69. Dr. Barbara Tversky — Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

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

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2019

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and thank you everyone for tuning into the Science Salon Podcast.
0:04.4	I'm your host Michael Schmer and I bring you this show from California once a week
0:09.0	as part of the larger mission of the Skeptic Society to promote promote science and reason, and to ensure that sound scientific
0:15.6	viewpoints are heard worldwide.
0:18.8	As a 501c3 non-profit, we rely heavily on the ongoing and generous patronage of listeners like you.
0:26.2	To pledge your support, please visit our website at skeptic.com slash donate.
0:31.7	Thank you. My guest today is Barbara Tversky with her new book called
0:37.8	Mind in Motion, how action shapes thought. Barbara is a America professor of psychology at
0:46.6	Stanford University and a professor of psychology at teachers union in
0:50.9	Columbia University. She is also the President of the Association for
0:55.3	Psychological Science. Tversky has published more than 200 scholarly articles about
1:00.5	memory, spatial thinking, design, and creativity, and regular articles about
1:05.0	about memory, spatial thinking, design and creativity,
1:08.0	and regularly speaks about embodied cognition at interdisciplinary conferences
1:10.0	and workshops around the world.
1:12.0	She lives in New York City and California. and study it and I didn't know most of this so this was a real eye-opener of thinking
1:26.0	about thinking without words and that's kind of the thesis so I start early in the conversation quoting from
1:34.6	Feynman so I won't spoil that here but it's it's a great way to start a book and
1:39.5	we cover a lot of interesting topics that is how did thinking even evolve in the first place before there was language.
1:47.0	So clearly thoughts occur and thoughts occur now without language.
1:52.0	Babies have thoughts, animals have thoughts,
1:55.3	without words. So, anyway, we get into all that. We also touch on the touchy subject of gender differences in spatial reasoning, something she's studying in her lab.
	...

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