Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson

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you’re trying to understand. A relatively simple problem—with sufficient prior associations—might actually be solved “in your head,” as the expression goes. But it’s more likely the case that you will need to employ or engage with other cognitive resources in the environment, be these other people, tools, time, and so on.

      In sum, where understanding happens depends upon the nature of the problem, while how depends upon:

      • Prior associations

      • External representations

      • Interactions

      • Coordination

      This is how we’ve come to understand understanding, and how we’ve chosen to structure this book.

      Human Understanding

      You’ll notice in all this, our focus is not so much on the tools and technologies, as much as the human at the center of things. For example, we could talk about interaction in terms of interface controls—sliders and checkboxes and such, but these things change. What hasn’t changed in thousands of years are the fundamental ways in which humans interact with information. Sorting, chunking, annotating, and so on, these are not new concepts. Whether it’s saving an Instagram photo with a heart, or leaving a mark on a cave wall, the fundamental interaction pattern—annotation—is the same.

      Accordingly, this is not a “how to” book, but rather a “how to think about it” book. Bridging theory from cognitive sciences with plenty of practical examples, you’ll learn how to think about the ways humans can play with and explore difficult concepts. This will apply both in the here and now and into the future. While technologies and modalities change, the humans at the center change very slowly, over millennia not milliseconds. By knowing how we—as human creatures—get a sense of information, you’ll be prepared for most problems of understanding.

      2

      Understanding as a Function of the Brain, Body, and Environment

       I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.

      —CONFUCIUS

      In the waning years of the nineteenth century, George Stratton, a graduate student who became one of his generation’s pre-eminent psychologists, conducted a simple yet curious experiment on his eyes. What would happen, he wondered, if the world appeared upside down? Glasses aim to correct vision. Stratton crafted glasses to distort his vision by inverting the world so that up became down, left became right. In one of his experiments, he wore the glasses for eight consecutive days. When he took them off, which was rarely, and mostly to sleep, he immediately put on a blindfold. In total, Stratton spent almost 90 hours peering at the world through his distorting lenses. The rest of the time he lived in darkness, as though blind.

      Stratton’s experience began exactly as you would expect. He was clumsy and bumbled around. He experienced dizziness, headaches, and what he called a “nervous depression.” Ordinary tasks, such as pouring a glass of milk, had to be “cautiously worked out,” and he found “all but the simplest movements extremely fatiguing.”1 He was less disoriented by the second day. His vision slowly adjusted and after the eight days, when the experiment concluded, the world appeared to him as normal.

      This is known as the Stratton effect, and it’s a marvelous example of the brain’s adaptability. Stratton became so well adjusted to his topsy-turvy lenses that when he finally took them off, he faced the same problem: the world appeared to be flipped. Once again, he stumbled, grew dizzy, and used his left hand to reach for items to his right. And once again, his visual system adapted. A few days after removing the glasses, his vision was just as before.

      Stratton’s curious experiment has been repeated many times with lenses that distort the world in different ways and with similar results. People experience nausea and clumsiness, slowly adapt, and if they wear the glasses long enough, the world stops looking weird. Hubert Dolezal, for example, attached inverted lenses to a football helmet during a five-week visit to a small village in Greece. Once he overcame the initial awkwardness, Dolezal adapted so well that he was able to bike, swim, and read.2 Hundreds of similar experiments have been conducted over the years, including dozens of long-term experiments in Japan, where people have worn the glasses for as long as 21 days.3

      That people can adapt to such a bizarre visual experience is surprising. Hence the hundreds of studies to explore the phenomenon. More surprising is that if the person remains stationary, they do not adapt. If they don’t walk, or they are handed objects instead of reaching for them, their brain doesn’t reconfigure itself to this new way of seeing.4 Furthermore, when people take off the glasses in these stationary studies, they readapt immediately, without any dizziness or other adverse symptoms.

      Our brain is astonishing. Our perceptual abilities are magnificent, especially our visual perception. But our bodies matter, too, often more than we realize. Action changes the brain and how we interpret information in the world. Yet the modern story of the brain is largely about what happens in our head. We are told the brain is a kind of biological supercomputer. That three-pound lump of squishy goo, nestled in our skull, is the engine that drives our ability to think, reason, decide, plan, and make sense of the world around us. That’s the standard story and so, as a result, we tend to view the world as out there (beyond the head) and understanding is in here (inside the head). Although the brain remains supremely important, there is more to the story, as the Stratton effect suggests.

      The Stratton effect brings to mind an aphorism, often attributed to Confucius, sometimes as just an old Chinese proverb, that goes “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.” It’s a reminder of the connection between doing and understanding, and how acting in the world shapes our ability to make sense of it. In the pages that follow, we will see how the science of mind is evolving in a direction that echoes Confucius, though, of course, as always with science, it’s somewhat more complicated than something you can print on a t-shirt. Our purpose in this chapter is to wrap our arms around this new science of mind and, from that, develop a foundation for how the information in our world can help us become better thinkers. Let’s start there, with a question: How does the mind work?

      Behaviorism and the Cognitive Revolution

      Since the days of Socrates and Plato, and almost certainly before then, human beings have wondered how we think, understand, and gain knowledge about the world we inhabit. The modern quest for a theory of mind began with the emergence of cognitive science in the late 1950s. Back then, the dominant theory was behaviorism, which viewed the brain as a black box—a biological device whose inner workings could never be directly observed. Because there was no way to see an idea, or a thought, or anything that happened in the head, behaviorists were taught “to eschew such topics as mind, thinking, or imagination and such concepts as plans, desires, or intentions.”5 What happened in the brain was mysterious and unknowable and, therefore, off limits.

      Not everyone was convinced. Some researchers believed that clever experiments could be devised that would explain the machinery of mind, at least in part. Early experiments were promising, many more were undertaken, and the cognitive revolution was underway. By the 1990s, cognitive science had convincingly demolished the central premise of behaviorism: the machinery of mind was knowable. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker summarized the cognitive turn this way: “Behaviorists insisted that all talk about mental events was sterile speculation ... Exactly the opposite turned out to be true.”6

      Cognitive science came to see the mind as an elaborate biological apparatus for processing information. It starts with your senses, which perceive information from the world and send signals to your brain. When you stub your toe, for example, information passes from the nerve ending, through the spinal cord, and up to your brain. When the stoplight turns green, your eyes perceive this change and send the information along the optic nerve. Your brain takes these signals

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