Currie-Knight [CK]: Imagine a picture of students thinking or learning in school.
If your picture is like most people's, you're imagining an individual student or a group
of individual students doing an individual assignment, maybe taking notes on a teacher
lecture individually.
And the student has a storehouse of facts in their heads, and one of the most important
goals of school is to increase that storehouse of factual information to help them function
better in the world.
Well today I have with me Dr. Steven Sloman, who's a cognitive scientist at Brown University,
and he's going to try to convince us that a good part of what that picture was is wrong,
that thinking is actually much more of an interactive and social process.
So he's recently coauthored a book with Dr. Philip Fernbach called The Knowledge Illusion:
Why We Never Think Alone.
So first he's going to try to convince us that individuals often overestimate the amount
of knowledge that we or anyone else store in our individual brains.
The second part, though, is that it's not all as bad as it sounds because the secret
to human thinking isn't just thinking as an individual process, but thinking as an
interactive process—in other words, when we think, we interact with tools, or we interact
with social groups.
So think about when I use a paper and pencil to help me write things down and maybe remember
what I don't think I can remember individually without the piece of paper and pencil.
Or think about how when I get together to solve problems in groups of people. Maybe
I don't know something and I need to, so I go down the hall and I ask my colleague,
who might know it, and she can fill me in on those things.
So thinking is an interactive process.
So I'm going to divide this interview into two parts because Dr. Sloman and I had a very
wide-ranging conversation.
In the first video, we're going to talk about the theory behind all this.
And this is the part where Dr. Sloman is going to try to convince us to adopt a more interactive
view of how thinking takes place, like the subtitle of the book: Why We Never Think Alone.
The second part of the video is going to focus more on educational issues.
If all of this is true, that we really do rarely or never think alone, what does that
say about education and how we educate?
Should we be as focused as we are on instilling factual knowledge to students and making sure
that we increase their storehouse of facts?
Or should we maybe instead, or in addition, get them used to functioning in communities
of knowledge and using tools to figure out how to solve problems.
Before we get to part 1, let me quickly introduce Dr. Sloman.
Dr. Steve Sloman is a professor in the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Department
at Brown University.
A computational cognitive scientist who studies how people think, he's the editor in chief
of the journal Cognition and the author of the book Causal Models: How People Think about
the World and Its Alternatives.
Most recently he's coauthored with Dr. Philip Fernbach the book that we just talked about:
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
So without further ado, here's part 1 of our two-part interview.
CK: We're here today with Dr. Steven Sloman to talk about the book that he's coauthored
with Dr. Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.
So, I want to start with obviously the title of the book and the main thing the book is
about.
Can you briefly explain to us what you mean by "Knowledge Illusion" and how people
suffer from this?
Sloman [S]: Sure.
Well first, let me say hello and thanks for having me.
CK: Absolutely.
S: The Knowledge Illusion came out of laboratory work initially done by Frank Keil, a great
psychologist at Yale.
What he and his student, Leonid Rozenblit, did was to ask people how well they understood
various common, everyday objects like zippers and toilets and ballpoint pens.
And people would report that they had a reasonable sense of understanding, you know, maybe 4
or 5 on a 7-point scale.
And then they would say, "Uh, okay.
How do they work?
Explain them in as much detail as you can."
And what they found was that people were wholly unable to generate reasonable explanations
the vast majority of the time, so that when they then asked them again how well they understood,
the people's responses were lower.
In other words, the attempt to explain burst their illusion that they did understand and
made them more realistic about their level of understanding.
So, as I said, Rozenblit and Keil called this the illusion of explanatory depth, and that's
essentially what we mean by the "Knowledge Illusion," that people tend to think they
understand how things work better than, in fact, they do.
And, you know, so, this has been demonstrated multiple times in the laboratory.
You can see this in real life all the time.
People tend to be relatively ignorant about things.
Only 25 percent of the U.S. population doesn't know whether the earth revolves around the
sun or the sun revolves around the earth.
And there are a plethora of facts like this.
People don't seem to understand basic things about how the world works, and yet they think
they do.
Even when we have no sense how things work, we feel like we do.
Right?
So, Rebecca Lawson is a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, and she gave people
the outlines of a bicycle and asked them to fill in the details.
And people were shocking in their inability to do that, in their inability to put the
pedals where the pedals go.
Sometimes they'd be up by the handlebars, and sometimes on the top of the frame, in
places that just made absolutely no sense.
And people were shocked by their own inability to draw a bicycle.
It seems like a very simple mechanism.
You can see it.
We see them all the time.
What's interesting is that even members of a bicycle club—these are people who would
go out biking weekly and fix bikes, because everyone who goes out biking on a regular
basis has to fix their bike once in a while—even they failed miserably at the task.
CK: One of the things I found really interesting related to that in your book is you talk about
kind of how the information-processing model of the brain often leads us to think the brain
is something that really just absorbs a lot of information, and we have a lot of info
in our heads, and that's what we use to process with.
And at some point you say really what the brain does is it has a remarkable ability
to distinguish between the stuff you need to know that's really important and the
stuff you don't really need to know and you can kind of forget those details.
So it seems like maybe what's going on if you can't draw a bike is because, well,
frankly, we don't really need to have that detailed an understanding of how bikes work.
Even people in bike clubs don't.
S: Exactly.
So the view we espouse in the book is that the world is incredibly complicated, and even
things that seem simple, like bicycles, are incredibly complicated.
And the way we get through this complicated world is—well, there are two answers, really,
to that question.
The first is that we pick out the critical features that we need to know in order to
get by.
We don't store all the details, but rather just pick out those things that are absolutely
essential.
So that's one way we kind of minimize the informational requirements we need to get
through the world.
The other is that we're foragers for information.
So we use things outside our own mind to represent the world.
We use our bodies, for instance.
So you can see kids use their fingers to count.
Right?
So they're literally using their bodies in order to perform this cognitive task.
You may well be aware, Kevin, that there are cultures around the world that use their bodies
to create a number system.
There are various people who have counting systems that start at the tip of one finger
and travel up their arm and across their shoulders, down their other arm.
So they're, again, using their bodies to count.
CK: There's an interesting study that I saw recently that might also kind of illustrate
thinking with your body.
It suggests that the act of verbalization in a self-referential way actually helps your
visual ability.
So if I tell people to look at this picture and pick out the banana in the picture, and
I'm going to time how long it takes you to find the banana, they've found that people
who are able and allowed to say "banana" to themselves—it actually focuses their
visual ability and helps their visual ability.
And I know there are others who suggest that, again, the act of talking to oneself actually,
for a lot of people, actually helps the clarity of their thought, because you're using now
your auditory system as part of your thinking process in some ways.
S: That's really interesting, yeah.
There's so much to say about that.
So, on one hand, there's no question that using the multiple modalities we have of perception
and action can help us.
These things are mutually reinforcing, so you know, a similar demonstration has been
done by Susan Goldin Meadow and her students at the University of Chicago, where it turns
out that allowing people to gesture with their appendages helps them to solve problems.
Right?
If they have to sit on their hands, it's harder for them to solve problems than if
they're simply allowed to wave their arms.
So, yeah, we use our bodies to help us think just as we use—now your example of using
language to help us think is a really interesting one both because it supports this idea that
having multiple modalities is helpful, but for another reason as well.
So, let me—I was sort of going through this list of the way we forge for information.
So we use our bodies.
We also use the world.
Right?
We use paper and pencil to do mathematics, and I use my email to keep track of what I
have to do.
And when I'm writing a book, then I'm staring at the page, it's incredibly useful,
in fact critical, to accomplishing writing.
So we're constantly—I use a city—if I'm in a new city, and I have to get somewhere,
I actually use the city itself as a kind of memory and a guidepost to help me get to where
I'm going.
So it's wrong to think that we process information only in the head.
Processing of information is something that makes use of the world as well.
So we use the body, we use the world, but more than anything, we use other people.
Right?
Other people are this tremendous source of information for us, and the vast majority
of the stuff we know is actually housed in other people's heads.
And we can go into it later, but that's why I think we suffer from the Knowledge Illusion.
So your example was about using verbalization to help us think, and I think that verbalization
goes beyond just being another modality.
I think that, you know, verbalization is a standard way of communicating with other people.
And communicating with other people is part and parcel of the process of thought, at least
one kind of thought.
And if you want we can talk about the various kinds of thought that there are.
So I think it's really, it's a way of engaging our community of knowledge.
And I suspect that the kind of study you just described shows that we can actually engage
that community inside our own heads.
I think there's a reason that talking to ourselves is useful.
It's because we can actually act as a conversational partner with ourselves.
CK: Yes, yes.
I think that's usually called dialogical reasoning, right?
It's—I know a little of Vygotsky, the psychologist—one of the things I was going
to mention is that these ideas about thinking with tools and thinking with the world and
thinking with social groups has actually a really long history in the field of education.
So if you look at some of the luminaries like John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, particularly—they
were always kind of exploring how there's no clean division between what goes on in
your head and what goes on between your head and tools, or what goes on in your head and
what goes on between yourself and the community of knowledge.
So Lev Vygotsky, one of his big ideas that's gained some currency—I don't know if it's
the standard view—is this idea that a good amount of our thinking can be called dialogical
thinking, essentially.
So we talk with people first, so we have conversations with people—our parents, teachers, others.
And at some point, we get good enough at kind of internalizing their voices, and it helps
us affect how we think.
We can now have those conversations in our heads.
So we get used to the idea of critical thinking with our parents, and then we used to the
ability to kind of have those kinds of voices internalized into our heads, and then when
we're critically thinking, oftentimes what we're doing is having that sort of conversation
in our head.
"Oh, I've read this passage, but that doesn't make sense because you could look
at it this way.
Oh you're right, you could look at this passage this way, etc."
And it becomes a dialogue that you have internally.
S: That's really interesting.
I was unaware of that idea.
Can I try to frame that in sort of modern cognitive science?
CK: Please do.
S: So there's some consensus, certainly not complete consensus, but a lot of people
believe that there are two systems of thought.
One of them I'll refer to as "intuitive thought," and the other as "deliberative
thought."
So the way we answer simple arithmetic question like "What's 2+4?" is based on intuition—that
is, we really just generate the answer from memory.
Right?
We don't know how we know the answer.
We know we've heard it before.
We're memorized it at some point.
But we don't know—we can't perceive, we're not aware of the thought process that
generates that answer in the same way if we see a lamp, we don't know what—we're
not aware of the cognitive process that tells us it's a lamp and that it would be used
as a source of light.
We just know it.
Right?
So intuitive processes just generate these responses, these outputs.
Intuitive processes.
As opposed to deliberative processes, which involve more serial, analytic kind of thought.
Right?
So if we're asked to, you know, divide 582 by 73, the answer doesn't just pop to mind.
We have to sit down—we have to work it out, and if we're really sophisticated, we can
do it in our heads.
Often, actually, this is the place we need external support.
But whatever happens, we're aware of the process that's generating the response.
And in that sense, it's a very different kind of processing than intuitive processing.
But it's worth noting that the term "deliberation" is one that doesn't only refer to things
that go on inside the head, right?
So juries deliberate.
Committees deliberate.
So "deliberation" is actually a word that also refers to a social process, which is why I
love the term, because I actually think that that is the nature of deliberative thought.
And it sounds like that's exactly what Vygotsky was saying.
Right?
So I would interpret dialogical thinking, and that's a new word for me, as the process
by which we kind of engage our intuitive system in—sequentially, serially.
Right?
We say something to it as if it were another person, and then it generates a response.
So that's who we're talking to when we're talking to ourselves.
For more infomation >> we live | by APEX - Duration: 1:45. 
For more infomation >> We Are Back Streaming Live (Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle) - Duration: 1:25:29. 
For more infomation >> 'Wat zit er in ons eten?' Afl. 3: Eten we wel wat goed voor ons is? - Duration: 7:39. 
For more infomation >> Way Down We Go (Blindspot) - Duration: 3:30. 
For more infomation >> We R' Seven VO Series [Sims 2] Complete Scene - Duration: 2:39. 
For more infomation >> We are god at skywars! w/BrandonBeast (Minecraft Skywars)A FIDGET SPINNER & CARS SPECIAL! - Duration: 1:09:31. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét