21. Dr. Leonard Mlodinow — Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2018

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Out of the exploratory instincts that allowed our ancestors to prosper hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans developed a cognitive style that Mlodinow terms elastic thinking, a collection of traits and abilities that include neophilia (an affinity for novelty), schizotypy (a tendency toward unusual perception), imagination and idea generation, pattern recognition, mental fluency, divergent thinking, and integrative thinking.

In this remote Science Salon (recorded on March 22, 2018), Dr. Shermer begins by asking Dr. Mlodinow what it was like to work with and get to know Stephen Hawking, on which the two worked together on two books. Hawking had to be elastic in his thinking given that his disease prevented him from doing science in the traditional manner.

Leonard Mlodinow received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include the best sellers Subliminal, War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), and The Drunkard’s Walk, as well as The Upright Thinkers, Feynman’s Rainbow, and Euclid’s Window. He also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Transcript

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0:20.0	This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations with leading scientists, scholars and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.
0:37.0	Just by way of background, of course, he already got an introduction as the
0:44.7	author of the drunkards walk and the world views which he did with Deepak
0:48.6	Chopra and then but more interestingly to me your co-authored book with Stephen Hawking is especially poignant now since we just lost him
0:56.2	So I thought as a say again to talking about
0:59.2	Different ways of thinking clearly this is one of the things that appealed to people about Hawking's
1:06.4	form of brilliance was that, you know, it was like a brain and a jar, or disconnected mind floating
1:11.7	above the body.
1:12.6	You know, it was just sort of such an odd thing.
1:14.6	And you knew him.
1:15.3	So maybe tell us a little bit about what
1:17.8	it was like to work with Stephen Hawking.
1:20.5	Well, that is the stereotype of the scientists, the brain in a jar, even when it doesn't seem so,
1:27.0	the person isn't physically challenged, people think of a scientist's brain in a jar or if you
1:34.5	if you look at the Hollywood films, they're nerds who only focus on their work and
1:39.7	so that's totally false. Right, right.
1:43.0	And he, you know, he was a very good guy and my, you know, probably the most telling human
1:50.7	character, so he had was a great sense of humor and I still remember you
	...

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