Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 63. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And the new. Our guest in this episode is Matthew Fisher a fifth year graduate student at Yale University's

Cognition and development lab.

He is on his way to becoming a fantastic psychologist.

He's done all sorts of research.

The people who did these studies with him, they recommended to me that I talk to him instead of them.

And his latest bit of research, it follows along the lines of the other stuff that he's been researching.

He says in his own bio that he examines the effects of acquiring information from external sources like the

internet and from other people through argumentation and he's very interested in how well people

can assess their own explanatory knowledge.

Why is it, he says, that people fail to realize there are gaps in their knowledge?

He's one of a number of researchers who was hammering away at this problem, and in this episode we're going to listen to

him explain this really really fascinating study that he put together to try to

figure out just what just what Google does to us. We use it all day every day to answer questions.

Let's pick his brain. I'm going to So you mentioned early on in the paper that human beings use a variety of cognitive tools to make our lives easier.

I think that's sort of a framing that maybe some people will go,

what are you talking about?

What are some examples of those cognitive tools? Yeah, so... about.

Yeah, so we actually start and maybe it's easier to start with physical tools and we can think

how they extend our physical abilities.

So in the paper we talk about, for example, a baseball glove.

So you can think of a baseball glove as just an enhanced hand.

You know, it's specifically crafted for a

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