaker 1: In group out group would be one. We tend to
Speaker 1: think that that if we're in one political leaning, that
Speaker 1: everybody in another political they're all alike. My group is
Speaker 1: highly differentiated, but it's because it's close to me. And
Speaker 1: I can see the differences. I don't see the differences
Speaker 1: in those others, so we tend to think of them
Speaker 1: is all alike, but our group is differentiate. That's quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite parts about the book was the
Speaker 1: nine law of cognition. And I have to ask you,
Speaker 1: how did you develop nine rules? And how long have
Speaker 1: you been working on these? You know? I started writing
Speaker 1: the book and I realized that certain of the things
Speaker 1: that I was saying, again, many of them about space,
Speaker 1: had generality to thinking in general or behavior in general,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to point to those and encapsulate them
Speaker 1: in a way. Then it became laws. And I have
Speaker 1: a good friend who comes from medical science, very hard
Speaker 1: noised researcher. After the book was written, and I couldn't
Speaker 1: change anything. Sounds confused by that because she was thinking
Speaker 1: of physics laws, which are laws, and and you can
Speaker 1: compute them and get answers that will in fact hold.
Speaker 1: So these are not like that. They're generalizations, and I
Speaker 1: think that fits with the way social sciences see laws
Speaker 1: kind of generalizations. Okay, let's go over some of these generalizations.
Speaker 1: Will start with rule number one. There are no benefits
Speaker 1: without costs, meaning creativity versus learning. How do they set
Speaker 1: each other? Interesting? And I mean it's a nice example.
Speaker 1: So I think again, the mind is quite simple. We
Speaker 1: want simple, straight answers. Things are always this, and things
Speaker 1: are always that. And we categorize because the number of
Speaker 1: things in the world is huge. If we had to
Speaker 1: think about each chair individually, each cup individually, it would
Speaker 1: be overwhelming. So we categorize things as chairs and tables
Speaker 1: and dogs and cats, and that enables us to know
Speaker 1: how to recognize them and how to behave towards them.
Speaker 1: Now we can miscategorize, and that happens often tragically and
Speaker 1: certain situations, but we forget that we need those categories
Speaker 1: on some level because we have to behave very quickly
Speaker 1: and we have to respond very quickly. Is someone throwing
Speaker 1: something at me to hurt me, as someone throwing something
Speaker 1: at me so I can catch it, and our behavior
Speaker 1: is going to be very different. So when you say
Speaker 1: cost versus benefits, sometimes the trade off is speed versus
Speaker 1: accuracy or making a defensive decision because it's a matter
Speaker 1: of existential survival versus Hey, I may not be accurate here,
Speaker 1: but better safe and sorry? Is that what you mean?
Speaker 1: By the forces of these decisions. Well, I mean it's
Speaker 1: a cost benefit. I think economists understands that everything is
Speaker 1: a trade off. I'm not sure that psychologists understand that
Speaker 1: that well, So then they'll say people miscategorize. Somebody had
Speaker 1: a toy gun, not a real gun. That this is
Speaker 1: we shouldn't be categorizing at all. And I want to
Speaker 1: say we have to we do it's it seems to
Speaker 1: be the way we think, occasionally with tragic consequence, exactly
Speaker 1: right and missteps. So on creativity and learning. We have
Speaker 1: to learn routines to get through the day, and otherwise
Speaker 1: if everything is a new problem, it's going to take
Speaker 1: too long. How do we get a key in a door?
Speaker 1: And how do we make toasts in the morning. So
Speaker 1: we have to get into those routines. But once we
Speaker 1: have those routines, it's hard to change them. So creativity
Speaker 1: requires thinking in new ways, meaning outside of the routines exactly,
Speaker 1: and thinking of a new way to build a teacup
Speaker 1: or a new way to design a chair. These are
Speaker 1: what designers have. A new way to design a school,
Speaker 1: maybe the old way of designing schools isn't as good
Speaker 1: as it could be. Libraries have changed enormously now that
Speaker 1: in a little while there'll be no paperbooks. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm happy so further hanging. They are hanging out, and
Speaker 1: I'm glad to see because I'm a fan. So in
Speaker 1: order to design, we have to get rid of those
Speaker 1: old ways and thinking new. And we just finished an
Speaker 1: experiment asking people to think of new ways to use
Speaker 1: old things, and the good answers come about the ninth answer,
Speaker 1: meaning it takes that long before they overcome their natural
Speaker 1: tendency towards routine. Exactly, quite quite interesting. What's I think
Speaker 1: interesting also is the way we got people to generate
Speaker 1: new ideas for these old things. How do you use
Speaker 1: an umbrella? And creative ways? Well, it can be sticks
Speaker 1: to hold kebab, but that was the ninth idea, right,
Speaker 1: and it's clever and cute. But the way we got
Speaker 1: people to think creatively was to ask them to think
Speaker 1: about different roles of people. So how would a doctor
Speaker 1: use this? How would a gardener use it? So we
Speaker 1: ask people to put themselves in mindsets of other professions.
Speaker 1: And professions are something we know a lot about. We've
Speaker 1: since we were three. People ask us, what do you
Speaker 1: want to be when you grow up and we interact
Speaker 1: with people with different roles, so we know a lot
Speaker 1: about what those roles do, and that help people generate
Speaker 1: new uses. So there's a television show that focuses on
Speaker 1: improv called Whose Line Is It? Anyway? And as you
Speaker 1: were speaking, I can only think of the segment they
Speaker 1: do with props where they give each group a different
Speaker 1: set of props, and it's amazingly creative, and it seems
Speaker 1: some people really have a skill set for applying these
Speaker 1: in unexpected ways. Yeah, and improv is exactly the right
Speaker 1: example for that, for that kind of creativity. I have
Speaker 1: a former grand with student who talks about art making.
Speaker 1: She's an artist. An excellent one is improvisational and you
Speaker 1: have to keep your mind open to new ideas. And
Speaker 1: I think you're right, you couldn't develop really good skills
Speaker 1: for doing it. Let's let's go to another rule number three.
Speaker 1: The mind can override perception, really cognitive dissonance, And is
Speaker 1: the way I was looking at that. If you're perceiving
Speaker 1: something and you're not going to believe it, how is
Speaker 1: it that we ignore what's in front of our very
Speaker 1: eyes if we're not happy with what we're seeing? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's not happy, it doesn't fit
Speaker 1: our hypotheses. So that's really more confirmation biased than anything,
Speaker 1: or exactly or disconfirmation exactly. We don't want to see
Speaker 1: that which disconfirms our existing but exactly. And one of
Speaker 1: the early studies that was done on that was by
Speaker 1: Jerry Brunner, an old friend, and Molly Potter, and they
Speaker 1: showed out of focused photographs of odd things like if
Speaker 1: I or hydrant at an odd angle, and they gradually
Speaker 1: brought them into focus and asked people to keep guessing
Speaker 1: what they were and compare them to a group that
Speaker 1: saw them in focus. So these odd angles, like an
Speaker 1: odd angle of a fire hydrant, people came up with
Speaker 1: wild hypothesis and when it was in full focus couldn't
Speaker 1: identify it because they already anchored to that previous And
Speaker 1: then let me go to my favorite question, my favorite rule.
Speaker 1: The mind fills in misinformation. I have a pet theory
Speaker 1: that we're walking around with the model of a universe
Speaker 1: in our head that's just wildly wrong, and that we
Speaker 1: it's mostly misinformation. I'm curious what your thoughts are on
Speaker 1: the mind fills in misinformation? Is it just little patches
Speaker 1: behind our vision that's filled in, or is our world view?
Speaker 1: Is our model of the universe completely wrong? Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know that. I would say it's one of the
Speaker 1: other around there's something in between. But sure we're filling
Speaker 1: in all the time. There are some lovely experiments on
Speaker 1: our worldview now where you show a photograph and then
Speaker 1: another photograph where something has changed, like even an engine
Speaker 1: is often a jet plane, and show them in rapid succession,
Speaker 1: and people think they've seen the whole scene, but they
Speaker 1: cannot identify what's changed. And those are that you can
Speaker 1: find them online their wild So you don't know what's changed,
Speaker 1: but you know you've seen a jet plane, people going
Speaker 1: up on it, cargo being loaded the background. You get
Speaker 1: this feeling that you see a rich scene. But it's
Speaker 1: because we're refreshing it all the time, internally refreshing it.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure we're filling in the gaps. So if
Speaker 1: in a series of photos, in one of them the
Speaker 1: engine is missing from the plane but it should be there,
Speaker 1: do we visually fill that in in our own minds?
Speaker 1: I think we just don't even notice that missing. We
Speaker 1: see airplane, we're coding it on that level and adding
Speaker 1: those details. So this is an example from Scott McCloud,
Speaker 1: who wrote a brilliant book on comics, and he says,
Speaker 1: you know someone sitting at a desk. You can't see
Speaker 1: their legs because the desk is covering it up, but
Speaker 1: you know they have legs. So we're filling in in
Speaker 1: that way. We fill in on language, We fill in
Speaker 1: all the time, missing information, we're guessing, and usually it's
Speaker 1: right because we've learned those contingencies in the world. I
Speaker 1: think almost everybody has at some point experienced an argument
Speaker 1: with someone that they're close to and say misinterprets what
Speaker 1: they're saying emotionally, and that can lead to the disastrous
Speaker 1: escalation of an argument. I mean you were angry. No,
Speaker 1: I wasn't angry. I was sad, And we get to
Speaker 1: those sorts of impasses. So the most I have to
Speaker 1: share something with you because I hadn't experience with filling in.
Speaker 1: That was just astonishing and it stayed with me many
Speaker 1: many years ago. I would occasionally ride a motorcycle and
Speaker 1: when the time came to get the motorcycle license, the
Speaker 1: state requires you go through this training program, most of
Speaker 1: which if you're an experienced writer you don't need, but
Speaker 1: they fill it in with a lot of safety things.
Speaker 1: And the one thing that stayed with me probably why
Speaker 1: I don't ride motorcycles anymore, um, is they wanted to
Speaker 1: explain to you how limited your field division is. And
Speaker 1: when you're looking straight ahead, you have about a three
Speaker 1: percent range of vision and everything around you is more
Speaker 1: or less a reasonable guests your brain constructing a model.
Speaker 1: But that means if something enters that field and you
Speaker 1: know you're not aware of it, it's a danger. And
Speaker 1: the way they showed this to you was they put
Speaker 1: us in a room, regular square, rectangular room, and you
Speaker 1: stand on one wall, and then a person um stands
Speaker 1: directly opposite you, about twenty ft away, and then in
Speaker 1: your peripheral vision on your same wall in the corners,
Speaker 1: someone holds a reasonable size playing card and they walk
Speaker 1: along the wall towards the person opposite you, and you
Speaker 1: have to say, you have to guess when you can
Speaker 1: identify the card is either red or black, and then
Speaker 1: when you can identify the actual suit and number of
Speaker 1: the card. And it's not like a regular four inch
Speaker 1: deck of plane cards. They're like ten big magician cards,
Speaker 1: like eight inch day or ten inch, and I was
Speaker 1: I assumed that I would be able to identify it
Speaker 1: pretty rapidly, maybe thirty degrees from forty five degrees, and
Speaker 1: I was shocked to learn that it's almost dead on
Speaker 1: maybe that instead of straight across from you, maybe it's
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty degrees before you can identify just
Speaker 1: the color. You couldn't even say is this a club
Speaker 1: or spade? You could say it's the card is black,
Speaker 1: and then a little closer before you can identify. And
Speaker 1: they're practically dead opposite you when you're staring straight ahead
Speaker 1: before you could identify the card. It was shocking at
Speaker 1: how little acutey you have outside of straight ahead of you.
Speaker 1: Your peripheral vision is. You can see images, you could
Speaker 1: see rough shapes, but there's no specificity at all. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful demonstration and we should all have it. Shocking,
Speaker 1: just absolutely shocking. So we discussed cognitive collage earlier, and
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by that concept. The way we put together
Speaker 1: our models of the world, how much of that is
Speaker 1: based on what we visually perceive in reality, and how
Speaker 1: much of it is based on what we're creating to
Speaker 1: fill in the holes, it's gonna vary. And what I
Speaker 1: liked about the College metaphor is its multi media. If
Speaker 1: you go back and look at Picasso and Bronch, they
Speaker 1: put newspaper clippings in and paintings in and all kinds
Speaker 1: of things in it. And again, people think, or many
Speaker 1: researchers thought, that our views of our environment are more
Speaker 1: or less vertical. And I think our research and the
Speaker 1: research of many other people show it's filled with small
Speaker 1: biases that aren't coherent. You try to put them together,
Speaker 1: different perspectives on the world, different landmarks. So you try
Speaker 1: to put them together, you don't get anything that would
Speaker 1: work on a Euclidean space. And in addition to its multimodels,
Speaker 1: So if I'm wandering around New York or another city,
Speaker 1: there are some things I know from language that I
Speaker 1: need to go four blocks this way. In turn, some
Speaker 1: things I know from recognizing the world, some from my
Speaker 1: recollections of maps that I've seen. So I'm gathering information
Speaker 1: from many different places to decide is the entrance to
Speaker 1: the Bloomer building going to be on Lexington or going
Speaker 1: to be on fifty nine, and how do I find it?
Speaker 1: And so I'm making those decisions. That way balancing that
Speaker 1: information gathering from many sources. It's not a coherent system,
Speaker 1: and I do think that's a model for all kinds
Speaker 1: of judgment. And the context is going to determine what
Speaker 1: information is salient and what information isn't what I'm bringing
Speaker 1: up now, what I'm bringing up in other cases. So
Speaker 1: I do feel that this cognitive collage idea is really
Speaker 1: a model for the way we make judgments in many situations.
Speaker 1: If you think about what's in the brain, there aren't
Speaker 1: calculations in the brain, there aren't maps in the brain,
Speaker 1: there aren't photographs of people, and it's all neurons. And
Speaker 1: we use these terms like language and spatial representations and
Speaker 1: images of faces and so forth as a way of talking.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there are places in the brain that
Speaker 1: are dedicated to recognizing faces or scenes and even rudimentary
Speaker 1: concepts of number. There are places that are activated. But
Speaker 1: in the end it's norns and these are ways of talking.
Speaker 1: And again, the idea that we gather information from all
Speaker 1: over the cortex to make a judgment whatever seems relevant
Speaker 1: seems to me a model not just for space, but
Speaker 1: for all judgment. So you reference the comparison of people
Speaker 1: using either verbal or visual thinking. But maybe this is
Speaker 1: the American schooling system. I tend to think about the
Speaker 1: way different people approach the world and either verbal or
Speaker 1: mathematical thinking, or at least maybe that's what we do
Speaker 1: with kids coming out of school. He's a numbers person
Speaker 1: or she's a language person. How did you come up
Speaker 1: with the economy between verbal and visual and are there
Speaker 1: any parallels for academia where there's a tendency for the
Speaker 1: math and science people to go this way and the
Speaker 1: literature and language people to go that way? Right? So
Speaker 1: people think of themselves as visual thinkers or as verbal
Speaker 1: thinkers or computational thinkers, or I think can aesthetically and
Speaker 1: meaning in terms of right dancers or right might be think.
Speaker 1: So those are again ways of talking. They don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence behind them. Even spatial thinking turns
Speaker 1: out or visual it turns out to be quite complicated.
Speaker 1: It's many different features verbal too. We know people that
Speaker 1: are can produce words but can think straight, and vice
Speaker 1: versa who are hard to come up with words but
Speaker 1: think very logically. So verbal abilities are quite different and
Speaker 1: spatial abilities are quite different. The bad news is you
Speaker 1: can be good at both and bad at votes. It's
Speaker 1: not that one compensates for another to some extent, they
Speaker 1: clearly compensate. So I recently had the wonderful opportunity of
Speaker 1: because of a talk I needed to give, of delving
Speaker 1: into Leonardo, who's by all accounts, one of the most
Speaker 1: brilliant thinkers of all times. He thought visually spacially, and
Speaker 1: he thought through sketching, and he used sketches as a
Speaker 1: way of understanding dynamic processes that not just static ones,
Speaker 1: because sketches are static. And in fact, he used the
Speaker 1: way he drew as a way of understanding the way
Speaker 1: vortices are happening water, so the way he drew them,
Speaker 1: and he used many different perspectives. So he was very
Speaker 1: much a kind of visual thinker. But he was able
Speaker 1: to get to enormous abstractions through the visual spatial thinking,
Speaker 1: and there wasn't much maths then. Quite interesting. One of
Speaker 1: the things you talked about in the book is our
Speaker 1: hands expressing our thinking. New Yorker's notorious with their hands, big,
Speaker 1: big hand. But what is the significance of gestures to cognition?
Speaker 1: How important is it you could typically understand what someone
Speaker 1: is saying on the radio regardless of what their hands
Speaker 1: are doing. That said, it's helpful to try and express
Speaker 1: certain ideas with your hands as as you speak. Why
Speaker 1: why is that? Yeah, I know it's lovely and I
Speaker 1: think what you're saying that we can get information just
Speaker 1: through hearing, we can get it just through readings. So
Speaker 1: human beings are enormously um adept at learning from different
Speaker 1: media and where I don't get filled in, but you
Speaker 1: couldn't if it face to face. Conversation does involve gesture,
Speaker 1: and we did a number of experiments showing that the
Speaker 1: way people gesture when they're explaining something changes the thought
Speaker 1: of other people. Really yeah, so so depending on what
Speaker 1: you're doing with your hands, you're very much. It's not
Speaker 1: necessarily for the speaker, it's for the listener both so
Speaker 1: for the speaker. So think of cyclical thinking, going from
Speaker 1: a seed to a flower back to a seed. If
Speaker 1: we ask people just to represent that, they tend to
Speaker 1: represent lines, not cycles. But if we gesture in a circle,
Speaker 1: they'll put down circles when we asked them to put
Speaker 1: something on paper. We have some other examples of that,
Speaker 1: but I think the most striking wounds are gestures for yourself.
Speaker 1: So we put people in a room there alone, not
Speaker 1: talking to anybody. They're reading a complicated description of space
Speaker 1: low catering, say eight landmarks in a larger space. It's
Speaker 1: new to them and they're going to be tested, so
Speaker 1: they have to learn it. And if you watch them studying,
Speaker 1: they're looking at the screen and their hands are making
Speaker 1: a map. They're drawing lines for the paths and points
Speaker 1: with emphasis on the table for landmarks. And when they
Speaker 1: do that, they're more likely to be correct on the exam.
Speaker 1: And if we tell them to sit on their hands
Speaker 1: when they're reading, they do worse. Really, so the process
Speaker 1: of emoting or or maybe that's the wrong word, of
Speaker 1: of cognitively expressing what they're learning through their hands helps
Speaker 1: them learn and helps them retain that. So, if you
Speaker 1: think about the language is arbitrary and it's very hard
Speaker 1: to understand a spatial description, what I can do with
Speaker 1: my hands is modeled the environment. And that's what I do.
Speaker 1: I turn the words into a model with my hands
Speaker 1: that my hands are representing the information in the description.
Speaker 1: And when you say words are arbitrary, you specifically make
Speaker 1: a point in the book that most words are completely arbitrary,
Speaker 1: with a handful of an amount of poetic exceptions. And
Speaker 1: that's true from you know, a cup, there's a different
Speaker 1: word for it in every language, and none of which
Speaker 1: sound like the word cup or or what what this
Speaker 1: physical object? If it makes a sound, what it would be? Right?
Speaker 1: And so we find with environments. We also find it.
Speaker 1: Teaching people how a car break works, they model it
Speaker 1: with their hands. So what's again an extra interesting about
Speaker 1: that is the hands are representing the information. Language also
Speaker 1: represents the information, and a sketch will represent the information.
Speaker 1: So with many different ways of representation, So one is abstract,
Speaker 1: one is physical, and one is a hatch to us
Speaker 1: actually part of our body. Right. And what I try
Speaker 1: to argue is that this kind of spatial thinking is
Speaker 1: more direct. I'm I'm expressing it through a diagram or
Speaker 1: expressing it through my hands. It's a direct representation of
Speaker 1: the knowledge. So even if I'm explaining, if I'm talking
Speaker 1: to about a situation where people are arguing or whatever,
Speaker 1: I use on the one hand, on the other I've
Speaker 1: created a diagram. I've put all the things that go
Speaker 1: with on this hand on one space, and the things
Speaker 1: that go with it on another in another space. If
Speaker 1: I talk about people rising in a corporate world, I'm
Speaker 1: going to use my hand to go up. So I'm
Speaker 1: illustrating all those ways of thinking with my hands, and
Speaker 1: it helps you understand and it helps me express. Quite interesting.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about the project that Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis did. Theo he wrote called the Undoing Project, and
Speaker 1: he very specifically said, without you, there would be no
Speaker 1: book Undoing Projects. First question, and the book is about
Speaker 1: Danny Kaneman and his partner Amos Tversky, who was your husband.
Speaker 1: They worked for many years together in Israel and then
Speaker 1: came here to the United States. I get the sense
Speaker 1: from the book that in the beginning you were a
Speaker 1: little reluctant to participate. Is that a misinterpretation or were
Speaker 1: you ready to jump in with both feet right from
Speaker 1: the beginning. No, I wasn't reluctant. Danny Kaneman and Michael
Speaker 1: had struck up a friendship. They lived pretty close to
Speaker 1: each other in at the time. Danny no longer has
Speaker 1: a home there. And the way Michael tells the story
Speaker 1: of how they met, Michael did go to business school,
Speaker 1: but he went too early to have learned Koneman and Firsty,
Speaker 1: and he came to it quite late, and they came
Speaker 1: would indirectly. He'd written money Ball, an amazing book, and
Speaker 1: Dick Taylor and I think as Sunstein wrote a review
Speaker 1: in the Republic and they said the book is great
Speaker 1: and all that, but Michael needs to know about Kanamen
Speaker 1: and first Key to understand why coaches scouts were missled
Speaker 1: and Billy Dean. So Michael at that time and now
Speaker 1: is living in Berkeley. One of his closest friends is
Speaker 1: Dr Keltner, who was a graduate student in social psychology
Speaker 1: at Stanford and tight actually for my husband. As Michael
Speaker 1: tells the story over beer, Michael asked Dr about this
Speaker 1: work and doctor says, sure, Danny lives up the hill,
Speaker 1: I'll introduce you. So Danny was willing, in his generous
Speaker 1: way to talk about the work explain it to Michael,
Speaker 1: because Michael realized he needed to know about it if
Speaker 1: he were interested in statistics, he need it to know
Speaker 1: about how people misuse them. So I think Danny said,
Speaker 1: if you walk with me, we'll talk. Because Danny walked,
Speaker 1: and they gradually I think struck up a friendship. And
Speaker 1: I think Michael tells it that he got the idea
Speaker 1: of writing a book about their friendship, about Danny and
Speaker 1: amesis friendship. And Danny came to me and he said,
Speaker 1: Michael wants to write a book and if he doesn't
Speaker 1: do it, somebody else will. And Michael likes us, and
Speaker 1: he named another person who was waiting in line and
Speaker 1: said that person doesn't like us. So I said, Danny, whatever,
Speaker 1: I trust you completely. Whatever you think, I'll go along with.
Speaker 1: So the side part on that story is, I think
Speaker 1: for a year or two Michael taught a course in
Speaker 1: finance journalism at the Berkeley School of Journalism. One point
Speaker 1: he opened it up to be school students. Our oldest son,
Speaker 1: Oran was a student has at that point and took
Speaker 1: Michael's course and they hit it off, and he obviously
Speaker 1: figured out who Oran was. He didn't figure it out
Speaker 1: at all. Really, he didn't figure it out at all.
Speaker 1: And I don't know exactly he never put that together,
Speaker 1: didn't put it together. And I don't remember if that
Speaker 1: was before or after money well, but he didn't put
Speaker 1: it together. And the upshot was that it was Oran
Speaker 1: who introduced me to Michael, which is sweet over email,
Speaker 1: which I mean, I think Michael asked Oran Michael. He
Speaker 1: ended up talking a great deal with my three children
Speaker 1: and ended up being quite fond of them, which of
Speaker 1: course warms the mother's heart. So how did you and
Speaker 1: Michael collaborate when he was doing the research part of
Speaker 1: the book. I don't know if his collaboration. Michael sat
Speaker 1: in my office at Stanford going through Emmessis papers. He
Speaker 1: really does his search beautifully, complete concentration, and he would
Speaker 1: ask me questions and I would answer them. If something
Speaker 1: was in Hebrew, I'd try to translate it for him.
Speaker 1: He asked me questions by email, and I answered them
Speaker 1: at great length, and that was I think an easy
Speaker 1: way for us to communicate. At one point, you know,
Speaker 1: I came to Israel young bride, within the middle of
Speaker 1: graduate school with no Hebrew whatsoever. Where did you go
Speaker 1: to Israel from from the US? From the US from graduates?
Speaker 1: That it was the October sixt six day war, right,
Speaker 1: and AMOS was drafted on the twenty two of May,
Speaker 1: and the war broke out ten days later. And and
Speaker 1: by then I'd learned enough Hebrew that I could understand
Speaker 1: what the chief of staff at Corobbins said on the
Speaker 1: ten o'clock news. So that's a longer story. I can
Speaker 1: tell it. And in fact, Michael asked about that, and
Speaker 1: I told them, in great detail, turn on your novelist eyes,
Speaker 1: what's it like to be an American coming to Israel?
Speaker 1: So I wrote in the sixties. Yeah, I wrote him
Speaker 1: at great length, what's that was like? And later I
Speaker 1: found letters I think my brother sent them. I'm found
Speaker 1: letters that I've written my parents. Everything that I remember
Speaker 1: was correct, which is astounding. You write about memory, which
Speaker 1: we know is not only fallible, but every time we
Speaker 1: recall an event, we're reconstructing the event on Memories are
Speaker 1: essentially replaced by a series of bad carbon copies. So
Speaker 1: it's nice that when you when something is that vivid
Speaker 1: and you remember it accurately. Maybe it's because it was
Speaker 1: so vivid it couldn't or that I retold it. I mean,
Speaker 1: memories start getting distorted them and you use language because
Speaker 1: they don't happen in language. I mean, they might happen
Speaker 1: in part, but they get distorted from the get go,
Speaker 1: from your perception and so forth. I think I helped
Speaker 1: my colin that way answering his emails. I gave him
Speaker 1: a long list of people he might want to speak with,
Speaker 1: both in the US and people who knew Amos well,
Speaker 1: and people like can Arrow. He was a close friend
Speaker 1: and stayed a close friend of mine for many years
Speaker 1: after Amos died. Kenneth stayed a close friend. So when
Speaker 1: Kenneth was one of the early Nobel Prize winners in economics,
Speaker 1: and he quickly bought into the work, it was clear
Speaker 1: to him that the work was right from the get go,
Speaker 1: in contrast to many other economists. So I sent him
Speaker 1: to a whole set of people that I thought he
Speaker 1: might give him a picture of Amos because he knew
Speaker 1: Danny well, but he didn't know Amos. I sent him
Speaker 1: to many people at friends of ours and Israel. He
Speaker 1: went to Israel three four times and met all of them,
Speaker 1: I mean Michael's research, where he met my sister in law,
Speaker 1: my niece and talked with them. He was extraordinary in
Speaker 1: the amazing and he got Amos in many ways. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are errors in the book, but some people were
Speaker 1: disturbed by the portrait of Amos is only being interested
Speaker 1: in his work, because he really was helpful on every way,
Speaker 1: both personally to people and in the departments in which
Speaker 1: he participated in the university. He was a super good citizen,
Speaker 1: so that he was single minded about his work isn't
Speaker 1: quite right. That's hard to depict when you're going back
Speaker 1: twenty five years later. I would imagine when you didn't
Speaker 1: know the guy, and you know, all of us are
Speaker 1: complicated and we're different, with different people in different situations,
Speaker 1: and he probably caricatured Danny, and then you're capturing them
Speaker 1: at a particular point of time and we're always changing.
Speaker 1: I mean, the book's a great story and what impressed
Speaker 1: me to him? And Michael learned the work and he
Speaker 1: kept telling me, I feel like it'd be student studying
Speaker 1: a plus work, but he really learned it. And I
Speaker 1: think his portrayal of both of the history that Mail
Speaker 1: and Lou Goldberg and other people have done similar work
Speaker 1: before their work Robin Dawes people who were influences on
Speaker 1: them or in the same ecology, and getting the work right.
Speaker 1: I thought he did a masterful job of explaining the
Speaker 1: work to lay people, so he might have gotten some
Speaker 1: of the nuances about Amos wrong. Did he find anything
Speaker 1: from speaking to friends, colleagues, relatives that surprised you. Did
Speaker 1: anything show up in the book that you said, huh?
Speaker 1: I don't really know about that. No, I don't think.
Speaker 1: So it's not that Amos didn't have secrets, although a
Speaker 1: few from me, But no, I don't. I don't think
Speaker 1: there was anything there that I didn't know. So you
Speaker 1: wrote or said, I don't remember where I pulled this
Speaker 1: quote from about Danny and Amos. Their relationship was more
Speaker 1: intense than a marriage, so that had to be a
Speaker 1: difficult thing to balance with your own marriage. What was
Speaker 1: that like living through that? I'm not sure if I
Speaker 1: said more intense than a marriage, but it was certainly
Speaker 1: intense like a marriage. They really loved each other, and
Speaker 1: they formed a close friendship, and the way they worked
Speaker 1: together was gleeful and joyful until it wasn't. When you
Speaker 1: say gleeful and joyful. There are stories parts of the
Speaker 1: Undoing Project where the two of them are locked in
Speaker 1: a classroom by themselves and all people in the hallway
Speaker 1: here is just peals of laughter for hours. They're back
Speaker 1: and forth debating stuff and just laughing their butts off.
Speaker 1: Was it work or was it fun? I had the
Speaker 1: advantage of understanding Hebrew and English, and the conversations would
Speaker 1: go back and forth and be mixed between English and Hebrew. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, they'd come out for tea or a
Speaker 1: lot of the conversations were in my house. They'd come
Speaker 1: out for tea, or they'd come out to tell me
Speaker 1: something that they were dying to tell me. And when
Speaker 1: Danny would leave and Amos would be with me, I
Speaker 1: would hear a recap of the discussion and the conversations
Speaker 1: and the stories the questions they were asking students. So
Speaker 1: I had a front row seat to everything that was
Speaker 1: going on. It didn't interfere with mine. So this wasn't
Speaker 1: an imposition. This was just your husband and a professional
Speaker 1: relationship that worked for him and worked for everybody involved,
Speaker 1: and gave me a great deal of intellectual pleasure, of
Speaker 1: personal pleasure. Danny would often visit us, stay in our
Speaker 1: house when we were at Stanford, he was at Vancouver.
Speaker 1: Amus tended to work late at night and come wake
Speaker 1: late in the morning, so I'd have breakfast with Danny.
Speaker 1: Danny's great company, and that was a pleasure. So he's
Speaker 1: in New York. Now you're in New York half the year.
Speaker 1: You guys still see each other? Sure? Sure? I mean,
Speaker 1: I'd like to say we we lived down the street
Speaker 1: from each other, because We both from the corner of Broadway,
Speaker 1: but hundred blocks apart. No, he's been a really loyal
Speaker 1: friend and I appreciate that. Can you stick around a
Speaker 1: little bit. I have a bunch more questions for you.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with Barbara Tversky, professor at Stanford
Speaker 1: in Colombia and author of Mind in Motion, How Action
Speaker 1: Shapes Thoughts. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and
Speaker 1: check out the podcast extras. Will we keep the tape
Speaker 1: rolling and continue discussing all things cognitive and psychology related.
Speaker 1: You can find that at Apple iTunes, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast,
Speaker 1: wherever your finer podcasts are found. Be sure to check
Speaker 1: out my weekly column on Bloomberg dot com. Follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at rid Halts. Sign up for my daily
Speaker 1: reads at rid Halts dot com. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast, Barbara, Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 1: You you and I can speak off Mike for as
Speaker 1: long as we're talking on Mike, because these are really
Speaker 1: really fascinating subjects. And I didn't realize the person who
Speaker 1: sent me down the behavioral finance Rob rabbit Hole. Um
Speaker 1: Thomas Gilovich was a student of Amoses and Lee Ross
Speaker 1: back in the day. Now, tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about Lee Ross. What was his relationship with Amos? How
Speaker 1: did how did he um have anything to do with Stanford?
Speaker 1: And and you and Amos? So Lee Ross, who said
Speaker 1: a dear friend. Um. It was at Stanford working with
Speaker 1: Nick nasb and they were working on essentially biases, their
Speaker 1: social psychologists, and they were working on biases in the
Speaker 1: way that we interpret other people's behavior and our own behavior.
Speaker 1: In those years, cognition was really active in social psychology
Speaker 1: and thinking about an individual. So one of the things
Speaker 1: they came up with is called the fundamental attribution error,
Speaker 1: and that's that we attribute our own behavior to the
Speaker 1: circumstances around us, and other people's behavior to enduring personality traits.
Speaker 1: So so when I do something right, when I do
Speaker 1: something right, it's because I'm so skillful, But when they
Speaker 1: do something wrong, it's they're not that smart. Than that,
Speaker 1: they're not good people. That's why they messed up. Is
Speaker 1: something like that, Or when when if I get angry,
Speaker 1: it's something that you did. It's a situation, it's not
Speaker 1: my fault. The circumstances, maybe you provoked me, and and
Speaker 1: if you're behaving that way, it's because you're an aggressive person,
Speaker 1: or an angry person or a shy person. So we
Speaker 1: all three. So so the that's kind of interesting, And
Speaker 1: it just goes back to the filter I view these
Speaker 1: things through is finance and investing in trading, and the
Speaker 1: greatest thing to do is to speak to traders who
Speaker 1: were either making money or losing money. And when they're
Speaker 1: making money, it's because they're brilliant. Hey, I had this
Speaker 1: trade figured out, I knew where to jump into it,
Speaker 1: I understood the value of this company. And when the
Speaker 1: trade goes south, it's never oh I had it wrong,
Speaker 1: it's well, the Federal Reserve did this, and who knew
Speaker 1: about this attack? And I ran And it's always externalities
Speaker 1: why they lose money. But it's their skills why they
Speaker 1: make money. Yeah, and you wonder why we're built that way,
Speaker 1: because it does interfere with learning what's happening in the
Speaker 1: world and how to interpret it. That it does feel
Speaker 1: very strongly that we're built that way. So so if
Speaker 1: that's the case, is there an evolutionary benefit to that
Speaker 1: sort of self confidence? Um? And ignoring things that that
Speaker 1: perhaps might even be your fault. Why would that why
Speaker 1: would that be hardwired? And you know, you could write
Speaker 1: an evolutionary story, sure that. I don't know how you
Speaker 1: know if it was correct or not, but it makes
Speaker 1: a great narrative. It makes a great story, right, And
Speaker 1: I mean evolutionary psychology has taken hold a bit in psychology,
Speaker 1: sometimes in an annoying way because in some sense all
Speaker 1: of us were doing it anyway, but it it there's
Speaker 1: there's a very little way that you can check those
Speaker 1: deep psychological hypotheses. You can check other sorts of hypotheses
Speaker 1: about structure eye or structure by raising food flies for
Speaker 1: many generations. But it's those deep psychological ones that the
Speaker 1: connection between any gene and psycho and behavior, and add
Speaker 1: to that epigenetics and our BioGenome in in our stomach
Speaker 1: and so genetics has become a huge field recently. Hasn't
Speaker 1: it that that our experiences somehow impact our our genetics?
Speaker 1: Am I oversimple? Well, again, I'm not an expert on this.
Speaker 1: I went to UH symposium on it and quiz the
Speaker 1: biologists mercilessly on the mechanisms, and yes, they seem to
Speaker 1: they seem to believe in this is some of this
Speaker 1: is animal work where you can check it that that
Speaker 1: actually it is affecting the genome, the germ cells that
Speaker 1: are being passed on to the next generation. And so
Speaker 1: if you starve the grandfather, the grandchild who never knew
Speaker 1: rat that never knew the grandfather has different eating behavior
Speaker 1: than if the grandfather wasn't solved. So a lot of
Speaker 1: that is looking at negative things that maternal deprivation, starvation,
Speaker 1: and so forth. So I asked, does it work for
Speaker 1: positive things? If you enrich an environment, does that get
Speaker 1: passed to the grandchildren? And they said it looks like
Speaker 1: it might. It does. And then I asked, are these
Speaker 1: big effects? And they said no, they're small effects. In
Speaker 1: the larger picture, they're small effects, but they're detectable. So
Speaker 1: since you mentioned rats, I have to ask this question, um,
Speaker 1: how do animals? How do the way animals think differ
Speaker 1: from human thinking? Or are there many parallels? Do animals
Speaker 1: and humans have a lot of similar thought processes? So
Speaker 1: again we're getting out of my own research research that
Speaker 1: I reviewed. But if you look, primates can't count the
Speaker 1: way we can count. But then there are many civil
Speaker 1: as nations still around in the world that don't have
Speaker 1: number words, and numbers are a cultural phenomenon. Not hardwired, yes,
Speaker 1: but one to one correspondences. Things that you have in
Speaker 1: tallies are old and are We have an estimation system
Speaker 1: as well as an accurate system. There are kind of
Speaker 1: two mass systems in the brain, and they are somewhat
Speaker 1: integrated and somewhat independent. But making estimates, are there eighty
Speaker 1: three things or ninety things? Primates can make those estimates
Speaker 1: quite well without counting, right. That's interesting, No, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: And one of the things you mentioned earlier that I
Speaker 1: was kind of intrigued with, I wanna I wanna just
Speaker 1: do a slight um variation of so you mentioned some
Speaker 1: people are good with language and other people are good
Speaker 1: with thinking processes, and not every he has both. But
Speaker 1: one of the things I was kind of fascinated with
Speaker 1: about language and creativity and thinking. So I write a
Speaker 1: lot and I speak a lot. But I found that
Speaker 1: my writing it's much more intel actually sharp, and at
Speaker 1: a higher grade level than my speaking, and I was
Speaker 1: kind of surprised. So when I worked on my first
Speaker 1: book over a decade ago, I thought, oh, this will
Speaker 1: be easy I'll dictate a bunch of stuff and it'll
Speaker 1: take me a couple of weekends, and I'll have a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand words, and I'm shocked as I'm rereading my
Speaker 1: spoken word. This is terrible. Why are the things that
Speaker 1: I laboriously pound out on a keyboard so much more
Speaker 1: articulate and intelligent than what I say? And eventually it
Speaker 1: wasn't a big leap to think, well, you have a
Speaker 1: part of the brain for speech and a different part
Speaker 1: of the brain for creativity and writing, and hey, maybe
Speaker 1: that speech part in is well developed as your writing part.
Speaker 1: Is that an oversimplification or is that a fair way
Speaker 1: to look at it? And no, I think it's probably.
Speaker 1: I don't think there are separate parts of the brain
Speaker 1: for speaking and writing. What happens when you write is
Speaker 1: you put something in a page and you would edit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but my first drafts of writing are much more articulate
Speaker 1: than my first drafts of speaking. And the best speaking
Speaker 1: things I do are when I write them out in
Speaker 1: advance and come up with the structural language that I want. Okay,
Speaker 1: so then you're you're putting on your your writing hat
Speaker 1: and supposed to your speaking is more spontaneous, sure, and
Speaker 1: the writing hat you're deliberately thinking about what what am
Speaker 1: I going to? What are the thoughts I want to express,
Speaker 1: and how's the best way to express them? So you
Speaker 1: some particularly adept at that. I had to. I have
Speaker 1: a colleague at Stanford named alband Or who writes many books,
Speaker 1: and they're all good. And you ask them a question
Speaker 1: and it comes out in paragraphs and pages full answers,
Speaker 1: like first draft. I have a friend like that. It's
Speaker 1: just fully formed, coherent, organized like I wish I could
Speaker 1: do that. I could do that on on pen and paper.
Speaker 1: I can't do that, verbon No. It's astounding, and I
Speaker 1: think it's he's practiced so much so if you think
Speaker 1: about musicians that write music or play music, they can
Speaker 1: do it very rapidly. They have the scheme as they
Speaker 1: can generated very quickly. It's highly practiced, like any sport
Speaker 1: would be highly practiced. So perhaps you're writing, you're thinking,
Speaker 1: at this metal level, how am I going to organize
Speaker 1: my thoughts. I've got an outline for organizing them. I'm
Speaker 1: gesturing the outline and and you're thinking that through and
Speaker 1: filling it through. This interview is different from spontaneous conversations,
Speaker 1: because again I'm crafting and thinking ahead and crafting in
Speaker 1: that way. So my convenent of dissonances. I'm going to
Speaker 1: stick with the two different brain sections because I like
Speaker 1: that idea, but also the way various aphasi acts and
Speaker 1: people who have had brain damage lose the ability to speak,
Speaker 1: but they can sing, or they could they could write,
Speaker 1: but they can't read. That's what led me to think
Speaker 1: it's a speech center and a writing center. You're telling
Speaker 1: me there is no difference. I don't know. I sort
Speaker 1: of doubt it because I think each involves many areas Aphacians. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Aphacia's brain damage, and it's usually not pointed. It's not
Speaker 1: it's a cluster of neurons probably and and and there.
Speaker 1: It is losing certain kinds of words and not others. Right,
Speaker 1: So this is a general So so the other thing
Speaker 1: I want to ask. Art comes up in the book
Speaker 1: in several places. I'm curious as to why you use
Speaker 1: art as an example. And then there's one specific example
Speaker 1: I have to bring up to you because I was
Speaker 1: intrigued by it. Um, what's the relationship between art and
Speaker 1: thinking and between the concept of spatial motion and how
Speaker 1: we express ourselves artistically. Yeah, so right, So how would
Speaker 1: I come to naturally? I drew a lot as a kid,
Speaker 1: and my mother's an artist, and my cousins that are
Speaker 1: so art is very much in my life writing too,
Speaker 1: for that matter. M but I happen to have I
Speaker 1: got interested in design, So I first got interested in
Speaker 1: how do we put the world in our mind? How
Speaker 1: do we get space in our mind? And then I
Speaker 1: got more and more interested in the spaces that we
Speaker 1: create to improve our own cognition. So diagrams would be one.
Speaker 1: Even the alphabet would be at one. Sure, developing the
Speaker 1: alphabet which was invented apparently only once, but invent it
Speaker 1: only once? What do you mean? The sound sound too,
Speaker 1: symbol correspondence was developed once since spread and then just
Speaker 1: variations based and otherwise. Alphabets were representing meaning the way
Speaker 1: Chinese went from symbology to phonetics. It's whether it's representing
Speaker 1: meanings directly the way Chinese does, or whether it's representing
Speaker 1: the sound of language of speaking. And that's what the
Speaker 1: Phoenician alphabet that spread everywhere and got varied and was
Speaker 1: apparently only invented once and then spread it is fascinating.
Speaker 1: So so let me have you disabused me of another
Speaker 1: thing I probably have wrong? Um? Have have you seen
Speaker 1: the trick in the Federal Express? Uh? So, the way
Speaker 1: that was first explained to me is the reason we
Speaker 1: don't perceive the arrow in the FedEx. And just pull
Speaker 1: up a FedEx, any picture of FedEx, and you'll see
Speaker 1: between the E and the x um there there's an arrow.
Speaker 1: That's the part of your brain that recognizes language is
Speaker 1: a different part of the brain that recognizes symbols, And
Speaker 1: when you're reading the letters, your brain isn't primed for
Speaker 1: seeing a symbol like an arrow. So that's fascinating, and
Speaker 1: it would be arrows are fascinating anyway, and they've gotten
Speaker 1: me fascinated, and somebody needs to do that work. The
Speaker 1: the lateral occipital parietal juncture, that area of the brain
Speaker 1: that is recognizing objects and recognizes fruits and vegetables and
Speaker 1: so forth. There are many different sub areas, is like
Speaker 1: a mosaic. There is only one area in all of
Speaker 1: those areas that recognizes left right asymmetries. Otherwise, your face
Speaker 1: mirror reversed is more places in a good example, but
Speaker 1: it's mostly the same the special there's a special area
Speaker 1: for faces, but most things, it doesn't matter. If it's
Speaker 1: a left right, turning it upside down matters, but left
Speaker 1: right doesn't matter. There's one area of the brain that
Speaker 1: is primed to recognize left right aberration, so we can
Speaker 1: tell a small B from a small D and differentiate.
Speaker 1: So that area is used for reading no matter what
Speaker 1: language you read. Now what that area would do with arrows,
Speaker 1: I'd be absolutely fascinated to know. So maybe the way
Speaker 1: I heard it might be right, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be exactly. And and the problem there is the arrows
Speaker 1: embedded in the letters. So the embedding is going to
Speaker 1: interfere with the perception anyway I'm not. It's like a relief.
Speaker 1: Are you looking at the white or the black? Exactly?
Speaker 1: The negative? There could be another the negative space. So
Speaker 1: let me bring that back to ouray, because we we
Speaker 1: started talking about that. You reference the linear how how
Speaker 1: linear things are when we're moving through space, the way
Speaker 1: language words after another appear. You use a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of examples, and you talk about, um, the space within
Speaker 1: an art and painting and how it had a form
Speaker 1: of linear progression. Until Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock come
Speaker 1: along where they just explode that concept. And the the
Speaker 1: reason that stood out to me is so my wife
Speaker 1: used to she's now retired, but she taught fashion, illustration
Speaker 1: and design. I've been dragged at every museum in the world,
Speaker 1: and initially a lot of some modern art just didn't
Speaker 1: resonate with me. Stella, I would look at just nonsense.
Speaker 1: Always was fascinated by Jackson Pollock, um, but I didn't
Speaker 1: care much for Mark Rothko until I don't know, fifteen
Speaker 1: twenty years ago, and I can't explain what happened. But suddenly,
Speaker 1: maybe having just seen it enough time, suddenly this is
Speaker 1: really fascinating stuff. There's there's it's not only abstract, but
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of different things going on, whether it's
Speaker 1: the space, the border, the color choices. Suddenly I went
Speaker 1: from not caring anything about roth Go to really, this
Speaker 1: is one of the most fascinating modern painters there are.
Speaker 1: And the fact that you used it as him as
Speaker 1: an example. I'm not a big fan of the black period,
Speaker 1: the later stuff he did when it's all black and
Speaker 1: gray and white, but hold that aside. The example of
Speaker 1: that having no linear narrative and no structural. Here's where
Speaker 1: your eyes going to naturally lead by the figures. I
Speaker 1: thought that was fascinating as an example early in the
Speaker 1: book Thank you. I'm not an art critic, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: appreciate it or either. So it gets back to the
Speaker 1: learning versus creativity. And when you're learning, you want things
Speaker 1: very straightforward and structured. When you're being creative you want
Speaker 1: to go in many different directions. And what I think
Speaker 1: both Roscoe and Pollock do and it took me a
Speaker 1: while to appreciate them as well, is there's ambiguity built
Speaker 1: into the paintings, and every time you look something different,
Speaker 1: you see something differ. And as you're looking at configures
Speaker 1: and reconfigures, and what Roscoe especially does is you get
Speaker 1: the adapters of the eye to color adapting, so colors
Speaker 1: change in them because of the way you're looking. You
Speaker 1: can get after images that are very interesting. With Rothco,
Speaker 1: look at a blank wall, but those adapters in your
Speaker 1: eye to the different colors keep changing, and that means
Speaker 1: that what you're seeing changes because it's not it's there,
Speaker 1: it's you're in your eye. And and Leonardo, by the way,
Speaker 1: knew that that it wasn't in the thing out there.
Speaker 1: It was in your mind, m through your eye. So
Speaker 1: I think, to me, that's what's intriguing about Roscoe. You
Speaker 1: commune with it and it different structures appear. It stops
Speaker 1: being flat and gets into depth. Oh, it's definitely dimensional.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's the switch that flicked onto me. Suddenly
Speaker 1: it wasn't just an orange or purple square. It's like,
Speaker 1: this really has a dimensionality to it and a depth.
Speaker 1: And I watch people going in there are those galleries
Speaker 1: in the in the tad and in what in the
Speaker 1: east wing of the National Gallery where there are lots
Speaker 1: of roth calls, and I watch people just going through
Speaker 1: and looking very quickly, and you have to sit there
Speaker 1: and commune, and then it's it. It becomes spiritual. So
Speaker 1: and that got me. It wasn't that, But earlier on
Speaker 1: I started looking at design and looking at architects how
Speaker 1: they design. We looked at experienced architects and drawing while
Speaker 1: they were designing, and there were early sketches are ambiguous,
Speaker 1: and it allows them to make discoveries in their own sketches.
Speaker 1: So they drew for one reason, and when they look
Speaker 1: at their sketch, they see new things. They see patterns,
Speaker 1: they see implications like this is a building, the traffic
Speaker 1: will not be right, or the light will fall poorly.
Speaker 1: So they see new things in their sketches, and it's
Speaker 1: the ambiguity that allows it. And then one of my
Speaker 1: graduate students started We studied them drawing and studied that process,
Speaker 1: and one of my graduate students started studying artists for
Speaker 1: whom drawing is their major practice, and for them, the
Speaker 1: drawing is a conversation between the eye and the hand
Speaker 1: and the page. There are no words, and if they
Speaker 1: try to talk about it, they can't. It interferes with
Speaker 1: the whole process. So this is a different way of
Speaker 1: thinking than language. It's thinking with the objects that I'm creating,
Speaker 1: with a body that's creating them, and with the thing
Speaker 1: that's perceiving them. And I'm sure something similar goes on
Speaker 1: in creating music and even in imagining your words. If
Speaker 1: you're thinking about speaking, you're thinking about how the words
Speaker 1: are going to sound, if you're if you're practicing it.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to call attention to that way of thinking.
Speaker 1: It's not going through language. It's an important way of thinking.
Speaker 1: It's the way I find my way in the world,
Speaker 1: and it contributes to many other kinds of It's the
Speaker 1: way I understand other people when I'm watching their bodies
Speaker 1: and their faces as are responding. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: call attention to those ways of thinking with the body
Speaker 1: and the world and the things that we create in
Speaker 1: the world. Is an important way of thinking that compliments language.
Speaker 1: That's different from language. I mean, I love language, So
Speaker 1: it's it's obvious you do. So I know I don't
Speaker 1: have you all day. I only have you for a
Speaker 1: little bit of time. Let me jump to my favorite
Speaker 1: questions that we ask all our guests, and let's see
Speaker 1: if we can learn a little bit more about Barbara Tavski. Um,
Speaker 1: so what do you? Uh? What are you listening to?
Speaker 1: Watching or downloading? Are you? Are you watching anything on
Speaker 1: Netflix or Interestingly? Movies affect me too much, too much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm very picky about what I see. So what
Speaker 1: have you seen that you've liked recently? Um? Synonyms, synonyms.
Speaker 1: It's an Israeli film about and because I lived in
Speaker 1: ISRAELI especially resonates it's about but it has universal appeal.
Speaker 1: It's about a man who was traumatized by being in
Speaker 1: the army, by what he had to do and it
Speaker 1: went to Paris and decides he needs a new identity.
Speaker 1: H quite quite interesting. It's a fascinating movie. And they
Speaker 1: add that to my Netflix. Cue. What's the most important
Speaker 1: thing people don't know about? Barbara Zavarsky. Oh, I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty much out there. I think you probably don't
Speaker 1: know that I, or maybe I hinted. I have three
Speaker 1: wonderful children, and they have produced eight wonderful grandchildren who
Speaker 1: are all lively individuals with personalities and who adore each other.
Speaker 1: Who are some of your early mentors, So that's interesting.
Speaker 1: I don't think I had much in the way of
Speaker 1: human beings. It was more books that were influential, and
Speaker 1: when I was a teenager, the existentialists, particularly um were influential. UM.
Speaker 1: Later philosophers like Russell Quine, Wittgenstein, especially late Wittgenstein, were
Speaker 1: all influential. Eventually, when I got into psychology, the early
Speaker 1: cognitive people like Chomsky, Miller, Brunner, Broadband, um kun who
Speaker 1: talked about scientific revolutions, but they were really intellectual revolutions.
Speaker 1: They were about the human mind. So those but more
Speaker 1: than that, the colleagues, I mean, I always, even as
Speaker 1: an undergraduate hung out with the graduate students and and
Speaker 1: learned an enormous amount from them. They were indulgent and
Speaker 1: that stayed with me. I'm fortunate to have had amazing
Speaker 1: colleagues who were also friends, including the one that I
Speaker 1: lived with for thirty years, and our overlapping friendship groups.
Speaker 1: So in your work, what other psychologists affect the way
Speaker 1: you approach the world of psychology. I think that, like you,
Speaker 1: I'm a generalist, and at I mean I had Amazon
Speaker 1: the house and that whole circle and Danny and other
Speaker 1: colleagues at Hebrew University when I was early on then
Speaker 1: moved to Stanford. Stanford's way of hiring people is wallpaper.
Speaker 1: You want the whole field covered, but you don't want
Speaker 1: to overlap. And and I've seen other departments build little
Speaker 1: nuclei of everybody's working on speech perception, and then there's
Speaker 1: a nucleus some myself working on other and you don't communicate.
Speaker 1: So what was really wonderful to me at Stanford was
Speaker 1: having wonderful people and developmental and social in rain In
Speaker 1: and people in cognitive doing different things from me. And
Speaker 1: I learned a great deal from that. I loved that,
Speaker 1: and now I have people from the arts and people
Speaker 1: from technology, people for many arts, music, drama, UM, painting,
Speaker 1: and who are dance? Who are influencing me? And everything
Speaker 1: goes through the human mind. I mean you've said that, well,
Speaker 1: you see it in your book. You talk about everything
Speaker 1: from you reference dance and moving through space as well
Speaker 1: as art and music. It's it's clear that all those
Speaker 1: different folks are influencing you. Let's talk about books. What
Speaker 1: are some of your favorite books? What are you reading
Speaker 1: these days? What do you like to recommend? Is? So
Speaker 1: I went from reading fiction voraciously to reading UM, to
Speaker 1: postmodern fiction to reading nonfiction so UM a long history
Speaker 1: and a lot of foreign fiction that I've loved and
Speaker 1: still love because it brings you to other worlds. But
Speaker 1: I'm reading So Sapiens, which I recommend to everybody. UM.
Speaker 1: Danny's book Thinking Fast and Slow is wonderful. UM anything
Speaker 1: Jared Diamond or Sapolsky as you recommended UM and UM
Speaker 1: Hans Rustling's factfulness I found very uplifting and and it
Speaker 1: gives you a right, the right perspective on long things
Speaker 1: you mentioned Jared Diamond, guns, germs and steel right would
Speaker 1: be one of them. And that again is a broad
Speaker 1: way of thinking that makes sense to me. Um, I
Speaker 1: loved Misbehaving Dick Taylor's Frock was just a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: So those are probably that's a great list that'll keep
Speaker 1: someone busy for a full semester. To say the least,
Speaker 1: UM tell us about it time you failed and what
Speaker 1: you learned from the experience. So that was a hard
Speaker 1: question for me. I I don't try things that are
Speaker 1: really out of reach. But if you think about being
Speaker 1: an an experimental psychologist, which I have been, every experiment
Speaker 1: is a risk. You build it and you build it
Speaker 1: on previous work, on your previous experience, and many of
Speaker 1: them fail. I mean, I think the failure rate is
Speaker 1: lower than the failure rate for startups. So the failure
Speaker 1: rate is about meaning that you just don't reach any
Speaker 1: conclusion by the experience, and if something happens that you
Speaker 1: didn't expect and you might be disappointed in But for me,
Speaker 1: that's the adventure on the phone, and you learn something
Speaker 1: from that. Now, learning from failure is problematic because it's
Speaker 1: just one experience and it's so easy in hindsight to
Speaker 1: explain why you failed. I mean, you saw that with
Speaker 1: people in stock picks all the time, need do calls
Speaker 1: this uh resulting where the poker players they learn the
Speaker 1: lesson the wrong lesson from the result as opposed from
Speaker 1: the process exactly. So it's only one um, one sample,
Speaker 1: and you're interpreting at it in in the hindsight. So
Speaker 1: failure has become popular now everybody's talking about failing is
Speaker 1: good and you learn from failure, but you don't necessarily
Speaker 1: learn the right thing from failure. So we're failing at failing.
Speaker 1: We're doing it's getting a little a little fractal there,
Speaker 1: but I think not letting failures get you down is
Speaker 1: probably a good lesson. Okay, that's that's that's good. Um,
Speaker 1: what do you do for fun? What do you do
Speaker 1: when you're not doting on the grandkids and doing research? Oh?
Speaker 1: In research is fun. I'm one of the few people
Speaker 1: that loves writing because it's making things sculpting. Sculpting. That's
Speaker 1: such a good turn of a phrase. Um, the library
Speaker 1: areing of Congress. Daniel Borston used to say, I write
Speaker 1: to figure out what I think, But you've reduced that
Speaker 1: to one word sculpting. Yeah, I'm a fan of Daniel Borstein.
Speaker 1: Two Explorer exactly are great books. Yeah, really, uplifting and
Speaker 1: just so well researched and so beautifully written. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he gets the essences of these things in an exciting way.
Speaker 1: Not not small books. Those are that's a summer. Each
Speaker 1: of those books is like there's your July and August.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was, and they're they're great. New York is
Speaker 1: full of fun. I mean the most fun is good
Speaker 1: conversation with friends, and I happen to have good friends
Speaker 1: who are good conversationalized. But I love music. I've developed
Speaker 1: a late passion for opera, for opera really interesting, and
Speaker 1: that took many years and now it's over the top
Speaker 1: and the stories are often you know, the men are
Speaker 1: bastards and the women are saints and the women die.
Speaker 1: But the end that's ever been yeah boham and right.
Speaker 1: But I've learned to love opera just by going. I'm
Speaker 1: no expert, but you learned by experiencing. And it's again
Speaker 1: a different way of learning than book learning. And I
Speaker 1: think that's the way you pointed out. You learn from
Speaker 1: our you just look just watching. There's this stuff to
Speaker 1: be picked up. So you're in New York a couple
Speaker 1: of months a year in California, Well, I'm now I'm
Speaker 1: actually Mrita at Stanford, so I'm there for summers and
Speaker 1: many breaks, but I'm still teaching at Columbia, so I'm
Speaker 1: more here, um right, and yeah, and hence I understand
Speaker 1: there's an opera or two here. Part I understand there's
Speaker 1: a couple of operas here all the time. The next
Speaker 1: one on my list is What's Sick, which is a
Speaker 1: very hard opera org It's it's human tragedy at its worst.
Speaker 1: But William Kentridge is doing this production and the sets,
Speaker 1: and he, in my mind, is the most inventive and
Speaker 1: interesting artist alive by a long shot. Wow. That's quite interesting. Um.
Speaker 1: So what are you optimistic about in the world of
Speaker 1: psychology today and what are you a little pessimistic about.
Speaker 1: I'm optimistic in general by the arts and sciences, um
Speaker 1: and they both have young people who are doing really
Speaker 1: innovative and creative things. In my own field, I happen
Speaker 1: to be past president of the Association of Psychological Sciences.
Speaker 1: I gave out a lot of prizes last year, including
Speaker 1: to young investigators. And they know math, and they know
Speaker 1: big data, and they know the brain and they know
Speaker 1: behavior and they're doing mind blowing things, and you can't
Speaker 1: help but be in all of these young people reasons
Speaker 1: to be optimistic about the future and about the the arts, politics,
Speaker 1: global warming. I'm worried about the same things. You know,
Speaker 1: a reckless leader of a major country doing impulsive things
Speaker 1: that that would never happen. You know, of course the
Speaker 1: adults are going to take charge. No one would behave
Speaker 1: recklessly like that. Yeah, you have to be optimistic that
Speaker 1: we will get past all that sort of Well, global
Speaker 1: warming is more of a worry. But so I'm worried
Speaker 1: about the things that normal people are worried about. But
Speaker 1: so I recently I agree with you on those I
Speaker 1: recently read something. So there are reasons to be frightened
Speaker 1: about global warming, but there are also reasons to be
Speaker 1: optimistic that will transition to sustainable energy and we'll find
Speaker 1: some technological solution that will reduce the negative effects. And
Speaker 1: then I read this column with a person and they
Speaker 1: look at all these surveys of people and my optimistic
Speaker 1: viewpoint on technology, what happens if it's wrong, And lots
Speaker 1: of lots of people seem to believe, oh yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: we'll see the skies, We'll find some way to reflect
Speaker 1: the sun temporarily and lower. There seems to be a
Speaker 1: belief amongst a lot of people that yeah, yeah, well
Speaker 1: we'll come up with a magic bullet, will be fine,
Speaker 1: and that's not usually how things work. They usually aren't
Speaker 1: magic bullets. And when somebody explained that, like lots of
Speaker 1: people think this, I'm like, gee, maybe it really is
Speaker 1: much worse than uh. I know it's bad, but I'm
Speaker 1: trying to be optimistic. And that kind of was like
Speaker 1: a reality check that maybe it's gonna be harder to
Speaker 1: fix this than we think. Yeah, and what what if
Speaker 1: you look for optimistic things and I think we share
Speaker 1: that looking for it. I don't know that there's going
Speaker 1: to be a magic, single solution. It's more gonna be many.
Speaker 1: But what is impressive. Despite the government's policy, which is
Speaker 1: not pro green, many companies have discovered that they're better off.
Speaker 1: It's economically in their interests, and so that that's happening.
Speaker 1: And you look at younger people and and you know,
Speaker 1: I once left the water running while I was brushing
Speaker 1: my teeth and one of my four year old grandchildren said, softer,
Speaker 1: turn off the water, stop wasting, stop wasting water. So
Speaker 1: coal is a perfect example of exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Coal has been and coal just plummeted in usage, but
Speaker 1: we have made natural gas not as good as solar,
Speaker 1: but much better than coal. It's become so inexpensive that
Speaker 1: coal fired electrical plants are rapidly going away. It's so
Speaker 1: much cheaper to switch to natural gas that the economic
Speaker 1: insensives are doing a lot of it on their own,
Speaker 1: just the cost of the material. You don't have to
Speaker 1: have scrubbers with natural gas, you don't have to have
Speaker 1: all these complicated carbon recaption systems. Now mining for natural
Speaker 1: gas releases methane another thing. Natural gas has a lot
Speaker 1: of its own problems, but on any comparison basis, it's
Speaker 1: just so much better than coal. Hopefully we see more
Speaker 1: of that moving in the right direction organically, um but
Speaker 1: we'll see and solar and wind and see and people
Speaker 1: are moving. The real question is can we go fast enough?
Speaker 1: Because the warming has already happened, The glaciers are mounting,
Speaker 1: the coral reefs are dying, and that's our fish population.
Speaker 1: So you could see the Great Barrier reef dying from space.
Speaker 1: There are satellite images that are showing it bleaching. For
Speaker 1: miles at a time. Um, I'm trying to Douglas Adams
Speaker 1: wrote a book maybe it was he's no longer with us,
Speaker 1: so it had to be like years ago called Last
Speaker 1: Chance to See And it's all these environments and species
Speaker 1: that this was before eco tourism was a big thing,
Speaker 1: and he said, hey, if you want to see these,
Speaker 1: you better go see these now because they're not going
Speaker 1: to be here in fifty years. And the great barrier
Speaker 1: brief is literally you know, they're much more sensitive to
Speaker 1: one degree increase in sea temperature than you know, even
Speaker 1: enjoiant populations of fish. So that's a really interesting book
Speaker 1: if you want to be depressed. So my last two questions,
Speaker 1: let me ask you this, Um, what sort of advice
Speaker 1: would you give to a recent college graduate who was
Speaker 1: interested in a career in experimental psychology. If it's experimental psychology,
Speaker 1: you have to learn brain and data. Um. Right, it's
Speaker 1: it's hard now, in much harder in some ways than
Speaker 1: and I was coming in. It's harder to get grant money,
Speaker 1: and you need grants, and so it's hard. I would
Speaker 1: tell people to be strategic. I wasn't, but it worked out.
Speaker 1: I was very lucky that is a theme on this show.
Speaker 1: Lots of people say how fortunate they were and how
Speaker 1: how lucky they were by their circumstances, and you just
Speaker 1: can't count on that happening always, right, And I think
Speaker 1: some of it was the meandering that I did seemed
Speaker 1: at first like me andering. This is the research track
Speaker 1: that I took. But eventually then I saw this isn't neandering,
Speaker 1: this is deliberate, and then I was able to craft
Speaker 1: what I was doing along the bigger vision that I had.
Speaker 1: But it took a while to get that. And if
Speaker 1: I look at Picasso at an artist Roscoe, if you
Speaker 1: look at early Roscoe is very different from later. It
Speaker 1: was representational, wasn't even abstract. And I think that a
Speaker 1: certain you do a certain amount of me entering, and
Speaker 1: that's probably a good thing of exploring and exploring widely
Speaker 1: before you get to help you get a vision, and
Speaker 1: also to give you the tools that you need to
Speaker 1: do something bigger. And so you build up the technical
Speaker 1: skills and then you get a leap off from conceptual skills,
Speaker 1: and you've tried many different things. It took a while
Speaker 1: before Picasso got his vision, and then he ended up
Speaker 1: having many visions because he was especially fertile in that way.
Speaker 1: And our final question, what do you know about the
Speaker 1: world of psychology today that you wish you knew thirty
Speaker 1: or forty years ago when you were a young student. Well,
Speaker 1: here's something I'm glad I didn't know. It's political, really,
Speaker 1: and I feeling like tenure at universities or what get
Speaker 1: published or or a little bit everywhere. So I thought
Speaker 1: it was grant money to or I thought I was
Speaker 1: going into a field that wasn't that was just intellectual.
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm aberrant that way of really enjoying
Speaker 1: ideas and playing with ideas and contributing to them and
Speaker 1: wanting to be around people who are thinking. And I
Speaker 1: thought academics was going to be the purest place on that.
Speaker 1: When I was studying, there weren't that many opportunities for women.
Speaker 1: And I was self supporting my last two years in college,
Speaker 1: so I I knew there was no I had nobody
Speaker 1: to fall back on. I had to make a living um.
Speaker 1: But sure, it's even who you site in your articles
Speaker 1: and and and so forth. So I thought, this is
Speaker 1: a level playing field. All that matters is good ideas.
Speaker 1: But there's not quite a meritocracy not right in meritocracy
Speaker 1: has come to be a bad word, but really in
Speaker 1: some cases. But I thought all that would matter with
Speaker 1: the ideas, but which ideas get picked up on and
Speaker 1: who they get attributed to it. Here being a woman
Speaker 1: was a bit of a disadvantage, and again I was oblivious,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad I was oblivious. But there are those
Speaker 1: political things are really social dynamics, and they're they're they're
Speaker 1: about human beings. And in the end, even if it's
Speaker 1: intellectual and ideas about science, it's still human beings that
Speaker 1: are making the market quite fascinating. Barbara, thank you for
Speaker 1: being so generous with your time. We've been talking for
Speaker 1: about two hours, and I could go for another two hours,
Speaker 1: but I know you have places to go and people
Speaker 1: to see. We have been speaking with Barbara Traversky, professor
Speaker 1: of psychology at Colombia and Stanford and author of the
Speaker 1: book Mind in Motion, How Actions Shape Thoughts. If you
Speaker 1: enjoy this conversation, well be sure and look up an
Speaker 1: intro down an inch on Apple iTunes and you could
Speaker 1: see any of the three hundred prior such conversations we've had.
Speaker 1: You can find that on iTunes, Google, podcasts. That's your
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Speaker 1: feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast
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Speaker 1: I would be remiss if I did not thank the
Speaker 1: crack staff that helps put these conversations together each week.
Speaker 1: Paris Wald is my producer, Mark Sinnascalce is my audio engineer.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Rehults. You've been listening to Masters in Business
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio