LITMIR.BIZ

FIGURE 2.5 Two very different kinds of meetings—one originating with a brain-bound view of cognition, the other with an extended view of cognition.

      • Make concepts visible

      • Design the environment

      • Explore multiple frames

      • Use the whole body

      • Make it safe to share

      Although this is an incomplete list, we provide it to show how all this theoretical discourse might be applied in a daily activity. Our concerns are practical rather than theoretical—we’re more interested in utility than truth. First, how do people understand information, especially when they have a lot of it? And second, how can we make information more understandable? Understanding the underlying theories of cognition provides us with a chance to radically reframe how we approach all problems of understanding.

      Becoming Smarter

      In the beginning, the web was all text, no video, not even pictures. That changed in 1993 when Marc Andreesen and a colleague, Eric Bina, released Mosaic, the first graphical web browser. This was the moment when “several million [people] noticed the web might be better than sex.”²⁸ Mosaic led to Netscape, which attracted people to the web in droves and paved the way for everything from Wi-Fi and smartphones to social media and ebooks. We are all familiar with this evolution: more powerful technologies that allow us to do more powerful things with information.

      This chapter has followed another evolution, one not widely known outside of graduate seminars and scientific journals: a new science of mind that gives us a different perspective on how we understand information. This book aims to stitch these two parallel evolutions together. In doing so, we echo the words of the cognitive scientist Don Norman, who wrote “The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained.”²⁹ Precisely.

      We don’t just think. We create tools and technologies to help us think better, understand more, and solve bigger problems. Norman reminds us that our ability to understand is limited when we try to do everything in our head, especially when we have lots of information and when the challenges are daunting, say cancer, sustainable energy, or space travel. We need to appreciate the complex interplay between prior associations, things we bring into and manipulate in the world, and how we figure things out by collaborating and cooperating with others.

      If we treat sensemaking as brainbound, the cost of understanding will be expensive, perhaps too costly. This is not to say we should never rely on what the brain can do. But when we spread the cost of understanding into the world, we open up incredible possibilities for understanding. Think of the tools that extend our physical abilities, the telescopes that let us see deep into space, or the group of people who, only by working together, could push a car up a hill. In the same way that tools or groups enhance our physical abilities, so, too, can we extend our cognitive abilities. By moving expensive operations into the world, we adjust the cost structure. By creating a map or sharing ideas, by playing with a data visualization or a deck of flashcards, by simply being allowed to point at something, we can reduce time, complexity, and errors. We increase our capacity for understanding when cognition is seen as something that happens in and through the world.

      Once we grok these ideas, we have the context for all that follows.

      The Blind Man and the Stick (Redrawing the Boundaries of Cognition)

      The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was an early advocate for the idea that we can only understand the mind by accounting for the person plus the environment. After decades of research that spanned everything from anthropology and semiotics to cybernetics and schizophrenia, Bateson concluded that boundaries were the essential question for understanding the complexity and messiness of human experience. Broadly speaking, that’s what embodiment does: redraws the boundaries of cognition.

      To comprehend the consequences, Bateson proposed a simple thought experiment:

      Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions ... If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior ... you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.³⁰

      The blind man, in Bateson’s metaphor, uses the stick to navigate the world. It provides spatial understanding. But we can make all kinds of “sticks” for all kinds of people to help them figure out all kinds of problems. Today’s stick is the smartphone, so we can rephrase Bateson as follows:

      Suppose I am a person, and I use a smartphone. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the surface of the phone? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway into the glass? But these are nonsense questions ... you need the world, the phone, the person, the world, the phone, and so on, round and round.

      If you have ever designed an app, or a website, or anything for a screen, the impulse is to start by arranging menus, images, buttons, and other widgets on a smooth pixelated surface. This decision means that understanding is hugely dependent on one place, the screen, and while not irrevocable, adjusting “where” understanding actually happens—in and through the world, the person, the phone, and so on—requires conscious effort.

      This is what we mean when we say that “understanding is about a system of resources distributed across the environment and then dynamically assembled to perform the activity and achieve a goal.” This is also a good, quick example for how these two evolutions, the evolution of technology and the evolution of our understanding of the mind, converge to unlock new possibilities.

PART

      2

      How We Understand by Associations

      Based on sensory input from our body and the environment, we recall prior associations. What we “think” may or may not be what was intended. Whether we’re having a conversation, reading words on a page, making inferences based on someone’s body language, even being affected by something as subtle as the temperature or a faint smell—all of these sensations influence the associations that come to mind, and what we ultimately think. For this reason, we say: “Associations among concepts is thinking.”

      To improve understanding at this level requires some basic knowledge about the brain as a perceptual organ and how much of what we call “thought” is really a tangled web of prior associations, associations that are activated by everything from stories to pictures to even the slightest turn of a phrase. The bulk of this section is dedicated to the many ways these associations are activated, followed by a cautionary note on the dangers and limits of associative thinking.

CHAPTER

      3

      Understanding Is Fundamentally About Associations Between Concepts

       Neo: This—This isn’t real?

       Morpheus: What is real? How do you

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