Speaker 1: Look ahead, imagine more, gain insight for your industry with
Speaker 1: forward thinking advice from the professionals at Cone Resnick. Is
Speaker 1: your business ready to break through? Find out more at
Speaker 1: Cone resnick dot com slash Breakthrough. This is Masters in
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week. On
Speaker 1: the podcast, I had an absolutely fascinating and fantastic conversation
Speaker 1: with a rock star professor of neural linguistics and cognitive
Speaker 1: psychology and all sorts of other interesting uh fields of
Speaker 1: study within the world of cognition and psychology, Professor Stephen
Speaker 1: Pinker at Harvard University. This guy is a rock star.
Speaker 1: This was really one of those conversations that was just
Speaker 1: so fascinating and went in so many different directions. Uh.
Speaker 1: He's a psychologist, but he also has a really fascinating
Speaker 1: uh quantitative background, and so he's a guy that's actually
Speaker 1: especially driven by data. When you think of things like
Speaker 1: neural linguistics or or visual cognition, you don't think in
Speaker 1: terms of of how's the math behind this? But he
Speaker 1: has a mind that looks at the world very much
Speaker 1: through a quantitative filter. Uh. He he wrote a number,
Speaker 1: by the way, uh one a ton of awards at
Speaker 1: at Harvard and throughout the sciences, highly highly regarded. His
Speaker 1: books have are also really really well reviewed, very notable.
Speaker 1: Uh the book Better Better Nature of Our Angels, why
Speaker 1: violence has decreased around the world and indeed when you
Speaker 1: look at it quantitatively, violence and war and crime or
Speaker 1: at record low levels. I know it doesn't look that
Speaker 1: way when you when you see the news, but that's
Speaker 1: a fascinating conversation. It's I love that sort of counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: Here's what everybody believes, it's all wrong, here's the data
Speaker 1: and proving it. Uh. And and he brings that approach
Speaker 1: to everything he touches. His His work on how the
Speaker 1: mind works is really fascinating. How children acquire language skills
Speaker 1: and why that is a significant evolutionary development amongst humans
Speaker 1: is really, you know, groundbreaking, fascinating stuff. Um. You may
Speaker 1: not think that there's an immediate application to the world
Speaker 1: of investing, but he's just one of these people who
Speaker 1: are so interesting and so knowledgeable and has such an
Speaker 1: interesting model in his mind for how to approach thinking
Speaker 1: about the world that I can't help but think that
Speaker 1: there are lessons for investors in this. So a little
Speaker 1: off the beaten path, but absolutely fascinating. Here is my
Speaker 1: conversation with Professor Steven Pinker. This is Masters in Business
Speaker 1: with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today
Speaker 1: is Professor Steven Pinker. He is a rock star professor
Speaker 1: of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard, where he holds
Speaker 1: the title of Johnstone Family Professor in the psych Department.
Speaker 1: He is a psychologist, linguist, and popular science author, specializing
Speaker 1: in visual cognition and psycho linguistics. I think you can
Speaker 1: find a lot of what we talked about today absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: He's won numerous awards from the National Economy of Sciences,
Speaker 1: the Royal Institute, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He is the
Speaker 1: author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, the
Speaker 1: Better Angels of Our Nature, The Stuff of Thought, and
Speaker 1: most recently The Sense of Style. He is also on
Speaker 1: the usage panel of the American Heritage dis Dictionary. Professor Pinker,
Speaker 1: welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you. First question, I have to
Speaker 1: ask you what is visual cognition and psycholinguistics? Those are
Speaker 1: two sub topics in the field of cognitive science, which
Speaker 1: is how do we think? What? What is the nature
Speaker 1: of intelligence. Visual cognition is how we um interpret what
Speaker 1: we see, or how we think about what we see.
Speaker 1: How do you recognize the face of a friend? How
Speaker 1: do you find an object when you're rummaging through a drawer?
Speaker 1: How do you imagine things that that are hypothetical, like
Speaker 1: what would my living room look like if the couch
Speaker 1: was on the other side, or what would the smalllecule
Speaker 1: look like if I rotated in three dimensions? How do
Speaker 1: we allocate attention across the visual field? How how does
Speaker 1: your airport screener look for the hidden weapon in those
Speaker 1: false colored X ray images and so on, or not
Speaker 1: find them? So we have learned indeed, so that is
Speaker 1: a problem in visual cognition. It's not vision in the
Speaker 1: sense of seeing color and motion and uh and sharp detail,
Speaker 1: but it's the next step up in the brain, namely,
Speaker 1: how do you how does the visual world um interact
Speaker 1: with what you know, what you see, what you think about.
Speaker 1: So that raises an interesting question. How much of what
Speaker 1: the average person perceives as a three hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: d Greek construct of the universe around them, how much
Speaker 1: of that is accurate and how much of that is
Speaker 1: the brain filling in projecting. I don't want to say fabricating,
Speaker 1: but filling in the blind spots and blank spaces is
Speaker 1: what we see actually there or maybe not so much. Well,
Speaker 1: when when we're not hallucinating and we're looking at something,
Speaker 1: then we can we can see things vertically, and we
Speaker 1: do it much better than any robot or artificial intelligence system.
Speaker 1: That's why it's taken Google so long to develop a
Speaker 1: self driving car. They're trying to bring it to the
Speaker 1: and exceed the level of a human visual system. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, there is an illusion that we have
Speaker 1: a wall to wall tableau of visual detail. Uh. And
Speaker 1: that is constructed by the brain because even if you
Speaker 1: if you hold your hand out maybe eight inches from
Speaker 1: the where you're looking, you can't even count the fingers
Speaker 1: your vision. The acuity of your vision falls off really dramatically,
Speaker 1: but your eyes are constantly flitting around UH. And so
Speaker 1: your brain constructs an illusion of a continuously detailed visual world.
Speaker 1: But outside the phobia, the spot that you're actually looking at,
Speaker 1: vision is surprisingly course, and we rely on expectations and memories.
Speaker 1: I could picture hundreds of listeners holding their arms out
Speaker 1: and saying, you know, I can't count how many fingers
Speaker 1: I have, And it doesn't have to be in the
Speaker 1: in your peripheral vision. It just has to be a
Speaker 1: few inches away from the direction of your gaze. So,
Speaker 1: and people talk about tunnel vision or hyper focus. Really
Speaker 1: that's the normal state of there's a sense in which
Speaker 1: we all have tunnel vision. We don't realize it because
Speaker 1: our eyeballs move around so quickly. And then psycho linguistics,
Speaker 1: that was the second half of your question. That's another
Speaker 1: topic in cognitive science, and that is the psychology of language.
Speaker 1: How do we understand speech, how do we produce speech,
Speaker 1: how do children learn their mother tongue? Where does language
Speaker 1: come from, who decides what the rules are, how does
Speaker 1: it change over time? How do we read? All of
Speaker 1: those are topics in psycho linguistics, the psychology of language. So,
Speaker 1: I don't remember which book it was. It might have
Speaker 1: been the Stuff of Thought, or it might have been
Speaker 1: um How the mind works. You talked about how words
Speaker 1: sometimes are aunt amount of poetic, and it just made
Speaker 1: me think of the mel Brooks call Rehner routine the
Speaker 1: two thousand year Old Man, where they discuss how egg
Speaker 1: and shower are automoto poetic and I won't spoil it.
Speaker 1: People should go find it on YouTube. It's hilarious. But
Speaker 1: how much of actual language is because things sound like
Speaker 1: the way they are a bit uh, and so it's
Speaker 1: not a complete coincidence that, say, the word malefluous solus
Speaker 1: and the word cantankerous reminds you of a person with
Speaker 1: a lot of sharp edges. On the other hand, that
Speaker 1: only goes so far, because if you could really predict
Speaker 1: what a word meant by what it sounded like, then
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have to go through the laborious process of
Speaker 1: learning another second language. All the words would would be
Speaker 1: the meetings would be obvious. So most of the language
Speaker 1: is arbitrary, but there is a little bit of correlation
Speaker 1: between sound and meaning. So I just got back from Europe,
Speaker 1: and I know most of what you've worked on has
Speaker 1: come out of the English language. But why is it
Speaker 1: that when a non speaker of let's say, French or
Speaker 1: Italian listens, it sounds so melodic, or if you listen
Speaker 1: to German it sounds so harsh and guttural. What is
Speaker 1: it about those languages that give those things that that sensation. Well,
Speaker 1: it's a component of language called phonology, the the the
Speaker 1: sound pattern of the language, and that includes the set
Speaker 1: of vowels and consonants that you're allowed to use. We
Speaker 1: don't have in English, but you have it in Hebrew
Speaker 1: and in uh German. Uh. It also includes the melody
Speaker 1: and rhythm of speech, what's called prosody. Prosody, yes, so
Speaker 1: that that's kind of the aspect of language that you
Speaker 1: can hear behind a closed door, and you can often
Speaker 1: recognize a language just from its prosody. I'm Barry RIDHLTZ.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My
Speaker 1: special guest today is Professor Stephen pinker Uh. He teaches
Speaker 1: at Harvard in the Psychology Department, studying cognition and psycholinguistics.
Speaker 1: One of your more recent books was called The Bitter
Speaker 1: Angels of Our Nature, How violence has declines, And when
Speaker 1: you see the data on this, it's pretty it's pretty astonishing.
Speaker 1: In the pres reference to Better Angels, you say the
Speaker 1: present day we are blessed by an unprecedented level of
Speaker 1: peaceful coexistence, but that seems to be contradicted by the
Speaker 1: news headlines we see every day. How do you reconcile
Speaker 1: the two because you can't get an accurate picture of
Speaker 1: the world by looking at the headlines. The headlines are
Speaker 1: about things that happen, they're not about things that don't happen.
Speaker 1: And as long as the rate of violence hasn't fallen
Speaker 1: to zero, they're always going to be enough violent incidents
Speaker 1: to fill the news. And we can lose sight of
Speaker 1: the vast amounts of the world that that are at peace. Currently.
Speaker 1: The there's a there is a zone of war that
Speaker 1: stretches pretty much from Nigeria through um Sub Saharan Africa,
Speaker 1: into the Middle East and then down into Pakistan. But
Speaker 1: five six of the world is at peace. And areas
Speaker 1: of the world that had were torn by war for
Speaker 1: centuries haven't had a war in in decades. Western Europe
Speaker 1: one of the most historically violent part so the world,
Speaker 1: hasn't had a war in in seventy years. Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: those of us who grew up remembering the war in Vietnam, Yes,
Speaker 1: and and there has not been a war in Southeast
Speaker 1: Asia and since a small skirmish between China and Vietnam
Speaker 1: in the late eighties. Uh then, and it isn't just war,
Speaker 1: it's also one on one crime, which actually kills more
Speaker 1: people than wars in most years, other than in world wars.
Speaker 1: But the rate of crime has gone down. Everyone knows
Speaker 1: that it's gone down in the United States, but it
Speaker 1: seems to have gone down globally as well, especially if
Speaker 1: you look at even earlier periods in the history the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, the rate of homicide was about thirty five
Speaker 1: times what it is today. So there was that wasn't
Speaker 1: even more dramatic decline, and it's homicides that killed the
Speaker 1: majority of people. So you mentioned the Middle Ages in
Speaker 1: the book you described the six major historical clients of violence.
Speaker 1: Let's skip ahead too. I think it was the third
Speaker 1: or fourth decline, which was the the invention of the
Speaker 1: printing press and the spread of literal Why is that
Speaker 1: someonepactful on reducing violence. Well, it's a conjecture. The the
Speaker 1: phenomenon we're trying to explain is why there was a
Speaker 1: cascade of humanitarian reforms around the time of the European
Speaker 1: Enlightenment the second half of the eighteenth century. Also, of
Speaker 1: course the time of the American Declaration of Independence and
Speaker 1: Bill of Rights, which was a kind of product of
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment. Why why did people wake up in the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century and say, well, maybe we should stop burning heretics,
Speaker 1: or maybe we should stop executing people for stealing a cabbage. Uh,
Speaker 1: maybe slavery isn't such a great idea when you come
Speaker 1: down and try to justify it. Maybe we should stop
Speaker 1: watching animals tear each other apart for entertainment. Maybe we
Speaker 1: should stop throwing debtors in in prison. So all of
Speaker 1: these reforms concentrated in a in a few decades, and
Speaker 1: we have to ask why, then, why did it take
Speaker 1: people millennia to figure out that might be something a
Speaker 1: wee bit wrong with slavery, and so one the first
Speaker 1: hypothesis is, well, maybe people got richer, and uh, if
Speaker 1: your life is more pleasant, then you value life more generally,
Speaker 1: and so you value the lives of others. But the
Speaker 1: timing doesn't work because people only started to get rich
Speaker 1: other than the kings and aristocrats in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and these reforms were really products of the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: So I suggested that maybe it's the rise of literacy
Speaker 1: and printing in the exchange of ideas, and that was
Speaker 1: the only technology that showed an increase in productivity prior
Speaker 1: to the Industrial Revolution. The cost of printing a book
Speaker 1: plunged in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. There was kind
Speaker 1: of an early version of Moore's law if you look
Speaker 1: at the cost of producing a book. More and more
Speaker 1: people were reading. They were best sellers. There were novels.
Speaker 1: They're also pamphlets in the first newspapers. So the world
Speaker 1: got more connected. People could exchange ideas, bad ideas could
Speaker 1: be criticized. People would get together in also in cities,
Speaker 1: in uh coffee houses and pubs and saloons to exchange ideas,
Speaker 1: and it's possible that first of all, that could increase
Speaker 1: your your circle of empathy. It's harder to dehumanize people
Speaker 1: when you read their words, when you see what life
Speaker 1: was like from their point of view. And also when
Speaker 1: you have ideas being brought together and people debating them
Speaker 1: and arguing them over them, then bad ideas tend to
Speaker 1: be filtered out. So the idea that the reason that
Speaker 1: there was a crop failure is because of witchcraft, for example,
Speaker 1: the reason that there was an epidemic is because the
Speaker 1: Jews poisoned the wells. Slavery is a good thing because
Speaker 1: Africans can't do anything but be slaves. All of these
Speaker 1: toxic ideas could start to seem ridiculous when you know
Speaker 1: more about the world, and that was conceivably accelerated by
Speaker 1: the exchange of printed matter. So education helps reduce violence
Speaker 1: by making people less likely to believe silliness and nonsense
Speaker 1: and more likely to understand basic science and the logic
Speaker 1: of This causes that not witchcraft on average over the
Speaker 1: long run, not in every case, because there have been
Speaker 1: toxic ideas that have been advanced by intellectuals. Uh Communism,
Speaker 1: for example, responsible for massive numbers of deaths, was an
Speaker 1: intellectual movement, and Nazism there were plenty of Nazi professors.
Speaker 1: But I think that when you have freedom of speech,
Speaker 1: freedom of expression, so you don't get thrown in jail
Speaker 1: by criticizing a bad idea, then it's more likely that
Speaker 1: the bad ideas will be exposed. And it's not a
Speaker 1: coincidence that repressive regimes are also repressive in um clapping
Speaker 1: down on free speech. So we've seen a huge decrease
Speaker 1: in crime and violence in the United States over the
Speaker 1: past thirty years. Some people have attributed it to things
Speaker 1: like the ending of lead paper and apartments. Other people
Speaker 1: have looked at the removal of various outlives to gasoline
Speaker 1: taking the lead out of gasoline. UH. The guys from
Speaker 1: Freakonomics even have gone so far as to suggest Roe v.
Speaker 1: Wade is a factor. Why the huge fall off just
Speaker 1: in the most recent few decades. Yes, so, starting there
Speaker 1: was an eight year decline of violent crime in the
Speaker 1: United States, which brought it down to almost half of
Speaker 1: its peak UH. And then surprisingly around O seven oh eight,
Speaker 1: there was a second decline which no one predicted. Everyone said, well,
Speaker 1: we have great recession, unemployment, crime is going to go up,
Speaker 1: in equality UH and and crime went down instead of
Speaker 1: going up. H. The honest answer is, no one really
Speaker 1: knows what all the causes were. Probably the cute theories
Speaker 1: like lead in the gasoline abortion are are wrong um
Speaker 1: the AUH. And it may be that a number of
Speaker 1: things went right around the same time. Among them were
Speaker 1: an increase in the number of police in a change
Speaker 1: in police tactics of policing got smarter nationwide, The homicide
Speaker 1: rate absolutely plunged. In rates of other types of crime
Speaker 1: like rape and assault and UH and robbery also went down.
Speaker 1: And then there are also changes that no one really
Speaker 1: can completely explain in the culture because there you also
Speaker 1: had a decline in teenage pregnancy, decline in insurance fraud,
Speaker 1: a decline in drug use. So somehow people got a
Speaker 1: little bit more civilized starting in the nineties on top
Speaker 1: of these other changes. So last question. You've noted that
Speaker 1: the economic benefits of affluence, really a post nineteenth century phenomena,
Speaker 1: did not have a big impact on on violent crime. Well,
Speaker 1: what why do you imagine that is? Well, it didn't
Speaker 1: have an impact on institutionalized violence, on slavery, on grizzly
Speaker 1: torture as a form of criminal punishment like breaking on
Speaker 1: the wheel and burning on this, on the stake um,
Speaker 1: on hundreds of capital crimes on the lawbooks, so it's
Speaker 1: really meaning crimes that there was a death penalty for
Speaker 1: but did not involve homicide exactly. That's right, criticizing the
Speaker 1: Royal garden being in the company. Listen, I understand some
Speaker 1: of these other things, but if you're going to criticize
Speaker 1: the royal that's it. That's amazing that a capital It
Speaker 1: is amazing. England had four capital crimes on the books
Speaker 1: and the prior to the nineteenth century, So the affluence
Speaker 1: didn't didn't institution I think affluence does affect certain kinds
Speaker 1: of violence. So, for example, countries that are at the
Speaker 1: rock bottom end of the poverty scale and make less
Speaker 1: than less than fift dollars GDP per capita are much
Speaker 1: more likely to have civil wars, although once you climb
Speaker 1: above that level then there isn't a clear relationship between
Speaker 1: civil war and affluence. But certainly rock bottom poverty is
Speaker 1: a contributor to civil war um in general, but not
Speaker 1: not always. It's the poorer sectors of psycho of society
Speaker 1: that are more crime prone. So there is there is
Speaker 1: some relationship, but it's not a not a perfect relationship.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry rit Halt. You're listening to Masters in Business
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Professor Stephen Pinker.
Speaker 1: He is professor of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard,
Speaker 1: author of numerous books, winner of numerous awards. His most
Speaker 1: recent book is Sense of Style. And let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about the way people communicate today with the
Speaker 1: written word. What's the impact of the digital realm on writing?
Speaker 1: I don't think there's a simple answer to that, because
Speaker 1: there isn't one thing called writing. And when people it's
Speaker 1: a question, I get a lot. Well, now that people
Speaker 1: are writing a hundred forty characters for Twitter and instant
Speaker 1: messages and emails, isn't the language going to deteriorate? And
Speaker 1: the answer is no, because we don't just write in
Speaker 1: tweets or in instant messages. We all command of variety
Speaker 1: of styles for different formats. We don't speak the same
Speaker 1: way when giving a lecture as we do um speaking
Speaker 1: to our family across the dinner table. Uh. Text message
Speaker 1: is going to be different from a funeral ooration. And
Speaker 1: so just looking at one kind of writing and saying well,
Speaker 1: that's what's going to happen to the language in general
Speaker 1: just isn't valid because we tailor our our language to
Speaker 1: the medium. What about technologies like power point and the
Speaker 1: tendency for people to try and communicate by numbered bullet points.
Speaker 1: There there's good power point, there's bad power point. Uh.
Speaker 1: In science of scientific presentations are done in power point. Um.
Speaker 1: Science has not shut down or or even slow down. It's,
Speaker 1: if anything, accelerating, and power Point by mixing text and
Speaker 1: images can be and video and audio can be remarkably powerful.
Speaker 1: We've all sat through horrific power point presentations where just
Speaker 1: binalities are are broken up into bullets. Uh so, but
Speaker 1: it's like it's like writing and saying, like, what does
Speaker 1: what does print do to the language? Well, there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot of drivell that people write down, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of brilliance that people write down, but they
Speaker 1: met PowerPoint medium opens up huge possibilities. Sturgeon's law applies
Speaker 1: to everything. In other words, exactly. Um So, so let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about how vocabulary and grammar of
Speaker 1: English have changed, what drives these changes, and how much
Speaker 1: has the English language changed just over the past century. Uh,
Speaker 1: it hasn't changed so much that you can't understand uh
Speaker 1: writing that was set down a hundred years ago. You know,
Speaker 1: if you have a look at a copy of the
Speaker 1: New York Times from and we can understand pretty much
Speaker 1: all of it. But it feels different. The style was
Speaker 1: more formal. There's been an informalization of style that might
Speaker 1: parallel the informalization of everything else. The fact that gentlemen
Speaker 1: don't wear ties everywhere, and that women don't wear white gloves, us,
Speaker 1: the fact that we refer to each other on a
Speaker 1: first name basis instead of Mr. And Mrs So and
Speaker 1: so all the time, and writing has gotten more casual
Speaker 1: as society has gotten more democratic, or at least the
Speaker 1: look and feel is more democratized. Uh, And vocabulary definitely
Speaker 1: turns over. If you look at an episode of contemporary
Speaker 1: show that was set in the past, like Downton Abbey,
Speaker 1: linguists of often had a field day at flagging all
Speaker 1: of the idioms and figures of speech that just didn't
Speaker 1: exist in the nineteen teens that the writers, UH kind
Speaker 1: of anachronistically put in. There's all there's a lot of turnover.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is. It is kind of random.
Speaker 1: There's drift in and out. People an old saying will
Speaker 1: will just sound fusty and old fashioned, and younger people
Speaker 1: stop using it, and they'll introduce new figures of speech.
Speaker 1: And so there's a constant turnover, which is why if
Speaker 1: you go back more than a hundred years, so you
Speaker 1: go back to Shakespeare, it's not often not that easy
Speaker 1: to understand what the references were because the vocabulary is obsolete.
Speaker 1: One of the things you you wrote in the book
Speaker 1: that I thought was quite interesting, many of the alleged
Speaker 1: rules of writing are actually superstitions. Explain what that means.
Speaker 1: So many of us have been under the impression that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't ought not to split an infinitive. So instead
Speaker 1: of saying um, as Captain Cricket did, too boldly go
Speaker 1: where no man has gone before, you should say to
Speaker 1: go boldly where no man has gone before. That's a
Speaker 1: perfect example of a superstition. There's absolutely no reason to
Speaker 1: avoid a split infinitive. The whole rule came from a
Speaker 1: kind of thick witted analogy to Latin, where you can't
Speaker 1: split an infinitive. But there's abolutely no reason to avoid
Speaker 1: spending with the proposition. Exactly so Shakespeare wrote, we are
Speaker 1: such stuff as dreams are made on. You're gonna go
Speaker 1: tell Shakespeare that he made a grammatical error. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry rid Helts. You're listening to Man Sessters in
Speaker 1: Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Professor Stephen
Speaker 1: pinker Uh, professor of psychology and linguistics at Harvard University.
Speaker 1: Let's jump into some of the really fascinating things that
Speaker 1: you have written about. There's there's one that really struck me.
Speaker 1: Let's go start right off on the wonky linguistical things.
Speaker 1: What's the difference between common knowledge and shared knowledge? Because
Speaker 1: they seem so similar. Yeah. Shared knowledge is when you
Speaker 1: know something and I know something. Common knowledge is a
Speaker 1: term from game theory and logic is when I know something,
Speaker 1: you know something. I know that you know it, you
Speaker 1: know that I know it, I know that you know
Speaker 1: that I know that you know that I know it,
Speaker 1: at infinitum, and that makes a difference. It makes a
Speaker 1: difference in um logically, there's certain things that you can
Speaker 1: deduce if something is commonly known that as you know
Speaker 1: that I know that you know it, and it makes
Speaker 1: a difference. I think in our everyday lives when we
Speaker 1: have an expression like the emperor's new clothes, what are
Speaker 1: we referring to? And the little boy said, the emperor
Speaker 1: is naked. He wasn't telling anyone anything that they didn't
Speaker 1: already know. They could see the emperor was naked. So
Speaker 1: why did it? Why was it such a big deal? Well,
Speaker 1: at that moment, everyone knew that everyone else knew that
Speaker 1: everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the emperor
Speaker 1: was naked, and that allowed them to challenge the emperor's
Speaker 1: authority by breaking out into laughter. But before the little
Speaker 1: boy said that, people didn't realize that they had a
Speaker 1: shared knowledge of his there was could there could be
Speaker 1: a you know, a little scintilla of doubt. You know,
Speaker 1: I can see it, but how do I know that
Speaker 1: everyone else can see it? And how do I know
Speaker 1: that they know that that I know? And that makes
Speaker 1: it by it makes a difference in technology, especially for
Speaker 1: uh what they call network externalities, That is when the
Speaker 1: advantage of a technology depends on everyone else using it,
Speaker 1: and so to generate a next network externality, you need
Speaker 1: to generate common knowledge. And the best example is from
Speaker 1: Michael Choa is when Apple introduced the Macintosh back I
Speaker 1: think it was the most expensive commercial ever made. They
Speaker 1: introduced it and the Super Bowl played once directed by
Speaker 1: Ridley Scott, exactly the famous commercial. Now, the thing is,
Speaker 1: no matter how good a computer Macintosh is, no one
Speaker 1: is going to buy it if they think that they're
Speaker 1: the only one buying it, because there won't be enough software,
Speaker 1: there won't be enough peripherals. You have to know two things.
Speaker 1: You have to know. Number one, it's a good computer.
Speaker 1: Number two, everyone knows that. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows
Speaker 1: that it's a good computer. And that's why you had
Speaker 1: to introduce it with a um with something that made
Speaker 1: a splash that you knew when you were watching the
Speaker 1: super Bowl that the whole country is watching the super Bowl,
Speaker 1: and so you knew that this product was going to
Speaker 1: be its advantages were going to be common knowledge as
Speaker 1: opposed to share knowledge. So so it's more than just
Speaker 1: the network effects like a fax machine or what have you.
Speaker 1: It's the network effect plus everybody recognizing that this is now. Well,
Speaker 1: that's how you create the network effects. You have to
Speaker 1: generate common knowledge. And the easiest way to generate common
Speaker 1: knowledge is if there's an event that everyone can witness
Speaker 1: while knowing that everyone else's witnessing the super bowls. That's
Speaker 1: why the ads in the super Bowl get almost as
Speaker 1: much coverage of the super Bowl itself, because that's where
Speaker 1: companies that introduce a product that depends on a network
Speaker 1: effect will introduce the company. Monster dot com is another example.
Speaker 1: Might be a great employment site, but who's going to
Speaker 1: go there unless they think that employers are advertising jobs
Speaker 1: and vice versa. Who's going to advertise there unless you
Speaker 1: know that people are going to be looking for jobs,
Speaker 1: And so you make a big splash on a super
Speaker 1: Bowl at Let let me continue along u surprisingly interesting things.
Speaker 1: Why do we have facial expressions and what functions do
Speaker 1: they serve. Yeah, it's not just too you might say
Speaker 1: it wouldn't it be best to keep a poker face
Speaker 1: and not to know, not to show your cards. Uh.
Speaker 1: Facial expressions can um can signal the credibility of a
Speaker 1: threat or a promise, and in a study that I
Speaker 1: did with Ian Reid and Peter de Sholey, we found
Speaker 1: that threats are more credible when they're delivered with an
Speaker 1: angry expression and tone of voice, because they are involuntary
Speaker 1: unless you're a really really good actor, unless they're perceived
Speaker 1: as real as sincere, because they are sincere in most cases.
Speaker 1: So people aren't that good at controlling their facial expressions.
Speaker 1: So we've seen I've read about other studies where they
Speaker 1: look at people smiling and apparently an actual smile involves
Speaker 1: the eyes, and a fake smile just involves the mouth,
Speaker 1: and on a subconscious level, people can see and and
Speaker 1: tell the difference. Is am I telling that right? Or
Speaker 1: absolutely sure? When the you know, when the flight attendant
Speaker 1: says bye bye, bye bye with the grin pasted on
Speaker 1: her face, you know that she's not actually experiencing joy.
Speaker 1: And it's usually because the sincere smile as along with
Speaker 1: a crinkling of the eyes, not just the mouth in
Speaker 1: a U shape. So this combines both the visual cognition
Speaker 1: and the uh the language aspect of this as well,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. Indeed, And talking to speaking of common knowledge,
Speaker 1: which we discussed earlier in the program, why do people blush?
Speaker 1: That's a puzzle that I've thought about, and I think
Speaker 1: that which is unlike other facial expressions, which are conveyed
Speaker 1: by contracting muscles, with blushing, You've got this rush of
Speaker 1: blood to the face. And I think it's because it's um.
Speaker 1: It generates common knowledge. That is when the thing about
Speaker 1: blushing is you uh. When you blush, you feel it
Speaker 1: from the inside and you display it from the on
Speaker 1: the outside, and you know that everyone knows that you're blushing.
Speaker 1: And in fact, when someone says you're a blushing that
Speaker 1: makes it all the worst. You blush all the more
Speaker 1: beat red. So with the genuine and sincere and both
Speaker 1: parties understand what it means exactly, it's I I messed up,
Speaker 1: and I know that I messed up. And I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to pull anything over on you. I'm not not
Speaker 1: a psychopath. I'm not a cheater. I have the same
Speaker 1: standards that you did, and I know that I messed up,
Speaker 1: which is a way of knowing that the person is
Speaker 1: less likely to mess up in the future if at
Speaker 1: least he recognizes that he messed up. So blushing embarrassment
Speaker 1: isn't acknowledgement of common ethical standards? Is that? Is that
Speaker 1: how common morality? Am I mistating that? That's right, common norms,
Speaker 1: that's right, But in particular the common knowledge, in that
Speaker 1: technical sense of if I'm blushing, then not, I know
Speaker 1: that you know that I know that I've messed up,
Speaker 1: and that means that I, by blushing, I'm acknowledging that
Speaker 1: I'm playing by the same rules. So I mentioned morality
Speaker 1: and ethics. One of the columns you had written, I
Speaker 1: think it was for The Times talked about three people,
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, and Norman Borlog And if you
Speaker 1: were to ask various people, who's the most admirable of
Speaker 1: these three people, who is the most um has had
Speaker 1: the greatest impact on on humans? Most most people get
Speaker 1: the answers to that wrong. Yes, I mean the common
Speaker 1: answer as well. You know Mother Teresa, she said, you
Speaker 1: know a saint. She is the most. In fact, if
Speaker 1: you ask someone who is the most moral person of
Speaker 1: the entry, they would say, oh, I guess Mother Teresa.
Speaker 1: And I think, what exactly did she do? I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, she washed the feet of some you know,
Speaker 1: lepers and brought them well help them. I mean, how
Speaker 1: did she actually make them less poor? Temporarily for a
Speaker 1: meal or two? But for a meal or two. But
Speaker 1: then you look at um Bill Gates, and I used
Speaker 1: the example at a time before he became famous as
Speaker 1: a philanthropist and was just starting the Bill and Melinda
Speaker 1: Gates Foundation. Um, he's trying to conquer infectious disease in
Speaker 1: the developing world with a the chance of improving the
Speaker 1: lives of tens of millions of people, of saving tens
Speaker 1: of millions of lives. Then Norman borlog I threw in,
Speaker 1: because that's a fascinating so I never heard of him.
Speaker 1: He won the Nobel Peace Price for uh inventing the
Speaker 1: Green Revolution in the nineteen sixties, developing crops and methods
Speaker 1: of farming that multiplied the amount of food that an
Speaker 1: acre of land would deliver. He's credited with saving a
Speaker 1: billion lives, more than anyone in history, and no one's
Speaker 1: heard of him he wins, and yet is totally unknown.
Speaker 1: So what it shows is that our sense that our
Speaker 1: own ascription of morality, who we revere, who we don't
Speaker 1: care about, who we even maybe even revile. By the way,
Speaker 1: the other reason I chose Bill Gates was at the
Speaker 1: time that he was associated with ms DOS and windows
Speaker 1: everyone hated and so everyone hated him. He got up
Speaker 1: someone through a pianist face. There were I Hate Gates
Speaker 1: websites at the time. Uh. It so our our description
Speaker 1: of morality, who we give brownie points to is very
Speaker 1: loosely related to how much good they do in the world.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's actually a quirk of our own nature
Speaker 1: of who we admire. I think it relates to who
Speaker 1: we would like to have on our side and our
Speaker 1: foxhole part of our community, and it isn't really closely
Speaker 1: related to how much good they do in the world. So,
Speaker 1: if people want to find line more of your writings
Speaker 1: online in addition to all your various books, where's the
Speaker 1: best place to send them? Stephen Pinker dot com is
Speaker 1: my website that has links to all of my articles,
Speaker 1: as well as two pages for each one of my books.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation. Be sure and stick around
Speaker 1: and listen to our podcast extras, where we keep the
Speaker 1: tape rolling and continue to chat about all things cognitive
Speaker 1: and linguistic. Be sure and check out my daily column
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at rit Halts. I'm Barry rit Halts. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Are you looking to
Speaker 1: take your business to the next level? The accounting, tax
Speaker 1: and advisory professionals from cone Resnick can guide you. Cone
Speaker 1: Resnick delivers industry expertise and forward thinking perspective that can
Speaker 1: help turn business possibilities into business opportunities. Look ahead, gain insight,
Speaker 1: imagine more. Is your business ready to break through? Learn
Speaker 1: more at cone Resnick dot com slash Breakthrough, cone Reisneck
Speaker 1: Accounting Text Advisory. Welcome to the podcast, Steve, I don't
Speaker 1: want to call you Professor Panker. Steve, what Steve? Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for doing this. This is really I
Speaker 1: love this stuff. I find it endlessly fascinating and anytime
Speaker 1: I can weave cognition into what investors should be looking at,
Speaker 1: thinking about, and just stimulating their thought process to develop
Speaker 1: better mental models and better processes to approach this stuff.
Speaker 1: I think it's just fascinating, and it's your work is
Speaker 1: so diverse that you're obviously fascinated by so much of this.
Speaker 1: It's apparent and everything I read of yours absolutely and
Speaker 1: thank you for having me on. Well, it's been it's
Speaker 1: been my pleasure. There are some questions we didn't get
Speaker 1: to before I do my standard questions, but some of
Speaker 1: these I just have to come back to. So in
Speaker 1: the ninet fifties, comic books were going to turn juveniles
Speaker 1: into delinquents. And what happened subsequent to that, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: nineties were was a decade of very low crime, and
Speaker 1: then the nines same thing. Video games We're going to
Speaker 1: cause people to become ultra violent, especially the first person
Speaker 1: shooter games. It's easy to imagine how that might happen,
Speaker 1: but it didn't happen. That was the era in which
Speaker 1: crime plummeted, and then in general, television, transistor radio's rock
Speaker 1: and roll music videos were decades where people were supposed
Speaker 1: to get stupid. That's right, and actually i Q scores
Speaker 1: have been increasing for decades, the so called Flynn effect. Well,
Speaker 1: crime did go up in the nineteen sixties and it
Speaker 1: stayed high from the sixties through the early nineties, so
Speaker 1: not all of so. So the people who said that
Speaker 1: when rock and roll was coming in that they would
Speaker 1: lead to a breakdown of order and safety weren't completely wrong,
Speaker 1: and that there was a crime shot up by a
Speaker 1: factor of more than two. So it was rock and roll.
Speaker 1: It wasn't an ill considered war in Southeast Asia. It
Speaker 1: was music. Well it wasn't rock and roll. But but
Speaker 1: although it wasn't, the war in Asia probably didn't lead
Speaker 1: to a rise in street crime in uh in the
Speaker 1: United States either, but it did lead to So what
Speaker 1: what I remember New York City in the seventies was
Speaker 1: a disaster. What led to a breakdown in those basic
Speaker 1: societal norms of not robbing and killing and raping? How
Speaker 1: does that go off the rails? Again, the the honest
Speaker 1: answers that we don't know for sure, but a number
Speaker 1: of things happened. The baby boomer generation reached its crime
Speaker 1: prone years in the sixties. That wasn't enough to explain it,
Speaker 1: that would explain why violent crime would increase by violent
Speaker 1: crime in fact increase, But it may be that having
Speaker 1: a whole generation coming of age at the same time
Speaker 1: overwhelmed societies defenses, and it was a time in which
Speaker 1: there was a civil unrest, change in rights. There was
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of a whole bunch of things, and
Speaker 1: a general you know, we we grew up uh in it.
Speaker 1: There was a decline respect for authority. The police backed off.
Speaker 1: There is some truth to the the explanation that the
Speaker 1: criminal justice system was less likely to put people behind bars?
Speaker 1: What about the broken window thesis? To any of that,
Speaker 1: there there is evidence that that that the broken windows
Speaker 1: effect is real. That is, if a neighborhood shows signs
Speaker 1: of disrepair, the famous broken windows, graffiti, turnstile jumping, and
Speaker 1: so on, then that conveys the message that that this
Speaker 1: is a place where the rules are not enforced. And
Speaker 1: there's some experiments that show that increasing the general appearance
Speaker 1: of order leads to a decrease in in the rate
Speaker 1: of crime. It doesn't deserve all the credit, but it
Speaker 1: may be deserved part of it. I find that I
Speaker 1: find that fascinating. Let me see what else I skipped through. Oh,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the long piece. When we were talking
Speaker 1: about from Better Angels, the various six phases of um
Speaker 1: decrease in violence. What what exactly is the long piece
Speaker 1: and what was the cause of it? Long piece refers
Speaker 1: to the fact that war between great powers that the
Speaker 1: eight pound guerrillas of the world um has kind of stopped.
Speaker 1: The last one that we had was in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three with the end of the Korean War, with the
Speaker 1: United States on one side in China on the other.
Speaker 1: Was that really a US versus China though, I mean,
Speaker 1: I know there were a lot of proxies, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't like World War Two where Germany and Russia and
Speaker 1: US and Japan were literally doing battles with each other. Well,
Speaker 1: there was a coalition that the United Nations authorized, with
Speaker 1: of course the United States contributing the most troops and weaponry,
Speaker 1: and of course the North Korea had its own army,
Speaker 1: but supported by overtly by China and with the USS
Speaker 1: are definitely helping, although not sending troops. But through most
Speaker 1: of history the great powers were always at each other's throats,
Speaker 1: and then after World War Two that that kind of
Speaker 1: um went out of style, as did wars between developed states,
Speaker 1: that is, rich countries. We we think of war is
Speaker 1: something that takes place in the poor, backward parts of
Speaker 1: the world. But it used to be that it was
Speaker 1: the rich countries that were constantly at war, and that
Speaker 1: has gone out of style, and wars between countries in general.
Speaker 1: Most wars now are civil wars, wars between interstate war
Speaker 1: as opposed to interstate war, and UM. A number of things.
Speaker 1: One is that the world has become more globalized. When
Speaker 1: you when there's more trade, there is less of an
Speaker 1: incentive to go to war. You don't. You don't kill
Speaker 1: your customers because your supply chain or your supply chain exactly,
Speaker 1: you don't. It's cheaper to buy things than to steal
Speaker 1: them than you don't. Uh, You're you're less likely to
Speaker 1: plunder and invade. There's been with the United Nations, there
Speaker 1: has been a norm that borders are pretty much grandfathered in,
Speaker 1: So you don't push borders around by force. You don't
Speaker 1: swallow states that states are are now considered to be immortal.
Speaker 1: They can break apart, but they can't be swallowed by
Speaker 1: their neighbors. Uh. There is more democracy, and on average,
Speaker 1: democracies are a little bit less likely to wage war,
Speaker 1: at least on each other. And I think there's more
Speaker 1: of a respect for human life. The idea that you
Speaker 1: should die for your country, that it's glorious and sweet
Speaker 1: and the best thing that you could do. And conversely,
Speaker 1: that leaders can sacrifice millions of their own young men
Speaker 1: for the glory of the empire is uh less an
Speaker 1: operation now than it used to be. So before I
Speaker 1: get to my favorite questions, I would be remiss if
Speaker 1: I didn't ask about the debate over gene editing. If
Speaker 1: people not familiar with Crisper. There's been a huge number
Speaker 1: of articles, most recently in Wired magazine, describing how this
Speaker 1: has made what was once time consuming, complex and expensive,
Speaker 1: very inexpensive and relatively easy to do. What is the
Speaker 1: advances in biotech say about current morality and why are
Speaker 1: some people on one side or the other of that debate?
Speaker 1: There's there's a widespread fear that first popped up when
Speaker 1: Dolly the Sheep was cloned in and it's been revived
Speaker 1: now with the development of Crisper Cassinine making it easy
Speaker 1: to edit genes that will be designing our own children
Speaker 1: very soon. We'll we'll put in the gene for musical ability,
Speaker 1: or athletic ability or high i Q. I think that's
Speaker 1: very likely, unlikely. I think it is possible. That you
Speaker 1: could edit out disease genes. But having looked at the
Speaker 1: genetic basis of personality and intelligence, I can tell you
Speaker 1: that there ain't no i Q gene. There are. There
Speaker 1: may be a thousand genes, each one of which raises
Speaker 1: or lowers your i Q by a tenth of a point,
Speaker 1: but the single gene that's going to give you musical
Speaker 1: talent or athletic ability just doesn't exist. That's just not
Speaker 1: the way genes work. There is a genetic basis to
Speaker 1: talent and personality, but seems to be distributed across hundreds
Speaker 1: or thousands of genes, each with a tiny effect, many
Speaker 1: of which may have side effects. That is, there may
Speaker 1: be a gene that increases your um likelihood of being smart,
Speaker 1: but also slightly increases your rate of having bipolar disorder
Speaker 1: or of some kind of degenerative disease. So I don't
Speaker 1: see parents taking the chance with their children at any
Speaker 1: time soon of mucking around with the with the embryo
Speaker 1: by putting in a few genes, each of which might
Speaker 1: increase the i Q by a tiny fraction of a point,
Speaker 1: but might also introduce some some risks. So I'm glad
Speaker 1: I brought that up because us. I've read some of
Speaker 1: the pieces you've written on that and thought it was interesting.
Speaker 1: Let me get to my I know I only have
Speaker 1: you for another ten minutes or so, so let me
Speaker 1: get to some of my favorite questions I asked all
Speaker 1: my guests. So your background is really kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: Did you know you always wanted to be a professor?
Speaker 1: Did you always want to go into teaching? I certainly
Speaker 1: enjoyed teaching from the time I was in uh in college.
Speaker 1: I put myself through college by tutoring high school students
Speaker 1: in math and science. Uh For a while, I thought, you,
Speaker 1: maybe I'd would be fun to be a high school
Speaker 1: math teacher, but I UH my mother, among others, convinced
Speaker 1: me that university was really a place for me. That
Speaker 1: adding to knowledge as well as transmitting knowledge was seemed
Speaker 1: to be what I enjoyed doing. Nicely done, rose Um.
Speaker 1: Next question, early mentors. Who were some of the people
Speaker 1: who uh um entered you and gave you intellectual direction
Speaker 1: As an undergraduate, I was a student at McGill University
Speaker 1: and was in the psychology department there, and I worked
Speaker 1: in a lab of a cognitive psychologist named Albert Bregman.
Speaker 1: Who studied auditory pattern perception, how we the brain makes
Speaker 1: sense of the world of sound. In university, one of
Speaker 1: my advisors was Roger Brown, the great social psychologist and
Speaker 1: founder of the study of child language acquisition in children
Speaker 1: and a gifted writer, and I think I took lessons
Speaker 1: from him on writing how to try to write stylishly.
Speaker 1: Stephen Kostlin was my mentor in visual cognition. He's now
Speaker 1: the academic dean of Minerva University, a startup university based
Speaker 1: in San Francisco. Interesting is interesting group, and it seems, um,
Speaker 1: you took something from each of those folks and took
Speaker 1: one more is a Joan Bresnan, who is a linguist
Speaker 1: at m I T. At the time she was a
Speaker 1: student of Noam Chomskys. She was my post doctoral advisor. Ah,
Speaker 1: there you go. That that's quite a quite a list.
Speaker 1: You referenced Chomsky quite frequently in many of the books, obviously, Um,
Speaker 1: he is a leader in this field. Uh. My next
Speaker 1: question is what are some of your favorite books, whether
Speaker 1: it relates to UH language and and linguistics or or
Speaker 1: anything else. Noam Chomsky was my colleague a M I
Speaker 1: T for twenty one years. And he was in a
Speaker 1: different department, but he was certainly an influence from the
Speaker 1: time that I was an undergraduate, particularly his books in
Speaker 1: in linguistics. Language in Mind was a book that I
Speaker 1: read as an undergraduate. I don't certainly don't share his politics,
Speaker 1: but uh and I nor do I subscribe to his
Speaker 1: particular theory of how language works. But he broke open
Speaker 1: the field of language and really deserves credit for the
Speaker 1: modern understanding of language. Any other books stand out as
Speaker 1: whether it's fiction non fixed in related Uh, Well, I'm
Speaker 1: married to a novelist, Rebecca Goldstein, and her book The
Speaker 1: Mind Body Problem I read many years before I met her.
Speaker 1: They really remember that old ad? The guy Victor Kayam
Speaker 1: and got a Shavery said, I liked it, so what
Speaker 1: the company bought the company? Well, I liked the novelists
Speaker 1: so much that I married her. That that's very very funny. Um, So,
Speaker 1: since you really started in psycholinguistics and and visual cognition,
Speaker 1: what are some of the major changes that have taken
Speaker 1: place in that industry or that field of study? I
Speaker 1: should really call it, certainly the rise of neuroimaging. Functional
Speaker 1: magnetic resonance imaging was revolutionized the field, being able to
Speaker 1: see what part of the brain lights up in response
Speaker 1: to different stimulus, different processes. Is that is that specifically
Speaker 1: what you're referring to exactly, yeah, and that that has
Speaker 1: been the single biggest change, And how does that manifest
Speaker 1: this often in the study of language, well, you can
Speaker 1: see how words are processed in the brain. UM. You
Speaker 1: can see how um grammatical processing is implemented. That is,
Speaker 1: by and again by grammatical processing, I don't mean rules
Speaker 1: like avoiding dangling participles. I mean just ordering words in
Speaker 1: a way that makes sense what we do every time
Speaker 1: we open our mouths and produce a sentence. And you
Speaker 1: can see also the pattern of information flow from one
Speaker 1: part of the brain to another, because it's not as
Speaker 1: if one blob of the brain is responsible for all
Speaker 1: the language there is. You have to coordinate your understanding
Speaker 1: of what words mean, your knowledge of in English syntax,
Speaker 1: the control of the muscles of your tongue. UH. In conversation,
Speaker 1: you go back and forth between speaking and listening, So
Speaker 1: it also involves hooking up uh speech information coming in
Speaker 1: from the ear. UH. You have to hold things in
Speaker 1: memory as you start a sentence. You have to know
Speaker 1: where you're going. So, a lot of different part of
Speaker 1: the brain are involved in language, forming a kind of network,
Speaker 1: and narrow imaging helps you see the different parts of the
Speaker 1: the network and how they interact. I recall reading about
Speaker 1: aphasiacs and other damages to physical damages to the brain.
Speaker 1: How important is looking at damage, physical trauma and disease
Speaker 1: too learning about language. Is that something that we did
Speaker 1: decades ago and figured out, oh, this injury causes this result.
Speaker 1: Have we moved beyond that or is that still a
Speaker 1: key part of recognizing how these brain components developed. It
Speaker 1: still is a key part. It used to be the
Speaker 1: only way that you could understand language in the brain.
Speaker 1: Um Now it's still important even in the era of
Speaker 1: neuro imaging, because your imaging tells you what is active
Speaker 1: when you are engaged in a task, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: tell you what's necessary for all you know, it could
Speaker 1: be like the lights that flash on a on a computer,
Speaker 1: that you turn off the lights, the computer still does
Speaker 1: its thing. It's kind of a spell low for effect,
Speaker 1: and you never know just from the fact that blood
Speaker 1: is going to a particular area of the brain whether
Speaker 1: actually at part of the brain is necessary for the
Speaker 1: person to do what they're doing. With brain damage, you're
Speaker 1: removing a component and or nature is removing a component,
Speaker 1: and you're seeing what they can no longer do. So
Speaker 1: it's still a supplementary form of information and an important one.
Speaker 1: So you work with a lot of college kids, people
Speaker 1: who are just starting out their career. When a millennial
Speaker 1: or recent graduate comes to you and says, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about a career in linguistics and visual cognition and in
Speaker 1: any of the subsectors of psychology that you focus on,
Speaker 1: what sort of advice do you give them? If you're
Speaker 1: if you're passionate about something, and if you're if you
Speaker 1: can see yourself throwing yourself into it, doing a lot
Speaker 1: of work, then you should pursue it as a career,
Speaker 1: even if the academic jug market is discouraging, which of
Speaker 1: course it is um it has been at various times,
Speaker 1: such as when I was a student, and I remember,
Speaker 1: I remember the advice that I got from Ronald Melzack,
Speaker 1: a professor of psychology at McGill, pioneer in the study
Speaker 1: of pain. He said, look at the bright side. People die, people,
Speaker 1: people retire, people get higher paying jobs. In industry. There's
Speaker 1: always turnover, even if the market is contracting, if you
Speaker 1: think you're good at it, if you're willing to to
Speaker 1: dedicate yourself to it, if it excites you enough that
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel like work but it feels like play,
Speaker 1: there will always be openings. And so I tell students,
Speaker 1: if they're really passionate about some intellectual topic, not to
Speaker 1: just automatically go into law or finance or consulting because
Speaker 1: that's the easy path, but that it really is still
Speaker 1: possible to make a career in what you what you love.
Speaker 1: And our our last question is what is it that
Speaker 1: you know about cognition and linguistics today that you wish
Speaker 1: you knew when you started thirty years ago? Oh? Well
Speaker 1: that UM, I think that any cognitive or psychological trait
Speaker 1: both has a heritable basis but is distributed over hundreds
Speaker 1: or thousands of genes. That there is not going to
Speaker 1: be a gene for x UM, That that there's a
Speaker 1: lot of information that can come out of looking at
Speaker 1: large data sets. That you're understanding of a subject is
Speaker 1: only as good as the data that you can examine,
Speaker 1: and that to understand something you've got to um look
Speaker 1: at as large a set of data as you can
Speaker 1: find Professor Panker, thank you so much for being so
Speaker 1: generous with your time that this has been just absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation UH, and others like this,
Speaker 1: be sure and look up an inch or down an
Speaker 1: inch at any of the other ninety two or so
Speaker 1: such conversations we've had over the past two years. Be
Speaker 1: sure to check out my daily column. It used to
Speaker 1: be Bloomberg View dot com, but I am now seeing
Speaker 1: that it is Bloomberg dot com. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at rid Halts Um. I would be remiss
Speaker 1: if I did not think Uh, Taylor Riggs for being
Speaker 1: our booker, Charlie Volmer for being our producer engineer, and
Speaker 1: Michael Batnick, head of research. I'm Barry Ri Halts. You're
Speaker 1: listening or you've been listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. Look Ahead, Imagine more, gain insight for your
Speaker 1: industry with forward thinking advice from the professionals at Cone Resnick.
Speaker 1: Is your business ready to break through? Find out more
Speaker 1: at Cone Resnick dot com slash Breakthrough