Podcast appearances and mentions of Barbara Tversky

What are Mike and Angela's favorite songs to cry to? Can upbeat music lift you out of a bad mood? And what is Angela going to sing the next time she does karaoke? SOURCES:Matthew Desmond, professor of sociology at Princeton University.Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.Joshua Knobe, professor of philosophy, psychology, and linguistics at Yale University.Simon McCarthy-Jones, professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin.Yael Millgram, senior lecturer of psychological sciences at Tel Aviv University.Stanley Milgram, 20th-century American social psychologist.Ruth Reichl, food writer.Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University.Barbara Tversky, professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University. RESOURCES:"On the Value of Sad Music," by Mario Attie-Picker, Tara Venkatesan, George E. Newman, and Joshua Knobe (The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2024)."The Reason People Listen to Sad Songs," by Oliver Whang (The New York Times, 2023)."Adele 30: The Psychology of Why Sad Songs Make Us Feel Good," by Simon McCarthy-Jones (The Conversation, 2021)."Why Do Depressed People Prefer Sad Music?" by Sunkyung Yoon, Edelyn Verona, Robert Schlauch, Sandra Schneider, and Jonathan Rottenberg (Emotion, 2020).Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond (2016)."Sad as a Matter of Choice? Emotion-Regulation Goals in Depression," by Yael Millgram, Jutta Joormann, Jonathan D. Huppert, and Maya Tamir (Psychological Science, 2015)."Music and Emotion Through Time," by Michael Tilson Thomas (TED Talk, 2012).Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (2011). EXTRAS:Girl Power Sing-Along with Laurie Santos and Catherine Price, at the Black Squirrel Club in Philadelphia (September 28, 2024)."What Makes a Good Sense of Humor?" by No Stupid Questions (2024)."How Contagious Is Behavior? With Laurie Santos of 'The Happiness Lab' (Replay)," by No Stupid Questions (2023).

Do you see yourself the same way others see you? What's the difference between self-perception and self-awareness? And why do Mike and Angela both hate fishing? SOURCES:Luis von Ahn, co-founder and C.E.O. of Duolingo; former chair of the board at Character Lab.Paul DePodesta, chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns; former baseball executive.Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.Michel de Montaigne, 16th-century French philosopher.Barbara Tversky, professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. RESOURCES:"What Makes a 360-Degree Review Successful?" by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman (Harvard Business Review, 2020)."Self-Other Agreement in Personality Reports: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Self- and Informant-Report Means," by Hyunji Kim, Stefano I. Di Domenico, and Brian S. Connelly (Psychological Science, 2019)."Don't Let a Lack of Self-Awareness Hold You Back," by Tim Herrera (The New York Times, 2018)."Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents," by Angela Duckworth and Martin E.P. Seligman (Psychological Science, 2005). EXTRAS:"Personality: The Big Five," series by No Stupid Questions (2024).Big Five Personality Inventory, by No Stupid Questions (2024)."Remembering Daniel Kahneman," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2024)."How Much Personal Space Do You Need?" by No Stupid Questions (2023).Moneyball, film (2011).Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis (2003).

One of our long-time subscribers recently said to us: “What I love about you is that you're regularly talking about things three years ahead of everyone else.” That inspired us to look back through our catalog of conversations to see which ones we think are most relevant now. Today, we're revisiting one of our most thought-provoking episodes, originally recorded in April 2022, featuring Barbara Tversky, the author of "Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought." This episode is great way to start 2024 because we are all about to experience what are known as Large Multimodal Models or LMMs, models which go beyond text and bring in more sensory modalities including spatial information. Tversky's insights into spatial reasoning and embodied cognition are more relevant than ever in the era of multimodal models in AI. These models, which combine text, images, and other data types, mirror our human ability to process information across various sensory inputs. The parallels between Tversky's research and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in AI are striking. Just as our physical interactions with the world shape our cognitive processes, these AI models learn and adapt by integrating diverse data types, offering a more holistic understanding of the world. Her work sheds light on how we might improve AI's ability to 'think' and 'reason' spatially, enhancing its application in fields ranging from navigation systems to virtual reality. As we revisit our interview with Tversky, we're reminded of the importance of considering human-like spatial reasoning and embodied cognition in advancing AI technology. Join us as we explore these intriguing concepts with Barbara Tversky, uncovering the essential role of spatial reasoning in both human cognition and artificial intelligence. Barbara Tversky is an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University. She is also the President of the Association for Psychological Science. Barbara has published over 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, and creativity, and regularly speaks about embodied cognition at interdisciplinary conferences and workshops around the world. She lives in New York. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world's great minds. Subscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your email Learn about our book Make Better Decisions and buy it on Amazon Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music

Barbara Tversky - Mind in Motion Zapraszam do lektury moich książek wydanych przez wydawnictwo Tathata: https://www.fundacjahs.org/sklep/ Zapraszam do lektury moich książek wydanych przez wydawnictwo Helion: https://sensus.pl/autorzy/jaroslaw-gibas/14859A Oferta moich szkoleń video: https://akademiahs.fundacjahs.org/courses/ Oferta moich otwartych szkoleń i warsztatów: Warsztat autoterapia: https://jaroslawgibas.com/warsztat-autoterapia/ Akademia terapii transpersonalnej: https://jaroslawgibas.com/att/ Realizacja video mini-wykładów jest możliwa dzięki środkom i zasobom Fundacji Hinc Sapientia https://www.fundacjahs.org. Jeśli uważasz, że publikowane tutaj mini-wykłady są przydatne i warto kontynuować ich produkcję to możesz ją wesprzeć darowizną na cele statutowe fundacji! Dziękuję:-) Jarosław Gibas

Join us on The Rhys Show as we delve into the captivating realm of spatial cognition with renowned psychologist Barbara Tversky. In her groundbreaking book "Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought," Barbara challenges conventional wisdom by revealing the profound influence of movement on human cognition. Discover the intricate relationship between our physical surroundings, actions, and the way we think, create, and communicate. Explore the power of gestures, diagrams, and non-verbal communication in shaping our understanding and creativity. Uncover the implications of spatial cognition for design, collaboration, and effective reasoning. Don't miss this enlightening episode that will expand your perspective and deepen your understanding of the world. Don't forget to support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rhyslindmark Full show notes at: www.roote.co/episodes/visual-thinking-and-spatial-cognition-with-barbara-tversky

I den siste utgaven av læreplanen for kroppsøvingsfaget har begrepet "kroppslig læring" kommet inn fra sidelinjen som en Tesla på autopilot med sovende sjåfør bak rattet. Fagfeltet har trykket begrepet til sitt bryst, men Pål står som vanlig igjen på sidelinjen og lurer på hva i huleste som skjer. Hva er egentlig kroppslig læring? Her trengs en lett tilgjengelig filosof og Lars tar oppgaven. Følg med på denne eksistensielle praten som for alltid vil fordre hvordan verden ser på sin menneskelighet.  Tekster og bøker som er nevnt i episoden:  "Fagartikkel: Kva kroppsleg læring eigentleg er! Av Øyvind Førland Standal https://www.utdanningsnytt.no/fagartikkel/fagartikkel-kva-kroppsleg-laering-eigentleg-er/219295 Boka "Kroppslig læring - perspektiver og praksiser" av Tone Pernille Østern, Øyvind Bjerke, Gunn Engelsrud og Anne Grut Sørum. Barbara Tversky (2019), Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), La phénoménologie de la perception  Andre nevnt: Maria Montessori, Peter Medawar, David Chalmers, Richard Feynman, Ludwig Wittgenstein og Georg Johannesen.  Her er et blogginnlegg fra Lars som dreier seg om relaterte spørsmål:  https://larssandaker.blogspot.com/2023/02/hva-ser-vi-for-oss-nar-vi-leser-litt.html Og her er noen gamle episoder som er relevante i denne sammenheng: https://larsogpaal.libsyn.com/5-hva-er-naturlig-bevegelse https://larsogpaal.libsyn.com/episode-43-om-flelser https://larsogpaal.libsyn.com/episode-48-sultflelsen https://larsogpaal.libsyn.com/episode-117-om-kritisk-tenking https://larsogpaal.libsyn.com/episode-89-forskning-aktivisme-og-vitenskapsfilosofisk-debatt   ---------------------------- Logoen vår er laget av Sveinung Sudbø, se hans arbeider på originalkopi.com Musikken er av Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, se facebooksiden Nygrenda Vev og Dur for mer info. ----------------------------  Takk for at du hører på. Ta kontakt med oss på vår facebookside eller på larsogpaal@gmail.com Det finnes ingen bedre måte å få spredt podkasten vår til flere enn via dere lyttere, så takk om du deler eller forteller andre om oss.  Både Lars og Pål skriver nå på hver sin blogg, med litt varierende regelmessighet. Du finner dem på disse nettsidene: https://paljabekk.com/ https://larssandaker.blogspot.com/ Alt godt, hilsen Lars og Pål

Conveying the right type of information for a group so that they can make accurate decisions can be challenging. Barbara Tversky, Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University and Professor of Psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University, alongside our take-over hosts, Barton Friedland and Jarno Kartela, uncover how people think about the physical and digital spaces they inhabit and how those are used to think, to communicate, to create, and of course, to decide. If you are a business leader, wanting better tools for understanding context and meaning in your teams, this is the podcast for you.

We humans make a lot of decisions. Apparently, 35,000 of them every day! So how do we improve our decisions? Is there a process to follow? Who are the experts to learn from? Do big data and AI make decisions easier or harder? Is there any way to get better at making decisions in this complex, modern world we live in?To dig into these questions we talked with…ourselves! We recently published our first book, Make Better Decisions: How to Improve Your Decision-Making in the Digital Age. In this book, we've provided a guide to practicing the cognitive skills needed for making better decisions in the age of data, algorithms, and AI. Make Better Decisions is structured around 50 nudges that have their lineage in scholarship from behavioral economics, cognitive science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Each nudge prompts the reader to use their beautiful, big human brain to notice when our automatic decision-making systems will lead us astray in our complex, modern world, and when they'll lead us in the right direction.In this conversation, we talk about our book, our favorite nudges at the moment, and some of the Great Minds who we have interviewed on Artificiality including Barbara Tversky, Jevin West, Michael Bungay Stanier, Stephen Fleming, Steven Sloman and Tania Lombrozo.If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world's great minds.Learn about our book Make Better Decisions and buy it on AmazonSubscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your emailLearn more about Sonder StudioThanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artificiality.substack.com

Acclaimed psychologist and longtime Stanford University professor Barbara Tversky calls on her nearly 50 years in the field of cognitive psychology for an in-depth discussion about how your brain works, and offers practical approaches to get it working even better. Tversky examines the Nine Laws of Cognition, why action shapes thought, how the language use changes what we think, tactics to communicate better on Zoom, why she dove into the work of Leonardo da Vinci, the importance of perspective taking, learned knowledge vs. earned knowledge, and so much more. Tversky joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1978, and she is currently an active Emerita Professor of Psychology. She is also a Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and the author of the 2019 book Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Her work focuses on the relationship between the spaces we inhabit and the actions we perform and how we think, create, and communicate. It's time to Listen and Learn! -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

How can we use beauty to convey meaning, and form to guide function, in our communications? In this episode of the SWD podcast, Dr. Vidya Setlur and Bridget Cogley explore these questions with data storyteller Mike Cisneros. In their upcoming book Functional Aesthetics for Data Visualization, Vidya (the “academic”) and Bridget (the “practitioner”) explore the relationships among what we see, how we encode information, and what we mean. You'll hear about the “bento box” model of organizing our information; how text, tone, register, and language affects our visualizations; how our relationship to food can inform what makes a communication effective; and how to go beyond “it depends” when considering the answers to challenging questions.  related links: Follow Vidya: Twitter (@vsetlur) | LinkedIn  | Tableau Research Follow Bridget: Twitter (@WindsCogley) | LinkedIn | TableauFit blog Book: Functional Aesthetics for Data Visualization Article: Honoring Kelly Martin, including the “Birdstrike Redoux” visualization Article: The Ishango bone, an early mathematical tool Paper: “The medium is the message” by Marshall McLuhan Article: “Light vision” by Margaret Livingstone (regarding isoluminance in Monet) Book: Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky

Have you ever wondered why you can recognize and remember things but can't describe them in words? That is one of the questions that started Barbara Tversky's contrarian research and academic career, leading to her theory that spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought. While most people were focused on language as central to human thinking, Barbara recognized that our relationship with the spaces we inhabit, including mental ones, provided a unique way of understanding the world. In her book, Mind in Motion, Barbara shows how spatial cognition is the foundation of thought and allows us to draw meaning from our bodies, our movements and the spaces around us.We find Barbara's work to be incredibly fascinating, especially as we consider the current approach to AI and technology design. While there is an extraordinary amount of investment being made into language AI, Barbara's work causes us to wonder about the opportunities for AI that taps into our spatial reasoning. We're just starting to scratch the surface of this idea in our design work and thank Barbara for uncovering the idea and sharing it in her wonderful book.In this episode, we talk with Barbara about spatial thinking as the foundation of abstract thought, the linearity of spaces and perception of distances, putting thought into the world, the creative power of sketching, self-driving cars, aphantasia (aka lacking a mind's eye) and the confusion between sight and navigational ability.Barbara Tversky is an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University. She is also the President of the Association for Psychological Science. Barbara has published over 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, and creativity, and regularly speaks about embodied cognition at interdisciplinary conferences and workshops around the world. She lives in New York.P.S. Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artificiality.substack.com

On this week's Tech Nation, Moira speaks with Stanford emerita psychology professor Barbara Tversky. She talks about “Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought”, how the mind can override perception, how feeling comes before logic, and how we organize things in our world the way we organize our minds.

On this week's Tech Nation, Moira speaks withStanford emerita psychology professor Barbara Tversky. She talks about “Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought”, how the mind can override perception, how feeling comes before logic, and how we organize things in our world the way we organize our minds.

Words alone won't do it.

Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding. This is the second half of a two-part conversation about interaction and embodiment. If you haven't done so already, please listen to part 1 before listening to this episode. Show notes @karlfast on Twitter Karl Fast on LinkedIn Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast Bruce Alexander The Rat Park experiments Bill Verplank's diagram of interaction Epigenetics About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Ed by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, avid Cronin, and Christopher Noessel Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian (Bonus: Jorge's book notes) The paperclip maximizer problem Punctuated equilibrium Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Karl, welcome back to the show. Karl: Thanks for having me again! Jorge: Well, I could not help but want to talk with you again, since you mentioned wanting to discuss rats and heroin, and that just sounded too intriguing to me at the tail end of our last conversation. So, why don't we pick right back up there? What do you mean by rats on heroin? Rats and heroin Karl: So in the 1970s, there was a lot of concern about drug addiction in various parts of the society, especially in the US, and especially with the Vietnam War. And a lot of veterans — a lot of soldiers who were in Vietnam and who were exposed to heroin were… I think there was some estimate, something like 80 or 90% of all the soldiers who went over to Vietnam had used heroin at some point and had a serious… what we would now classify maybe as an addiction. I'm not sure if that number is correct. But there was this general widespread concern about this and what was going to happen when these people came back. I don't think that this particular study was motivated directly by that, but certainly this was in the air. And so, there was a Canadian psychologist named Bruce Alexander, and he was concerned about a lot of the studies that had been done around addiction and said, "well, these rats are stuck in like a small, cold cage, often socially isolated from all other rats. If I was in that kind of situation, maybe I'd like to take some heroin too!" So, he designed a study where he had a couple of different groups of rats. One group of rats, they were basically in the sort of normal lab cages that you would have. The other ones were in what are called "Rat Park." And you can actually look this up on Wikipedia. It's called, "The Rat Park Experiments." And they… they were like 200 times larger. There were about a dozen, 15 rats or so in there, both male and female. So, they had a completely different environment in which they were able to run around. They could play, there were all kinds of lovely things. There were things to keep them mentally stimulated. It was kind of like a rat heaven. And in both of these different groups, each of them, the rats were divided up into two different groups. There were rats that were given water to drink, and the other rats had a choice between water and water that was sweetened, but also laced with morphine. What they found basically was that when they were in rat park — in rat heaven — very few of them would consistently go and choose the morphine. But the ones that were in the cages almost always did the morphine. And there were several conclusions about this, but one interpretation was that social isolation was the major factor and that lack of socialization drove a lot of addiction. My understanding is that this is not… this has been criticized in a number of cases. But the broader one, the way that I've always interpreted this study, is that the role of the environment has a huge impact on stuff. And when it came to the veterans, when they came home, a surprisingly small percentage of veterans came back to the US after the war and continued with their heroin addiction. So, there are studies with rats, there are findings with the actual veterans. Embodiment and interaction Karl: And to me, this raises this question that relates to what we were talking about last week. We had this idea of embodiment. And the big idea with embodiment here is that the mind is not the same thing as the brain. Our bodies, our tools, the space around us — how we move and act in the world — this is all part of our cognitive system; that our brain might be in the head, but our mind is embodied. Our mind extends out into the world. So, the systems and the tools, the information we have… all the things that we design that are exterior to the body, those should also be understood as part of the mind. They're not just out there. And that brings us back to the other main thing we talked about last week was this question of interaction. How do we interact with the world? Why do we interact with the world? And we introduced that distinction between pragmatic and epistemic actions. And we gave that example of moving the bishop, where you pick up the bishop, and you move it and put your finger on it, but then you move it back. From a traditional perspective, we would say, "oh, you did two moves in the world. You've moved a piece, and then you pressed undo." But there's research, which says, "well, no, no, there's actually real reasons why you would want to do that." And the distinction is what they call pragmatic action and epistemic actions. And the idea of a pragmatic action is you're going to change the world in order to change the world. You want to bring about some change in the world. But an epistemic action is about changing the world to change your understanding of the world. To make thinking easier, or faster, or more reliable. So, we have these different ideas here. We have this idea that the environment plays a role in our mental wellbeing. The environment plays a role in our ability to think. The way we interact with the world is part of how we think, in many cases. And what we talked about was… we went through a number of different examples, but the big idea is this I think has major implications for the things that we design in a world where we have a lot of information. We have rich — increasingly rich — computational tools, powerful computational tools that don't just sit in a desk, that are being embedded into every part of our world. And that can sense and interact and respond back to us in more meaningful and interesting ways. Jorge: You mentioned in our previous conversation the opportunities inherent in the trajectories that we see in technology. Karl: Yeah. So, especially I think with AI, but that's an obvious one, right? Think about it this way: one of the things I argued last time is that we need to have a better conceptual toolkit when we're designing, when we're creating these different things. We need to think about how what we are making is not just out there, but is connected in a meaningful way to what our brains can do. So, we should think about certain definitions — certain words — and try to understand them and develop new concepts for how we talk about this. So, for example, let's start with some basic ones that I've already mentioned: action. I think of action is doing something. It's a thing, done, it's a gesture, it's a movement. And that is distinct from reaction — what happens in response to a situation, an event, to an action. But I use the word interaction to not mean action and then reaction. You can think about it that way in terms of the timeframe, but I tend to think of interaction as the action coupled with the reaction. So, you act in or on the world, that action combined with the response. Think about it as the difference between you can talk about, like, your coffee, and you can talk about the cream, but once you mix the two together, now they're bound together and that's different. So, we can think of them as separately, but we also need to learn to see them as connected together. Now, language can be a little slippery. And I know that in my writing and in my speaking here, I have probably used… I'm sure that I have used the word action when I really meant, by those definitions, interaction. I tend to use them synonymously. I talked about epistemic action. Really, I think it should be epistemic interaction, but it's a bit of a mouthful. But that's an example of definitions. Or another one would be "interactivity." This is a word that gets tossed around kind of loosely and casually, often as a synonym with interaction. I think it's best understood as a quality or attribute of an interaction. Some interactions are easy. Some are interactions are difficult. Sometimes easy is better. Not always, right? In learning, when interaction is too easy and quick — if learning is too easy — then the learning becomes shallow. You need a kind of certain friction. Or another example for interactivity: how difficult is it to articulate your intentions with a system? So, you can talk about a gap between what you intend to do and your ability to articulate it. And can we, through design, close that gap? When do we want to close that gap? So, you might have the same interaction. But the interactivity or certain dimensions of that interactivity could be very different. And there could be good and bad around that. Jorge: This brings to mind Bill Verplank diagram of interaction. I don't know if you're aware of that diagram. Karl: Refresh my memory. Jorge: Well, it's a feedback loop between the world and some actor. And the actor senses the world. Verplank labels it "feel." so, there's this sensing of the world. The actor, through sensing, knows and then does. So that's the other arrow. So, you sense, and you do. And this cycle of sensing and doing amounts to an interaction. And what I'm hearing you say is that… it's not a binary thing, but there's a gradient of interactions. So, some things are more interactive than others. Karl: Yes. And you know so that loop, that idea here… this is where I think embodiment is trying to say, "it's really complicated." It's a lot more complicated. It's a lot more nuanced than we have tended to describe it. You know, you take a class in cognitive psychology, you pick up a lot of different books around how the mind works, and you're going to see — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly — a simple loop around perception, cognition, and action. Perception is input, right? Information from the world that is input into the brain. The brain takes that and does computation on that. And then from that, we act on the world. From the embodiment perspective, the simple and wrong way to think about that is that the cognition happens just in the head, right? Perception is input. Action is output. Cognition is what happens in the middle. And what embodiment is trying to say is, no. There is an element where that could be the case, and maybe often is the case. But it's certainly far from the entire story. We need to redraw that picture. Think of it as maybe a first order approximation of how the mind works. Now, we need to think about second and third order effects here. What are the other things that are going on here? And that's what things, like epistemic actions, point to. More broadly, it's very common in design for people to have taken a lot of classes and to have studied aspects of perception. All graphic and visual design, color theory, like layout… you know, all of this is about changing the perceptual inputs. Controlling the perceptual inputs. All the aestheticism that we have is about the perceptual inputs are largely about that. I'm much more interested in the other side of that, the interaction side of that loop. And how that is connected to the things that we create, and trying to unpack this in the light of what the science is telling us about embodiment. Jorge: Would it be fair to say that the emphasis then is on the touch-points between these artifacts that we perceive and the people who are perceiving them? Karl: Yes, and the way that those touch-points happen. And you know, the more I think about this… and I've been thinking about interaction for well over a decade. And you see this notion of interaction in so many different areas, in different fields. Like we just talked about it with the example of rats and heroin and this connection to the environment. Another one from biology is, we have that old idea of the debate between nature or nurture. And most of us today have gone, "oh, well, it's not about nature, it's not about nurture. It's nature and nurture, and some sort of balance between the two." But biologists don't believe that either. Not anymore. What a biologist would say is it's more about how the organism interacts with the environment. Evolution is an interactive process. An example related to that is genetics. In the mid-nineties, we had all this talk and this huge effort to decode the human genome, and the story that was told there was, "well, if we can just decode the human genome, then we'll be able to read the book of life," as though it was just information. And genes were presented to us as a deterministic thing. You have a gene, this tells you how tall you're going to be, this tells you what color your hair is going to be, it can determine intelligence, all of these things. But what we now know is that's really not what's going on. That is part of the story, but it's much more complex than that. And the big area in genetics is epigenetics. Epigenetics is how your behavior and your interaction with the environment shapes the way that the genes express themselves. So, maybe interaction will turn on a particular kind of gene, maybe it won't. It depends on how the environment that you're in really shapes this. This leads us actually back to rats. There are studies that go back to the 1950s about baby rats and how their mothers lick them. There are what are called "high licking mothers" and "low licking mothers." So, some rats get licked a lot when you're a baby, and some mothers will not lick their babies a lot. And they do this to calm the rat down. This changes the epigenetics: changes how the genes — especially around stress — and I believe it's cortisol, but other things — express themselves. So, a rat that gets licked a lot is going to be a much calmer rat. It will not get stressed as much. A rat that is not licked a lot, won't learn to do that. And so, it's genes will express themselves in a different way. And you might think, "well, it's great to be calm, not so great to be anxious." But then we come back to this problem of, well, what kind of environment is the rat in? If a rat is in a dangerous environment, it actually pays off, from an evolutionary perspective, to be anxious because you're going to be more alert to threats. So, you have this really much more complex, interesting trade-off. And interaction, to me, seems to drive all of this. The mother is licking the baby, that's interaction. The rat grows up to be in a particular environment — grows up in one environment, then maybe migrates to a different environment — that connection between the environment is interaction. All of this stuff again and again, we see interaction throughout everything. Think about another example, like programming. We talk about functions. And then we talk about objects. We talk about APIs… this, all the ways that programs interact with each other. We gave an example in our previous conversation about why people talk with their hands and the importance of gestures. It's not just a way of providing extra information to someone else. It also turns out that that physical movement has an inward-facing component that helps smooth our thoughts, or sort of like a cognitive grease. Epistemic actions. There's another example. We had the example of chess, which comes from a study about how people play Tetris. And the thing I'm trying to get at here is: I think interaction is fundamentally under-appreciated. We want to tell a story about the things. The things that we have. The objects, the artifacts, and the story that we want to tell might be about their perceptual qualities, their aesthetic properties, how beautiful something is, or the quality of which it is made. We might talk about its usability. We have various ways in which we talk about the objects. Or, from the cognitive side, we'll talk about what the brain is capable of. And I keep thinking from all the stuff that I see, this question of how we are interacting with those things: how we interact with things, how we interact with the environment, how we interact with other people. All of that seems to be really, really central. And my question has been, how do we come up with a better, richer — and from a design perspective — more useful way of talking about that? Interaction design Jorge: Most folks listening in will have heard of interaction design, and they probably associate it with things like the gestures and motions and… I've heard it described as though interaction deals with time. Whereas other disciplines deal with spatial relationships, interaction deals with time-based relationships. Karl: Well, and I know if you read, say_ About Face_, the interaction design book by Alan Cooper. He defines interaction design in terms of behavior. But for my reading of behavior, I think of it as the way you act or conduct yourself often, especially towards others, or towards things. And it tends to be more of a macro definition. It's a larger scale pattern. So, part of this is also a terminology question and looking at the things that we do at multiple levels. There's a nice paper by Cameron Seddick, who was my dissertation advisor actually many years ago, and he breaks interaction down roughly into, I think, four different levels. He talks about events. So, those are like the smallest-scale thing. This is something that actually changes and happens. An event would be like a click, a drag, pinch, scroll, tap, grab. Those types of things. An interaction is something more like filtering or rearranging or annotating. That is comprised of — depending on how things are designed — one or more different kinds of events. Then from there above that, we have different kinds of tasks. And above that, we have activities. And so at each stage, we get a level of behavior that is broader and more comprehensive, as opposed to being narrower. Activity theory, which is also another area which has strongly connected in many ways to embodiment, has a similar notion that interaction has multiple scales and dimensions. And also that things can move up and down, depending on our conscious level of control and experience. So, the classic example here would be learning to drive a car and especially learning how to drive say a manual transmission. When you first learn, you have to be very clear about, okay, I am pressing the clutch. I am moving the gear shift. But as you get more skilled and experienced with that, that goes from a low-level set of actions to something that's much broader. It's easier and it's more automatic. So, things can shift and change around. Again, we come back to this idea that… well, I'd say there are two reasons why I think interaction is not really as fully appreciated in design circles as it could be. Or maybe not appreciate is the right word… maybe a better phrase would be, talked about it in a way which allows us to fully leverage what interaction can do. And one reason I think for that is that it is complicated. It is nuanced. And I think the other major reason is that we have this idea from cognitive science that is baked in pretty deep about what is this relationship between the world, and perception, and the brain or the mind, and action. And we have tended to have a story from cognitive science, which is pretty simple: the one we talked about earlier, where perception provides information, the brain takes that and converts that information, which would then do mental computation. We call that thinking. And then action does the output. Perception, input. Action, output. And thinking happens in the brain. Embodiment is this big revolution in cognitive science, which is trying to really change that. But so much of the design world is based on traditional cognitive science from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that it's not just a mind acting in the world. It's a mind acting on the world, so that the act of sensing and tweaking the thing that you sense, in interacting with the world, you gain an understanding of the world. And that is part of what cognition is. Is that a fair read on it? Karl: I think so. The reason I talk about it as action and reaction combined, is because things run both ways simultaneously. And that always makes it much harder to grapple with. Barbara Tversky is a longtime researcher at Stanford and wrote a book a couple of years ago, called Mind in Motion, which summarizes her lifetime of research in this area. And it's very much a book about embodiment, and she talks about several laws of cognition. I don't remember all of them, but the first two I think might be illuminative for this conversation. Her first law is that benefits always have costs. There is a cost to thinking just in the head. There is a cost to acting in the world. But when there's a cost, there's also benefits. And when we think about interaction in this richer way of being action and reaction together, how we have this notion of the extended mind, and we think with and through the body and the world around us, what we're talking about is how we're shifting those cost-benefit trade-offs. Where the thinking happens is really important. A classic example here would be when you're, say, multiplying two numbers. Most of us can multiply two times eight in our heads and get 16. But very few of us can multiply 28 times 342 in our heads and get a good answer. So, we have moved the computation out into the world. We could do it on pencil and paper. We could do it with a slide rule. We could do it with an abacus. We could do it with a calculator. We could ask a voice assistant to do it, right? And so, where do we think about that unit of analysis? Do we think that the thinking is happening in the brain? Do we think that we've offloaded it out into the world? Or do we see the two things — what we have in the world, and what we have in our head — as combined, and see that as the cognitive system? "Interactionism" Jorge: You brought up in our last conversation this word "interactionism," which I sense is a call for people who design interactions to be more conscious of what it is that we're doing. And I'm wondering if you could unpack that term for folks. Karl: So, I've been grappling for a word here which describes this notion that we would look at the world through this lens of interaction. We would not see interaction as, "well, I've pulled up whatever my favorite design tool is, and I've got a pallet of widgets on the left-hand side and I can drag and drop, and those are the interactions." How do we begin to start seeing this as much more important? So, interactionism in this sense here is a word, which I…. You know if you look up "ism," it's both a good word and a bad word, right? We all live in isms. We live in capitalism. Or liberalism. Or conservatism. We have lots of different ways around that. But what it really means is a doctrine, a perspective, a philosophy about how we look at things. What we see and the system in which operate. And right now, I think a lot of times in design, we have certain isms that exist. Certainly if you come out of graphic design and visual design, historically, has really been a strong influence for user experience and design more broadly. And there, aestheticism is very strong. Out of other kinds of design, we often have a very strong idea of the object of the thing. Usability engineering, and ergonomics, and human factors gave us a different kind of ism around the usability. UX itself, I think, is an ism, right? It is the experience that matters. And so, information architecture and other areas, have like sort of an information-ism, that we are focused on the information. Or maybe we could use the word structure. So, the structure-ism or structuralism. Each of these words has positives and negatives. Each of them is loaded in different ways and have certain histories. Even the word interactionism has this. If you do a search for interactionism, you'll find that it actually has at least two major meanings historically. One comes out of philosophy, and philosophy of mind, going back all the way to René Descartes, who famously created the idea of mind-body dualism and said that there is the body and then the mind is somewhere else. And we have this mental space, which is not physical space, and that thinking happens… there's this interaction between these two spaces, this mental space and the body and the world. And that is one way that people talk about interactionism. Another one is a perspective in sociology, or it was called micro-sociology, that wants to look at and think about sociology entirely in terms of the interaction between individuals. So, interactionism actually already is a word in at least two major areas. I'm interested in it simply as this perspective or this lens in which we really see this and begin to elevate it to a more prominent role, rather than thinking of it as, "Oh, well, I had an interaction here, and I sprinkled on some interaction there." Or, "This interaction is very usable." Is it just philosophy? Jorge: This is not something that you are going to encounter in a palette of components in a development environment. Karl: Right. Yes. Jorge: It's more of a philosophical take on what it is that we're doing here. Karl: It is a philosophical take, but it's also a philosophical take based on the way that the science of mind has been evolving and the new evidence that we have. So, it's not purely philosophical. Jorge: I say that with the caveat that I think that when a lot of folks hear the word "philosophy," they turn off, right? They think, "well, this is not actionable." But I think of a philosophy as a way of understanding what it is that you're doing in the world. Karl: Yes. And I think that anyone who has paid attention to robotics and artificial intelligence over the last five or six years, has realized that one of the major problems that the field has had has been ignoring philosophy. I mean, artificial intelligence and robotics has really revived philosophy in many ways. But I just don't think it's actually sort of revived it, but it's made like all the people who are doing this philosophy of ethics is super important. Philosophy of mind is super important. I recently read a book by Brian Christian called The Alignment Problem. And it's all about this question of what's known in AI as, how do we align human objectives with robotic objectives? How do we make sure that robots don't go out of control? The infamous paperclip optimizer problem, right? And you can read this book in a number of ways, but one of the most important ones is all of these people in computer science and robotics and AI going, "whoa, philosophy! Really important! Not a waste of time." Deep, deep questions here that have completely changed the way that they have gone thinking about the technology and the assumptions that they have underneath it. Jorge: And what I'm hearing here is that as designers of information systems or interactive systems — if we dare use that label now — we have to develop the awareness that what we're making is not just a collection of things to interact with. In some ways, it is extensions of people's minds. And much like the folks who are working on AI and robotics are taking the time out to think about what they're doing in a broader light, that we should be doing the same. Is that a fair summary of what you're saying here? Karl: Yes, I think so. I would draw an analogy to another idea from biology — actually paleontology — of punctuated equilibrium. There was a question for a long time about how evolution happens and issues and questions with the fossil record because there seemed to be gaps in the fossil record and long periods of basically not much happens. And so, in the late sixties and early seventies, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge proposed a theory… what they called, "punctuated equilibrium." You can think of it as a curve. Think of a chart where you've got an X and Y axis, where you have a rise in an uptick. Time is along the bottom. Rate of evolutionary changes on the Y axis. And you have a rise, and then it tapers off, and it plateaus, and then it goes up again for another period of time. And then we have a period of where it plateaus, and then you have another period of change, and then it plateaus. So, evolutionary change is not a linear line. It's not this sort of straight line up at a steady rate. You have periods of intense change, and then you have periods of relatively little change. And I think that this is one way to look at how design has evolved. We had a period, I would argue, of very intense change through the late 90s and early 2000s with the advent of the web. You know, information architecture comes into its own, usability engineering becomes much more recognized and interaction design becomes a more widely recognized term. And user experience comes up and becomes more or less sort of this much more dominant term. But the early stages really are there, we have this period. And then I would say that we had a long period where… long being relative, I guess, but we had a number of years where things were more stable. Then what happens is we get mobile, right? And especially by say 2010, along with this mobile, I feel like we had large organizations especially, went and said, "you know, all of this work that people in UX do, this is really important, and we're going to stop hiring outside agencies and different groups to come in and consult and do this on a contract basis. We're going to start building UX teams." And we've seen, over the last 10 years, this massive growth in UX as an industry. We have people who go get a degree in graphic design, computer science, or whatever, and then they do a 12-week bootcamp in UX, and now they're a UX designer. We've been growing like this massive number of people in the field, and all of these people have been moving in-house. And so, we have this period of rapid change where we have a growth of the field, and we are having to integrate it into organizations where it's now a really important part of it. And so, when I look at this, we see this period of change. We've seen changes like this through technology. We had the PC revolution, then we had the web. And then we have mobile. Everyone in Silicon Valley is thinking about, well, what's the next iteration of this because this tends to happen in periods of 12 to 15 years. What's the next new major platform? And we can see this coming. We're going to have another period of intense change. And when I look at the trend lines, as opposed to the headlines, you can see some of them that. They seem fairly obvious: more and more information, more embedded computation, not just sitting on a desk or even in your pocket. We have pervasive sensors. We have intelligent response to what human beings are doing. The capacity for a greater and tighter connection between people and the digital world. We have more complex pattern matching. We are having machines now that — with robots and AI — they can do things at a scale that humans cannot do. Or an accuracy or a speed that they cannot do. If we think about these as being separate, out there, aside from human abilities, I think we're going to wind up missing a huge opportunity. I think design is going to be caught flat-footed. The book that Steven and I wrote is an early attempt, from a design perspective, strongly influenced by information architecture, but also coming from distributed cognition, to explore some of these ideas and do it in a way which could be helpful to designers. And so, we break the book up into several sections. We talked about associations. We talk about visual representations. We talk about interaction, and we talk about something called coordination. And then we look towards the future. And in each of these, we explore some of the science. We give lots of examples. But we also try to provide frameworks for people, conceptual tools so that people can look at these different areas and begin this process of building it up. We would not in any way think that this is a be all and end all, but we were consciously trying to provide people with a way to think about the problems that they have now and provide a way to think about them that is going to be more helpful in the future, given these trend lines. Closing Jorge: I already mentioned in the previous episode that it was one of my favorite reads of last year, and I strongly encourage folks to check out the book. And other than that, Karl, where are the best places for folks to follow up with you? Karl: The best place to find me at the present is on Twitter. I'm @karlfast, and that's K-A-R-L-F-A-S-T. I am not super active on Twitter, but if people ping me, I will respond. You can also look me up on LinkedIn. And again, if you message me there, I will respond. Jorge: Thank you so much for being with us and being so generous with your time. Karl: Pleasure to be here. Always nice talking with you.

Is Venice east or west of Naples? Our perception of an environment is often influenced by how we categorize things by proximity. Often, we associate words with the way humans think, but we tend to overlook actions and movements. Language is important, but pictures are better remembered than words. In this episode, Stanford Professor and member of the governing board of the International Union of Psychological Science, Barbara Tversky discusses how gestures, motion, scenes, and events become the foundation for our thoughts and ideas. She discusses how spatial thinking underpins how maps are created, how they are used, distance and direction, and how they relate to ideas. Listen to the end of the show to hear how this cognitive theory can be used as a practical reference for AI, understanding personal interactions in virtual meetings, and creating emphatic designs. Episode Quotes:In simple terms, how is spatial thinking defined and used in your book? “Spatial thinking is the foundation of thought, moving in spaces essential to life. If we didn't move in space, we wouldn't find food shelter, avoid dangerous situations, and be attracted to good things. So the basic motion is really approaching, avoiding, going toward or away from something.”What are the implications of the spatial theory of cognition in AI? “Many of the people active in AI are really trying to mimic the mechanisms of the brain. That's been a challenge to AI because it doesn't distinguish what kinds of neurons their specific connectivity is and so forth. And the brain has a lot of specializations that aren't completely understood. There's so much left to do. That's truly exciting. But many researchers in AI are now realizing they really need to think about how a body in the world is experiencing things, seeing things, making sense of what it sees. Making sense of how the body interacts with things in the world.”On emphatic designs:“If you could think of drawing as frozen gestures, they go beyond. Once you're putting something on paper, it's going to be more complete. It has to be. You see gaps and you also see implications that you haven't thought about.”Show Links:Author's ProfileStanford ProfileBarbara on TwitterAuthor's WorkMind in Motion: How Action Shapes ThoughtsGoogle Scholar ArticlesAll Publications

01:07 - Marlena’s Superpower: Bringing the Arts to Tech * Coming Into Tech as a Creative 04:42 - Parallels Between Art and Computer Science/Software Engineering * System Architecture * Spatial Thinking & Representation * Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky (https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Motion-Action-Shapes-Thought/dp/046509306X) * Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (https://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011) 09:33 - Sketchnoting and Zines * The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking by Mike Rohde (https://www.amazon.com/Sketchnote-Handbook-illustrated-visual-taking/dp/0321857895/ref=asc_df_0321857895/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312021252609&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6623941144735025539&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9006718&hvtargid=pla-454389960652&psc=1) 14:19 - DIY Publishing and Physicality – The Power of Print * The Pamphlet Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars) 20:33 - Zines at Work & Zines in Professional Settings * Slowing Down Our Thought Processes * Using Diagrams to Ask Questions & For Exploration * Graphic Facilitators 31:11 - Target Audiences, Codeswitching, & People Are Not Robots 37:58 - How We View, Study, and Treat Liberal Arts – (Not Well!) * Formulating Thoughts In A Way That’s Available For Consumption 43:01 - Using Diagrams and Images * UML (Unified Modeling Language) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language) * Collaborative Whiteboarding Software and Shared Visual Language (Drawing Together) 50:41 - Handwriting Advice: Decolonize Your Mind! * SLOW DOWN * Write Larger * Practice * How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (https://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Nothing-Resisting-Attention/dp/1612197493) 59:45 - The “Let’s Sketch Tech!” (https://appearworks.com/) Conference * Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/letssketchtech?fan_landing=true) * Podcast (https://anchor.fm/appearworks) * Newsletter (https://appearworks.activehosted.com/f/7) Reflections: Damien: Decolonize your mind. Jamey: Zine fairs at work and valuing yourself by taking up space. Rein: Creativity is good for individuals to explore, but when we share it with people it’s a way we can become closer. Marlena: Connecting arts and technology. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hello, everyone and welcome to Episode 236 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jamey. And I’m another one of your hosts and I’m here with my friend, Damien Burke DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here in addition to with the host, our guest today, Marlena Compton. Marlena Compton is a tech community organizer, designer, and collaboration artist who has worked in the tech industry for 18 years. She grows tech communities and organizes conferences such as “Pear Conf” and “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Marlena has worked for companies like IBM and Atlassian. This has left her with a life-long appreciation for quality code, empathy, and working together as a team. When she isn’t working, Marlena enjoys lettering, calligraphy, and walking her dog. Welcome to the show, Marlena. MARLENA: Hi, thank you so much. DAMIEN: So I know you're prepared for this. Same thing we do for all of our guests, we're going to start with the first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MARLENA: Yeah, so my superpower is bringing the arts to tech and that is teaching people the value of creative arts—such as writing, sketching, music, and more—and how this relates to the tech industry, helping creative types feel more at home in tech, and helping folks who are mostly in the science track in school learn why they need the creative arts for critical thinking and thinking through problems. So it's like, you have to give people a space to do this learning from a peer perspective versus top-down perspective. This includes building community for folks to explore these things. JAMEY: So you came to tech from art previously, is that right? MARLENA: I have a wild academic background of interdisciplinary studies, which will not get you a job for anything but like, renting a car. [laughter] Or whatever and also, later I did computer science, but while I was getting my liberal arts degree, I did a lot of art history, a lot of painting, and a lot of theater. JAMEY: I wonder if you could speak to coming into the tech industry as someone who is already an artist and considers themselves an artist, like, how that translated for you. Like, what skills from being an artist, do you think were helpful to you as you were starting in tech? MARLENA: Sure. So I think that if you know that you're an artistic type, like I knew how important arts were for me. But I think for children often they get a lot of pressure to find something that will get them a job and it's not like this isn't for good reason, it's like we’ve got to be able to pay our bills. On the other hand, when you're a creative type, it's such a core part of your personality. You can't really separate it from anything and if you try to just tamp it down, it's going to come out somehow. So I was this college graduate and I was having a really hard time getting a job and figuring out what I wanted to do that would make enough money to support me. Computer science was literally the last thing I tried and I seem to do okay at it so I kept doing it. [laughs] And that's how I got into it. I wish that we had bootcamps when I started learning computer science, but there weren't any and so, all I could do was go back to community college. So I went to community college. I had to take every single math class over again. Calculus, I had to take three times, but I stuck with it. I didn't know if I could do it, but I kept taking the classes and eventually, it worked. So [laughs] that's how I got into the tech industry and it's like, it's totally okay to do this just to make money. That's why I did it. DAMIEN: So then coming in with this art background, which seems really broad and you didn't talk about anything specific, what insights and connections were you able to make between art and computer science, and art and software engineering? MARLENA: Sure. So for me, building software is a creative process. In fact, this is something I've believed for a very long time, because as soon as I got out with my newly-minted CS degree and I knew that I needed to create, draw, write, and do all of those things. Eventually, I started looking around for okay, what in computer science is kind of more visual place and it used to be people would think of diagramming software, HoloVizio, Rational Rose, which is that is quite a throwback. Who here –? DAMIEN: UML. MARLENA: [laughs] That UML, yes! I would look at these things, like system architect, where it's like the idea was that you could literally draw out pieces and then it would make your code, which was [laughs] I think an epic fail if you look at it from, did it actually ever write successful code? I have never – REIN: There's another option, which was the expense of architects draw the boxes and then the chief engineer put the code in the boxes. MARLENA: Well, but see, you need a brain in there and this is all about the brain. [laughter] MARLENA: Yeah. I think one transformation that my thinking had to go through so, I had to go from this computer science perspective of find a way to chop up all your thoughts into little, discreet, logical pieces so that you can make classes, objects, and things like that and instead look at the brain as an organ in your body. We take more of a holistic perspective where it is your brain is connected to your thoughts is connected to like your internal axes, GPS system, and mapping system and how all of that comes together to problem solve. REIN: Yeah. I love it. Without bodies, we couldn't think about things MARLENA: Indeed. This past year, I've spent a lot of time specifically investigating this connection. One of the things I did was read Barbara Tversky's book, Mind in Motion, and the premise of her book is that spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought. That is how you orient yourself in the world and how you perceive a space around you and yourself in that space is what allows you to organize ideas, take perspectives that are based in imagination, and things like that. REIN: Yeah, and this ties into Wyckoff's work on basic metaphors because basic metaphors are how we structure our thought, but they're all about the world. So thinking about the metaphor of containment, you have a thing, it has an inside and an outside, there may be a portal that gets you from the inside to the outside. So this is how houses work, right? This is how we think about houses. This is also how we think about relationships. It's how we think about code. And then there's you combine that basic metaphor with the metaphor of traveling; starting at a place, traveling along a path, ending up at another place. You put those two metaphors together, you can have complex thoughts about achieving goals. But these are all metaphors based on, like you're saying, our perception of living in a world that has 3D space. Yes, and maps are such a big part of that. So when I was reading through this particular book, she goes into things like maps, how we map ideas, and things like that and there is quite a bit of science behind it. And even for metaphor, she writes that metaphor is what happens when our thoughts overflow our brains and we need to put them out into the world. DAMIEN: So putting these thoughts, these ideas back out into the world and into some sort of spatial representation, is that how you view the tech notetaking, or diagramming sort of thing? MARLENA: Absolutely. So I guess, for listeners, I want to back up a little bit because I think something that Damien knows about me and also Jamey and Rein from looking at the biography is that I'm very into sketch notes. Just to bring us out of the depth [laughs] a little bit, I can tell you about why I turned to sketchnoting and why I started doing it. It was because I was trying to learn JavaScript and yes, Damien, I know how you feel about JavaScript, some of us like it. [laughs] DAMIEN: I don't want to show my cards too much here, but I will say the fact that you had difficulty with it is telling. MARLENA: Well, but I also had difficulty learning C, Java, Erlang. DAMIEN: So how did [inaudible]? MARLENA: Well, so I went to CascadiaJS and this was my first – well, it wasn't my first, but it was the language conference and I was just learning JavaScript and I didn't understand half of it. It just went over my head. So to try and create some memory of that, or try to figure it out, I started drawing. I had seen sketch notes on the web. They were experiencing a bump in popularity at the time. I think my Mike Rohde’s book had just come out and it helped. That was what introduced me to this whole world and eventually, we're talking about when thoughts overflow and you turn to metaphor, this is exactly what was happening for me was Barbara Tyversky refers to these pictures we draw as glyphs. They can be more complicated than language and that is why when we're really trying to figure something out, we're not going to be writing an essay, maybe sometimes, but for the most part, we'll start diagramming. JAMEY: I also wanted to talk about zines while you were on. I was thinking about zines when you were talking about this because I feel like there's a few different mediums of art that I do and some of them are more intentional than others. To me, zines are about like, “I'm thinking this and it needs to exist in physical space and then it will be done and I can stop thinking about it,” because it exists. MARLENA: I love that so much and it's exactly what zines are there for. So zines are DIY publishing and zines are the publishing that happens for topics that, I think it happens a lot for people who are underrepresented in some way. Because you're not going to have access to a publisher and it's going to be harder for you to get any official book out. But then sometimes it's also just, maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want your zine to be a more informal publication. I love zines how kind of – they are all so super niche like, you can put anything. Define the word zine, ha! [laughs] JAMEY: It's so hard. People will argue about this in the zine community for like days and days. Hard to define the word. MARLENA: And that's actually part of the power of zines because it means it can be whatever you want, which means whatever you want to create is okay. I think that's really what we're trying to get down into here is having different ways of expressing and problem solving be okay and accepted. REIN: Just something to point out that containment is a metaphor we use for categories. So we're talking about what is inside the zine category? DAMIEN: I want to go back to the well, Marlena, you said zines were do-it-yourself publishing, DIY publishing, but blogs are also do-it-yourself publishing. So zines have a physicality to them and feels like that's an important aspect. Can you talk about that, or why that is? MARLENA: Well, there are also digital zines, so yeah. [laughs] But. DAMIEN: Maybe five containerization and categories. MARLENA: [laughs] Well, if we wanted to talk a little bit about physical zines, that even is interesting and Jamey, maybe you have a few thoughts about this that you can share, too because there are just so many different ways to format a zine. JAMEY: Well, I know that digital zines are a thing and I've read some digital zines that I've very much enjoyed. To me, the physicality of zines is a big part of them and a lot of what's appealing about them for me. I think that part of the reason for that is that, as you were getting at, people can write whatever they want, people who might not have a chance to write in other formats and most importantly about that, you can't censor a zine. It's impossible because someone makes it themselves and then they give it to whoever they want to have. It's a very personal experience and there's no middleman who can like tell you what you can, or can't say. So I think that having that physical piece of paper that you then hand directly to someone is what makes that possible and not putting it on the internet is also what makes that possible. Like, you have this thing, nobody can edit what's in it. It's all up to you. Nobody can search for it on a search engine. If you don't want someone to see it, then you don't give them one and it's just a holdover from what a lot of media was more like before the internet and I appreciate that about them. [chuckles] DAMIEN: Yeah. To me, it sounds so much like the Federalist Papers, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense. JAMEY: Oh, those were zines for sure. DAMIEN: I wrote this thing, [inaudible] about, I'm hazing him out of here, read this. [chuckles] Those are zines, okay. JAMEY: And political zines are a huge subsection of pamphlets and all sorts of political ideology. REIN: And that's where printing started was with the publishing of zines, that's my argument. MARLENA: This is the power of print. It's the power of print and that power, it's something that you don't necessarily get with the internet. Zines are an archive as well and I don't think we can just say – So when I did the first Let’s Sketch Tech! conference, I had an editor from Chronicle Books come and she talked about publishing. When I was talking to her about doing this talk, what I thought was most interesting about our conversation was she said, “Books aren't going away. Books are never going away because we are so connected to our hands and our eyes.” Books are always going to be there. Printed, words printed, pamphlets, zines, I think they're going to outlast computers. [chuckles] Think about how long a CD, or magnetic tape is going to last for versus the oldest book in the world. DAMIEN: Yeah. REIN: And by the way, if you don't think that printing was about zines, go Google the pamphlet wars. We think it's about publishing the Bible, but the vast majority of stuff that was printed was pamphlets. Zines! DAMIEN: And we can look at things that have survived through a history and it's really truly about paper from Shakespeare's works to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is how things have survived. MARLENA: And on another aspect of this is the fact that we are human, we have human eyes and those eyes have limits as to how much they can look at a screen. Looking at paper and also, the physical manipulation of that paper, I think is a very important aspect of zines. So my favorite scene ever, which is sadly lost to me, was this very small print zine and it was the kind that is printed literally on one piece of paper and this folded up. But it had the most magnificent centerfolds where you open it up and this is awesome picture of Prince and the person even taped a purple feather in the centerfold part of it and it's like, that's an experience you're only going to get from this kind of printed physical medium. DAMIEN: So yeah, I'm seeing a pattern here, communicating ideas through physical mediums. JAMEY: And I think that because zines are so DIY and low tech that people do really interesting things with paper to express what they're going for. Like, I've been doing zines for a long time with friends. But my first one that I ever did by myself, I had this black and white photo of a house that had Christmas lights on it and I was trying to be like, “How am I going to express this feeling that I have about this picture that I want to express in this media?” I'm like, “I'm going to go to Kinko's and make copies of this for 5 cents and how is it going to look the way I want?” So I ended up manually using a green highlighter to highlight over all of the Christmas lights in every single copy of the zine so that everyone would see the green Christmas lights that I wanted them to feel what I was feeling about. I think that's a pretty simple example because it's not extremely a lot of work to put highlighter in your zine either. But I think that people have to think about that and how they want to convey something and then people have done a lot of really interesting things like taping feathers into their books. MARLENA: Yeah. This is a way of slowing down our thought process, which I don't think we talk about enough because right now, in our culture, it's all about being faster, being lull 10x and making a zine is a great way to reflect on things that you've learned. So I would really like to take a minute to just talk about zines at work and zines in a professional setting because I've noticed that one thing people think as soon as I start talking about zines is why do I need this in my job? Why do we need this in tech? I think that zines are a great way to help people on teams surface the unspoken knowledge that lives in the team, or it's also a way to play with something that you're trying to learn and share with other people. I’d like to hear Jamey, do you have thoughts about this? JAMEY: I have a thought, but I'm not sure how directly related it is to what you just said and I feel self-conscious about it. [chuckles] But I like to teach people to make zines who aren't familiar with zines, or haven't made them before and the thing that I try to teach people that I think zines can teach you is that you can just do this. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. It doesn't take a specific skill that you can't just learn. So they're accessible in that way, but I think it's also a bigger lesson about what you can do if you want to do something and that's how I feel about tech. If you want to learn to code, it's not magic, you can learn how to do it. If you want to do a zine, you can learn how to do it. To me, those thoughts go together. I feel like that wasn't exactly what you just asked, I’m sorry. DAMIEN: I liked it, though. [chuckles] MARLENA: It does tie into the fact that it's important to help people feel at home at work. Well, you're not at home at work, but to feel as though they are in the right place at work and this type of making zines and allowing people to surface what they know about your system, about what you're building, about ideas that your team is tinkering with. This kind of format gives people the space to surface what they're thinking even if they're not the most vocal person. DAMIEN: So one of this really ties into what I was thinking. When you said zines at work and there's a couple of great tech zines which I love and I think should be in a lot of offices. But the idea of actually creating one at work, something happened in my chest when I thought about that idea and it's because it's a very informal medium and tends to be informal and whimsical and you just kind of do it. I realize how much that is counter to so much of how tech teams and tech industry runs where it's very formal. You can't just ship code, you’ve got to get a pull request and reviewed by the senior engineer and it's got to fit our coding standards and run in ordering time, or less. [laughter] That can be very, I'll say challenging. JAMEY: I think that's also exactly why it’s easy and fun to learn about tech from zines because it feels so much more approachable than a formal tutorial and you're saying like, “Oh, will this be too hard, or what will I learn?” There's all of this baggage that comes along with it where it's like, “Oh, the zine is like cute and whimsical and I'm going to read it and it's going to be interesting,” and then like, “Whoa, I just learned about sorting from it.” DAMIEN: Yeah. Just because you’re writing software, or doing computer science doesn't mean we have to be serious. [laughter] Probably needs to be shouldn't be. REIN: It also makes me think about a shift that I would really like to see in the way diagrams and things like this are used, which is that when you're asked to produce an architecture diagram, you're generally asked to produce something authoritative. It has to be the best current understanding of what the organization has decided to do and that doesn't leave any space for exploration, or for using diagrams to ask questions. I think that's bad because naturally, on a team, or in an organization, everyone has their own models. Everyone has their own local perspective on what's happening. If there's no opportunity to surface, “Hey, here's how I think this works. Can I compare that with how you think this works?” You can't maintain common ground. I don't think producing a lot of words is a great way to do that. I think that's very inefficient. I also think that having an hour meeting with twenty people where you all talk about it is also inefficient. So I'm wondering if diagrams can be useful here. Relatively, it’s a little bit quicker to draw some boxes and connect them with arrows than it is to write a 1-page report. I'm wondering if we could promote more people putting out these low fidelity diagrams that are, “Here's what's in my head,” and sharing them, if that would help us maintain common ground. MARLENA: Absolutely, and I love the way that you brought up this situation where everyone is – because I think we've all been in these meetings where it's like, there are some technical hurdle, decisions have to be made, technology needs to be chosen, libraries needed – that type of thing. What I experienced was it was hard for me to get a word in edgewise. REIN: Yeah, like if you have twenty people in a meeting, at most three of them are paying attention and about half of them are going to be underrepresented in the meeting for a variety of reasons, if not more. MARLENA: Yeah, and well, I'm just going to say yes. For underrepresented people, this happens a lot. So one of the things that I like to promote is taking apart the traditional jam everyone into a room, let the conversation naturally happen. I'm just going to say it. I don't think that works too well and honestly, I think that a zine format, or even if it's just like take a piece of paper, let people diagram what they think is interesting, then trade, then your team is having a zine fair. [laughs] REIN: Or if you do that to prepare for the meeting and then the meeting is going over them. MARLENA: Sure. Yeah, and maybe the discussion is like a facilitated discussion. I did a lot of Agile team stuff, including I had to go down the route of learning how to facilitate just because I couldn't get a word in edgewise on my team. So I started looking at different ways to how do you have a discussion when it's like, there are two, or three people who always talk, nobody else says anything, but everyone has thoughts. It's really interesting what happens when you start trying to change how a group is having discussions. REIN: It also seems like it's super valuable for the person doing the facilitation because they have to synthesize what's happening in real-time and then they come away with the meeting, with the synthesis in their brains. Part of which they've been able to put into the diagrams, the drawings, and whatever, but only a part of it. So it seems like if you have some external consultant come in and draw diagrams for your team, that external consultant then leaves with a bunch of the knowledge you were trying to impart to everyone else. MARLENA: I don't know if that's necessarily true. In the world of graphic recording, those folks go to all kinds of meetings and I think it's true that they are going to come away with a different set of thoughts in their head, but they're also not going to have the context of your team. REIN: Yeah. MARLENA: And that's a pretty big part of it. But I know Ashton Rodenhiser, she's a graphic facilitator who does this and she'll go into meetings like the one we're describing, and while people are talking, she's drawing things out. It's really interesting what happens when people see their discussion being drawn by a third party. I've seen this happen at some conferences; it's really great way to change the way you have discussion. REIN: Yeah. So for example, we do incident analysis, we do interviews with the people who are there, and we review slot transcripts. What we find is that the people who are doing the interviews, conducting the analysis, facilitating the reviews, they become experts in the systems. MARLENA: Ah yes, because so much – it reminds me of how teaching somebody to do something, you teach it to yourself. So they are having to internalize all of this discussion and reflect it back to the team, which means of course, they're learning along with the rest of the team. REIN: Yeah. So I think my point was not don't hire consultants to do this, it was keeping them around after you do. MARLENA: [laughs] Wouldn't it be amazing if having a graphic recorder, or a graphic facilitator was just a thing that we all had in our meetings? REIN: Yeah, or even something that was democratized so that more people got the benefits of – I think doing that work has a lot of benefits to the person who's doing it. JAMEY: This is making me think a lot about the way that you engaged with something, or the way that you express it, depending on who your target audience is. Like, if I'm taking notes for myself in my own notebook, my target audience is just myself and I write things that won't make sense to anybody else. If I'm writing like a document for work, the target audience is my team, I'm writing in a way that reflects that it's going to be read and understood by my team instead of me. I think that a lot of what we're talking about here with zines, diagrams, and things like this is kind of an interesting hybrid. When I write a zine, I'm doing it for me, it's benefiting me, but not in the same way as notes in my notebook where I don't want anyone else to ever look at it. So it's like, how do I write something that's benefiting me, but also has an audience of other people that I'm hoping will get something out of it? I think that's a bit of a unique format in some ways. DAMIEN: That's interesting because everything I hear from novelists and screenwriters, it's always “Write the book, write the movie that you want.” You're the audience and if you love it, not everybody's going to love it, [chuckles] but there are other people who will, chances are other people will love it. If you write something for everybody to love, nobody is going to like it. MARLENA: Yeah, I think so, too and you never know who else is going to be thinking the same way you are and sometimes, it's that people don't have a way to speak up and share how they're feeling in a similar way. So I actually love that zines allow – I think it is important to be making something that is from your perspective and then share that. That's a way to see who else has that perspective. DAMIEN: But I also understand this need to, well, I'll say code switch. This need to code switch for different audiences. [chuckles] Rein brought up UML. I learned UML in college back in the long-ago times and I hated it. It was an interesting thing to learn, but an awful thing to do because all of my UML diagrams had to be complete, authoritative, and correct because I was doing them for my professor and I was a TA. I thought, “Well, if I had large amount of diagrams describing large systems, looking at them could be very informative and useful.” But no one in the world is going to write those things because this is way too much work unless I'm allowed to be informal, general, not authoritative, or complete and so, I'm realizing these tensions that I've been going on in my mind for decades. MARLENA: Well, and there's programs. Using those programs was so clunky, like adding a square, adding a label, adding a class, and pretty soon, if you were trying to diagram a large system, there was not a great way to change your perspective and go from macro down to micro and zoom out again. Whereas, this is, I think what is so great about the human brain. We can do that and we can do that when we're drawing with our hands. DAMIEN: Yeah. There were promises of automated UML diagrams that you get from type systems and static analysis and I think I saw some early versions of this and they created correct UML diagrams that were almost readable. But going from correct and almost readable to something that's informative and enlightening, that's an art and we don't have computers that can do that. MARLENA: Right. Like, humans are not computers. Computers are not human. [laughs] When is it not Turing complete? [laughter] I think that initially people really wanted to be robots when they were sitting down at the computer and I think we're going through a period right now where we're rethinking that. REIN: Well, in part it was management that wanted people to be robots. DAMIEN: Which reaches back to the industrial revolution. MARLENA: And still does. What I love is that having this conversation about how we work and how to build software, it brings up all of these things, including this type of management wanting people to be robots, but we're not. What's interesting to me and what I think is that if we could shift our perspective from let's make everyone a machine, we're all robots sitting, typing out the stuff for people. If we could shift to thinking about building software is a creative process, people are going to need sleep. If you want them to solve your problems, they're going to need different ways to express themselves and share ideas with each other. REIN: It's really important to uncover facts about work and human performance like, even if you have rules, policies, and procedures, humans still have to interpret them and resolve trade-offs to get them done. You can have two rules that are mutually exclusive and now a human has to resolve that conflict. Also, that we think that the old paradigm that Damien was talking about, this Taylor’s paradigm, is that manager decide how the work is to be done and then workers do what they're told. But workers, to do this, have to think about high level organizational goals that are much more abstract than what the people designing the work thought they would have to think about. I think if you can uncover – this is all creative problem solving and it's a part of the day-to-day work. DAMIEN: Yeah, that command-and-control structure was always a fantasy, less so in some places than other places, but always, always a fantasy. REIN: Even the military is reevaluating what C2 means in the face of overwhelming evidence that humans don't work that way. DAMIEN: It's nice to pretend, though. Makes things so much simpler. MARLENA: What's interesting about this changing paradigm in how we view this management and control piece is how this is manifesting in the world of academia, especially in the world of liberal arts, because liberal arts colleges are not doing well. [laughs] In fact, Mills College here in the Bay Area is not going to be taking freshmen next year and they're going to close. But I think there's a theme of education in here, too in how people learn these skills, because we've been talking about zines. You do not have to have a degree to know how to make a zine and that's awesome! [laughter] Along with these other skills and I know that there are a lot of people in tech, who they went through computer science program, or even a bootcamp and maybe they did some science before, maybe not, but they're still going to these creative skills and it may be, I think a lot of folks in the US and in tech, it's like you weren't in a position to be able to study art, or to get that much exposure, because it was about survival. Survival for your whole family and there's just not the time to try and explore this stuff. I would love to see more space in tech for people to explore all of the creative arts and see how does it help you express yourself at work. The most concrete example I have of this is writing up a software bug. So I used to be a tester and I could always tell who had writing skills and who didn't based on how they would write up a bug. [laughs] DAMIEN: No, and I can definitely feel that. I work on a team of one for several projects. So sometimes, I have to write a user story, or a bug and I have a very strict format for writing bugs. It's basically, it’s write on a Cucumber and yet I will take minutes and minutes and minutes to properly wordsmith that bug report for me [laughs] so that Tuesday – MARLENA: As you should! Doing a good job! DAMIEN: So that Tuesday, when I read that I know right away what it means and what it says. Whereas, I can write something quickly that might be accurate, but would be difficult for me to understand, or I can write something quickly that could be in complete assuming that I found the bug. I'm the one who put the bug in there; I know everything there is to know and still come back to this, no clue. I don't even know what the bug is. I actually have to throw away a feature this week because I had no clue what I meant when I wrote it. MARLENA: I used to actually give a talk about this, how to write up bugs, because it was such an issue and if you don't train developers and other folks who are looking at an app to write them, then it ends up, the testers are the only ones who can write it up and that's not okay. [laughs] DAMIEN: And when you talk about a talk, how to write a bugs, there's some obvious mechanical things. How do you reproduce this? What did you expect to happen? Who's doing it? That sort of things and these are very clear and obvious, but then there's the actual communicating via words issue. [chuckles] How can you write those things down in a way that's easy for the next person to understand? I spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing. It's hard. It's an art, I guess. REIN: I want to turn this into an even more general point about the importance of the discipline of formulating your thoughts in a way that's available for consumption. So as an example, I used to write notes in a shorthand way where if I thought I knew something, I wouldn't include it because I already knew that I don't need to take a note about it and what I've found is that I couldn't explain stuff. I couldn't integrate the new knowledge with the old knowledge when it came time for me to answer a question. The approach I've been taking more recently is formulating my thoughts in a way that if I had to write a blogpost about that topic, I can copy and paste things from my notes, ready to go, and just drop them in. That's the thing I do for myself, but what I've found is that I actually understand stuff now. DAMIEN: Yeah. I've had the same experience writing things that I thought I understood. This is the rubber duck story. You think you understand something so you try to explain to somebody else and go, “Oh, that's what it was.” But since we have Marlena here right now, [chuckles] I want to talk about using diagrams and images in that process for a person who doesn't work that way usually. MARLENA: Indeed. Well, one of the things that I think we hint at in the world of tech—this is interesting because we've all been bashing the UML and all that stuff, but it did give us a set of symbols for visual representation of programming type things. Like, you make the rectangle for your class and then you put your properties in the top and the methods in the bottom, or something like that. Something that I've noticed in the sketchnoting world is that sketchnoting 101 is how to draw at all. How to feel confident enough to put your pen on the paper and draw a line, draw a box, draw a circle, make them into objects, whatever. But once you're past that introductory, when 101 level of sketchnoting and you've done a few, the next level up is to start creating your own language of visual representation, which I think people kind of do, whether they intentionally do it, or not. I kind of find myself doing it. The way that I contain categories of information in a sketch note, I've kind of come to a particular way that I do it. That type of thing is because we don't talk about creativity and representation; we don't take the time to do these things. They're not really a practice. Everyone kind of just does their own and I've been on teams that, or I've tried to be on teams that had a fairly mature way of having a wiki, you're going to talk to each other, Agile teams. Still, we might have a wiki, but it's not like we were always drawing together. I'm interested in have you all had experiences on your teams of drawing together, collaborating on one drawing at the same time? REIN: Yeah. We use a collaborative whiteboarding software to do various things and one of them is drawing boxes that represent systems and architectures. One of the exercises we sometimes do is we say, “You get this part of the board, you get this part of the board, you get this part of the board. I want you each to diagram how you think the system works now and then in 15 minutes, we're going to look at them together.” MARLENA: Yes. That type of thing, I think it's so important and I wish that more folks did it on their teams. Have y'all found that you have any visual representation that has started repeating itself, like say certain part of a system you usually draw in a certain way? REIN: Yeah. We've definitely developed a language, or a discourse over time and some shorthand, or mnemonics for certain things. We’ve not standardized, I think is the wrong word, but we've moved closer together in a more organic way. DAMIEN: Which is how language develops. MARLENA: Indeed, indeed. But this way of having this shared visual language together is going to give you a shorthand with each other. Like, when you have a map, you have a legend, and I think that it's important Rein, like you mentioned, not necessarily having standards, but having some common ways of drawing certain things together. That type of drawing together is very powerful for developing your collective way of visualizing a system and thinking about it. REIN: And another thing I want to highlight here is that if you ask four people to diagram and architecture and you get four different diagrams, that doesn't mean that one of them is right and three of them are wrong. What that usually means is that you have four different perspectives. MARLENA: Yes. We all have our internal way of mapping things and it is not a right, or wrong, a good, or bad. It's just, every person has a different map, a way of mapping objects in the world, that is brain science stuff. DAMIEN: I get the opportunity to reference my favorite, what I discovered just now, today, I’ll just go with today's zine, Principia Discordia. JAMEY: Oh my god, that’s my favorite! DAMIEN: Marvelous work of art. They say in Principia Discordia that the world is chaos. It's chaos out there and we look at it through a window and we draw lines in the window and call that order. [chuckles] So people draw different lines and those are the diagrams you’re going to get. JAMEY: That’s so beautiful. REIN: I have to interject that John Haugeland, who's a philosopher, said something very similar, which is that the act of dividing the universe into systems with components and interactions is how we understand the universe. It's not something that's out those boxes. Aren't something that are out there in the universe. They're in here in our heads and they're necessary for us to even perceive and understand the universe. DAMIEN: Which gives us a whole new meaning to the first chapter of the book of Genesis. But [laughs] we don't have to go that far down the road. MARLENA: Well, even if we think about color and perceiving color, everyone's going to have a different theme that they see. It's going to like – REIN: Yeah, and there's philosophically no way to know if red for me means the same thing as red for you. MARLENA: Mm hm. DAMIEN: So applying that same standard to our technical systems. Some senior architects somewhere might draw a diagram and goes, “This is the truth of what we have built, or what we should be building and that there is no external representation of truth.” “Oh, look, the map is not the territory! We can go through this all day.” [laughter] REIN: And the interesting thing for me is that this is something that there are Eastern philosophies that have figured out long before Western philosophy did. So while Descartes was doing his stuff, you had the Jainism principle of Anakandavada, which is the manifoldness of the universe. There's no one right truth; there are many interlocking and overlapping truths. JAMEY: How does this relate to a GitHub [inaudible]? [laughs] DAMIEN: [overtalk] It means your diagramming is direct. REIN: It certainly says something about distributed systems and in distributed systems, we call this the consensus problem. [laughter] DAMIEN: I love the fact that Git was built to be this completely distributed, no single authority source control system and now we have GitHub. MARLENA: Indeed. REIN: I want to know how I, as someone who has terrible handwriting, can feel comfortable doing sketching. MARLENA: Sure! I just did a whole meet up about that. It's not just you, I think that it's 75% of engineers and we emphasize typing. So what I tell people about handwriting, the very, very basics, is slow down. Not what you want to hear, I know, but it makes a huge difference. So this past winter, my pandemic new skill that I learned is calligraphy, and in calligraphy, they tell you over and over and over to slow down. So that's tip number one is to slow down and then number two is try writing larger. Whatever it is you're writing, play with the size of it. Larger and slower generally gives you a way to look at what you're writing and which pieces like, there are probably some letters that you dislike more than others when you are writing and you can take those letters that you really dislike. Maybe it's just a matter of reviewing like, how are you forming the letter? If it's all of them, it'll take you longer, but. [laughs] JAMEY: When I was a kid learning cursive for the first time, I really hated to do the capital H in cursive. I think it's like an ugly letter and I think it's hard to write and it was hard to learn. My last name starts with H so I had to do it a lot. I just designed a new capital H and that's what I've been using in cursive since I was like a little kid [laughs] and nobody notices because nobody goes like, “That's not how I learned cursive in class,” if they can read it. That's how I feel that language, too and we're talking about the way language evolves. People will be like, “That's not a real word,” and I'm like, “Well, if you understood what I meant, then it's a word.” DAMIEN: Perfectly fine with it. JAMEY: And that's kind of how I was just thinking about handwriting too like, what is there right, or wrong if you can read what I'm expressing to you? [chuckles] DAMIEN: Yeah. If you look at the lowercase g in various glyph sets, you have to actually pay attention and go, “This lowercase g is not the same symbol as this lowercase g.” [laughs] You have to totally call your attention to that. They are vastly, vastly, different things. MARLENA: The letters that look the same, though are capital T, I, and F. DAMIEN: You don't put crossbars on your eye? MARLENA: Well, I'm thinking in terms of like, for calligraphy, when I got into the intermediate class, I had to come up with my own alphabet, typography, design my own alphabet. Those letters were so similar, they just gave me fits trying to make them all different. But I think it's important for people to practice their handwriting. I know that we all just scribble on the pad for charging, or whatever. You just scribble with your fingernail and it doesn't look like anything. But keeping that connection to your handwriting is also an important way of valuing yourself and this space that you take up in the world. I think it's really good if you can get to a place where you can accept your own handwriting and feel comfortable with it. Since I am into stuff like calligraphy and lettering, it's definitely part of my identity, the way that I write things out by hand. It's physically connected to you, to your brain, and so, things like that, we want to say everything is typing in tech, but there is a value for your confidence, for your brain, and for how you process information to be able to write something by hand and feel confident enough to share that with somebody else. JAMEY: That was really beautiful, actually. But I was going to ask, how do you think your handwriting relates to your voice? Because when you were saying that about feeling comfortable with your handwriting and how it's like a self-confidence thing, it made me think of the way that people also feel and interact with their voice. Like, you always hear people, “Oh, I hate listening to a recording of myself. I hate listening to my voice.” MARLENA: Well, there's that whole field of handwriting analysis, just like there's that whole field of body language and that includes what someone's voice sounds like. It is attached to your personality and how you're thinking and how you're working with ideas. [laughs] So it's not like I'm judging someone when I look at their—sometimes I am, I'm lying. Sometimes I am judging people when I look at their handwriting. I mostly don't. Honestly, I think we've lost so much education about handwriting in schools, what I dislike about that is, we were talking about the power of print earlier. Well, if you feel uncomfortable writing your name, if you feel uncomfortable writing down what you believe and sharing it, that's the type of censorship, isn't it? So I think handwriting is important for that type of thing, but I think it is connected to your personality. JAMEY: It says something about you and when you put something out into the world that says something about you in that way, it's kind of a vulnerable experience. MARLENA: It is, and you're showing people how you value yourself. I think that's partly why a lot of times in tech, we've minimized the role of handwriting so much that nobody feels comfortable sharing their handwriting. Well, it's not nobody, that's a big generalization, but a lot of people don't feel comfortable sharing their handwriting and that is a loss. That is a loss for everyone. DAMIEN: I love what you said, in part because I didn't want to hear it, when Rein asked, “How do you improve your handwriting?” You said, “Write slower and write bigger,” and I knew right away that that was correct because that's the only thing that has worked when I was trying to improve my handwriting. But I gave up on that because I didn't want to; I don't want to write slower and bigger because of what you said—taking up space. If you look at my handwriting historically, it's been not taken up – very little space, very little time. I don't want anybody to have to wait for me to finish writing. I don't want to use this whole page. I don't want to think my writing is so, so important that it's all big on the page, but allowing myself to take up space and time is how I get to better handwriting. So that was just such a beautiful way of putting it. MARLENA: Well, I read this book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and it's a wonderful book where the book blows me away and it's hard to talk about it because she has packed so much into it. But it's thinking about how we make ourselves go so fast and it's about the attention economy. How we are trying to speed ourselves up so much and I think that handwriting is part of this. If we are going to take back our own lives, that includes being able to slow down enough to write your name in a way that feels good to you and share it. I like what you wrote in the chat, Damien, but I'd like to hear you say it. DAMIEN: I wrote it in the chat so I wouldn't say it. [laughs] “Decolonize your mind.” It was a message to myself, decolonize your mind. The idea that you don't get to do nothing, you don't get to take up space and time. Yeah, and so that's just, it's all these things are so tightly connected. MARLENA: So I think y'all are ready for me to tell you the story of how I came up with a first Let’s Sketch Tech conference and this conference happened maybe 2017, 2018. I always forget the exact year, but it was post Trump getting elected. Now the Women's March, right after Trump got elected and sworn into office, was a major point in time and wake up call for me. I've always tried to learn about politics, intersectionalism, and things like that, but this March showed me the power of making something with your own hands and showing that and sharing it to someone else. I wanted everyone to feel like, even in this era of Trump, we still have the power to make something meaningful and share that with our own hands. So that was when I decided to start emphasizing more and learning more about the connection between art and tech. I'd been doing sketch notes and it sort of struck me that there was not much of a community out there that handled this topic, which I thought was just kind of strange. When I looked at sketchnoting itself, it seemed like more was happening in the world of design. Well, what about engineers? I've had to draw out things so many times to learn them, to teach somebody else, to understand what's happening and so, that's when I put together this Let’s Sketch Tech conference. I wanted people to be able to retain the power to make something with their own hands, because that can never be taken away from you, whether you have internet connection, or not. But even if you do have the internet connection, combining these together is just so powerful. So that is why I started this conference and this community and it's pretty deep. I don't bring it up all the time because it's kind of a lot, but yeah, and we had a great time. DAMIEN: Thank you so much, and thank you for sharing that story and everything else you've shared with us. How do we feel about going into reflections? I think I'm going to be reflecting on in the broad sense, it's what I didn't want to say earlier until Marlena called me out, decolonize your mind. But in a smaller sense, it's how much of my view of the tech industry, my work in there, and the environment there should be formal, structured, strict, authoritarian. I had all these ideas that are still, unbeknownst to me, having a huge influence about how we can work. The idea of a zine fest at work seems so outrageous to me because it doesn't fit into those ideas and so, I'll be reflecting on well, where else am I seeing this stuff and how has it prevented me from doing something so very effective? [laughs] I said, zine fest. I used to think I was too young to mispronounce zine, but whatever. [laughs] Who’s next? JAMEY: I can go next. So my two favorite things, I think that got said, one of them was also about like the zine fair at work. I host zine fairs in my hometown and the idea of like, well, if you both draw something and then you trade, you're having a zine fair. I absolutely love that. And then my other favorite thing was about the talk closer to the end about valuing yourself and the way and taking up space and all of those things. I feel actually like I want to mush those two things together because talking about valuing yourself, like really resonated with me the way that I do zines in my regular life, not in tech. But I think that inside of tech is a place where there are people that I really want to see value themselves more. It's a system that has a tendency to shut people down and keep talented people and I want to imbue that kind of confidence into a lot of engineers, especially newer engineers. So I think that I really like this idea of a zine fest at work, and maybe that can, in addition to helping teach us about our systems and stuff, help us encourage each other to take that time to value ourselves. REIN: I think what struck me about this conversation the most is that creativity is good for people, personally, individuals to explore our creativity. But when we share it with other people, that's a way that we can become closer. I think that for the work to happen—because to some extent, I tried to apply these ideas at work—people have to build and maintain common ground with each other. I think that encouraging people to be creative and to share that creativity—you typically wouldn't ask a junior engineer to draw an architecture diagram, but I think you should. MARLENA: I hope that after listening to this, people definitely ask their newer folks on their team to draw a diagram, then we’ll share and trade with them. I think what I've learned from this conversation is, well, I think that it validated, more than anything, the ideas that I'm trying to spread about connecting arts and technology. It was wonderful to hear each of you talking about the struggles and challenges that you have at work in bringing this together because it is a different way of thinking. But I feel so positive whenever I talk about this and seeing people be able to recognize themselves and seeing some doors and windows open about how they can incorporate the arts a little bit more into their tech lives is the reason why I do this and it's been such a privilege to share this with all of you and your listeners. So thanks for having me. DAMIEN: It's been a privilege to have you. The idea that we can start out with like, “Let's draw pictures as engineers,” and ended up with, “Oh my God, how do I become fully human?” [laughs] It's really amazing. JAMEY: Yeah, this was really great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. MARLENA: It was a lot of fun. DAMIEN: Marlena, why don't you give your Patreon and your podcast? MARLENA: Sure. Well, I started the Patreon because it was an easier way for folks to sign up for the meetups that happened in Let's Sketch Tech. We do a monthly meetup and I'm starting to plan the conference for this year. There's a free newsletter, but if this podcast is giving you life, if you're getting oxygen from this conversation, I highly suggest checking out the Let’s Sketch Tech Patreon, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to my podcast, Make it a Pear! I talk a lot about creative process in tech. DAMIEN: Awesome. Thank you so much and thank you for joining us. Special Guest: Marlena Compton.

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Dr. Barbara Tversky is a Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University and a Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Tversky specializes in cognitive psychology. She is an authority in the areas of visual-spatial reasoning and collaborative cognition. Dr. Tversky's research interests include language and communication, comprehension of events and narratives, and the mapping and modeling of cognitive processes. She is the author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. In this episode, we focus on Mind in Motion. We start with the concept of cognitive map. We discuss embodied cognition. We then talk about gestures, and how they aid communication and learning. Other topics include: the relationship between the how we perceive space and how we perceive time, and between space and how we think about our social environments; how we move from the way we perceive the world to concepts and abstractions; how to improve learning, and using virtual and augmented reality; and creativity. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, ANJAN KATTA, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, MAX BEILBY, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, OMARI HICKSON, PHYLICIA STEVENS, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JOÃO ALVES DA SILVA, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, MIRAN B, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, MAX BEILBY, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, AND GARY G HELLMANN! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, SERGIU CODREANU, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND NIRUBAN BALACHANDRAN! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, AND MATTHEW LAVENDER!

Mike is inspired after listening to an interview with psychologist Barbara Tversky. He's all fired up to talk about how movement and physical experiences in the world create the foundation for children's cognitive abilities. The group is reminded of how remarkable and under-celebrated young children's mental capabilities are.

On this episode of the GovComms Podcast, contentgroup CEO David Pembroke speakers to cognitive psychologist, Barbara Tversky. Currently located in New York, Barbara is a Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College as well as a Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University. She has conducted extensive research into the areas of memory, language, spatial thinking, event cognition, extended mind, diagrammatic reasoning, design, gesture and creativity. In this podcast, Barbara shares with us what she has learnt about the brain and how her research on gesture and movement can benefit communicators when trying to get an audience to understand or learn about a certain concept or idea. Barbara explains how the brain is quite complex, and as a result, when you are trying to get a group of people to understand something, you must do so in a way that easy for the brain to understand. She goes on to explain studies which she has conducted that prove how using gestures play a big role in helping someone understand a concept or remember a set of rules that they have to follow. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic seeing people separated and having to communicate through video conferencing platforms, such as zoom, more often, Barbara explains the difficulties that this holds for communicators and what changes she feels need to be made to these services, to allow the most effective forms of communication. Barbara explains that gesturing is a natural way of communication, and that it should be used. She also explains to David that humans are visual thinkers and therefore should not shy away from trying to visualize ideas and concepts to their audience. We end the episode with some tips from Barbara on how government communicators should use gestures and graphics to their advantage. Discussed in this episode: How our brains understand information and concepts and how we can best communicate them to one another. The importance of gestures and the research that proves how effective they are. How to communicate effectively when face-to-face options are not possible.

On this episode of the GovComms Podcast, contentgroup CEO David Pembroke speakers to cognitive psychologist, Barbara Tversky. Currently located in New York, Barbara is a Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College as well as a Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University. She has conducted extensive research into the areas of memory, language, spatial thinking, event cognition, extended mind, diagrammatic reasoning, design, gesture and creativity. In this podcast, Barbara shares with us what she has learnt about the brain and how her research on gesture and movement can benefit communicators when trying to get an audience to understand or learn about a certain concept or idea. Barbara explains how the brain is quite complex, and as a result, when you are trying to get a group of people to understand something, you must do so in a way that easy for the brain to understand. She goes on to explain studies which she has conducted that prove how using gestures play a big role in helping someone understand a concept or remember a set of rules that they have to follow. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic seeing people separated and having to communicate through video conferencing platforms, such as zoom, more often, Barbara explains the difficulties that this holds for communicators and what changes she feels need to be made to these services, to allow the most effective forms of communication. Barbara explains that gesturing is a natural way of communication, and that it should be used. She also explains to David that humans are visual thinkers and therefore should not shy away from trying to visualize ideas and concepts to their audience. We end the episode with some tips from Barbara on how government communicators should use gestures and graphics to their advantage. Discussed in this episode: How our brains understand information and concepts and how we can best communicate them to one another. The importance of gestures and the research that proves how effective they are. How to communicate effectively when face-to-face options are not possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's guest, Barbara Tversky, has spent her professional life questioning the primacy of the mind over the body. Her incredible book, Mind in Motion, argues that our abilities to think and perceive originate in our bodies. And more specifically, in the process of movement and feedback from the environment. Which means that physical activity is far from optional exercise. Moving our bodies in multiple ways, frequently, is the core of who we are as homo sapiens. If you want to grow and evolve, books and philosophies are fine, but challenging your physical body with new situations and challenges is a far more powerful engine of evolution.

Barbara Tversky argues that our thinking, and consciousness itself, arises from the experiences of our physical bodies in space. Rather than being an afterthought, or just the province of athletes and dancers, spatial thinking is the foundation of all thought. The post We Move, Therefore We Think: Barbara Tversky on PYP 431 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

This week, a deep dive into human psychology and cognition, with author and esteemed psychologist Barbara Tversky. Professor Tversky an Emirita Professor of Psychology at Stanford and Columbia Univeristies, and is one of the world's foremost authorities on memory, spatial thinking, creativity, and embodied cognition - all highly relevant themes in Systema practice. Her book - Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought - posits that spatial thinking is the foundation of all thought, and that how we sense and perceive the world shapes our thought patterns, emotions, and decisions. Her depth of knoweldge on this subject is staggering, and we were barely able to scratch the surface in this extended, 90-minute discussion. But for unabashed brain/movement/cognition nerds, this is well worth the time. Here, we touch upon: How our actions mould our perceptions of the world why spatial thinking and gestures precede language and words why people cannot help but mimic and coordinate actions how wrestling and complex movement improves math and science scores in kids Learn more about Barbara Tversky and her reserach here.Mind in Motion, on Amazon books  

157  |  Spatial Thinking with Barbara Tversky

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews cognitive psychologist Barbara Tversky, author of 2019's "Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought." Tversky is a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Mike is inspired after listening to an interview with psychologist Barbara Tversky. He's all fired up to talk about how movement and physical experiences in the world create the foundation for children's cognitive abilities. The group is reminded of how remarkable and under-celebrated young children's mental capabilities are. 

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Barbara Tversky about how our senses of space and motion underlie our capacity for thought. They discuss the evolution of mind prior to language, the importance of imitation and gesture, the sensory and motor homunculi, the information communicated by motion, the role of “mirror neurons,” sense of direction, natural and unnatural categories, cognitive trade-offs, and other topics. SUBSCRIBE to continue listening and gain access to all content on samharris.org/subscribe.

Sam Harris speaks with Barbara Tversky about how our senses of space and motion underlie our capacity for thought. They discuss the evolution of mind prior to language, the importance of imitation and gesture, the sensory and motor homunculi, the information communicated by motion, the role of “mirror neurons,” sense of direction, natural and unnatural categories, cognitive trade-offs, and other topics. Barbara Tversky is a professor emerita of Psychology at Stanford University and a Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Experimental Psychology. Barbara has published more than 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, and creativity. She is the author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought.

On this week’s Tech Nation, Moira speaks with Stanford emerita psychology professor Barbara Tversky. She talks about “Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought”, how the mind can override perception, how feeling comes before logic, and how we organize things in our world the way we organize our minds.

BARBARA TVERSKY (https://www.edge.org/memberbio/barbara_tversky) is Professor Emerita of Psychology, Stanford University, and Professor of Psychology and Education, Columbia Teachers College. She is the author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. The Conversation: https://www.edge.org/conversation/barbara_tversky-the-geometry-of-thought

You’re a body in the world. From the moment you’re born, from that very first gasp of air, you’re taking in sensations, trying to get a handle on things and the relationships between them. There’s a lot of things to get a handle on. Too many. So your brain needs to simplify. It makes boxes for objects, maps them onto grids to track their motion. Through this process, the physical world enters your mind. It makes your mind. And that’s where things start to get really interesting. My guest today is cognitive psychologist Barbara Tversky. Her new book MIND IN MOTION: How Action Shapes Thought, upends everything most of us think we know about thinking. Tversky’s first law of cognition is that there are no benefits without costs. We simplify the physical world—reduce it to lines and boxes. We build abstract thought—everything from Shakespeare to string theory to how to design a pair of sneakers—on top of that same flawed foundation. And that explains all of our superpowers and all of our blind spots. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Philosopher Alva Noe on the puzzle of perception Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought. When we try to think about how we think, we can’t help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you’ve done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn’t just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we’re feeling up or have grown far apart. In this dialogue Dr. Tversky and Dr. Shermer discuss: her new theory of cognition, in detail, with examples what is a thought? what did humans think about before language? what do babies, chimpanzees, and dogs think about without language? how will far future humans think if their language is completely different from ours? if you had to warn humans 10,000 years from now not to open a container of nuclear waste, what symbols would you use? gender differences in spatial reasoning why there are not more women programmers in particular and women in tech in general I.Q. tests, intelligence, and why thinking is so much more than what these tests capture. Listen to Science Salon via iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Soundcloud. This Science Salon audio-only recording was created on June 1, 2019. You play a vital part in our commitment to promote science and reason. If you enjoy the Science Salon Podcast, please show your support by making a donation, or by becoming a patron.  

In this week's Five Good Questions, we're interviewing Barbara Tversky about her book Mind in Motion. Barbara Tversky has three degrees in cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan. She moved to Israel with Israeli husband, learned the language & culture, taught, fought wars, and had 3 kids. Then she was on to Stanford to research memory, categorization, spatial thinking & language, design, diagrams, event cognition. Her kids grew up, her husband died, and she moved to Columbia Teachers College, adding research on gesture, art, creativity, and joint action. Five Good Questions: 1. What are mirror neurons and how do they unite seeing and doing? 2. How do we use spatial reasoning to navigate the world? 3. What is the first law of cognition and what are some examples to help us understand? 4. What makes maps so miraculous? 5. How can insights of your research help investors and professional decision-makers be more effective? And make sure you pick up your copy of the Rebel Allocator, available now on Amazon in digital, physical, and audiobook formats!

The prevailing view on how we think is that we use language: through writing our thoughts down, or debating them with friends, or reading other people’s words in books. But might there be some concepts, some feelings, some images, that are beyond words? After all, what’s the point of visual art or design or classical music if they don’t have meaning without the words to describe them? What are our thoughts really made of? The psychologist Barbara Tversky has a wrench to throw in the argument that language is behind cognition. She makes the case that movement and spatial reasoning are the real keys to understanding our bodies and their place in the world, as well as the wildly abstract thoughts we come up with.Go beyond the episode:Barbara Tversky’s Mind in MotionListen to our interview with Alexander Todorov about the science of first impressions—an example of how the speed of our visual thinking can compromise its accuracyThe method of loci—or using a memory palace—is ancient evidence for spatial reasoningAustralian aboriginal songlines—written about most famously in Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines—are used to navigate physical and spiritual spaceTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The prevailing view on how we think is that we use language: through writing our thoughts down, or debating them with friends, or reading other people’s words in books. But might there be some concepts, some feelings, some images, that are beyond words? After all, what’s the point of visual art or design or classical music if they don’t have meaning without the words to describe them? What are our thoughts really made of? The psychologist Barbara Tversky has a wrench to throw in the argument that language is behind cognition. She makes the case that movement and spatial reasoning are the real keys to understanding our bodies and their place in the world, as well as the wildly abstract thoughts we come up with.Go beyond the episode:Barbara Tversky’s Mind in MotionListen to our interview with Alexander Todorov about the science of first impressions—an example of how the speed of our visual thinking can compromise its accuracyThe method of loci—or using a memory palace—is ancient evidence for spatial reasoningAustralian aboriginal songlines—written about most famously in Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines—are used to navigate physical and spiritual spaceTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.