#168 Mind and Motion

#168 Mind, Space & Motion With Barbara Tversky

This was one of the more interesting podcasts I've heard in a while. Maybe because she sounds like someone's wise old aunt from Massachusetts. Maybe because I didn’t know much of this stuff before listening. 

The starting point was how our understanding of spatial relationships is more fundamental than abstract thought or language, which turns out to be Law Number Six in the "Nine Laws of Cognition" that she proposes.

Here are a few random factoids which came out of the conversation:

Blind children use their hands to describe directions. The gesturing helps complete the thought. 

Children’s drawings naturally tend to exaggerate those parts of the body (head, hands) that have a lot of neuron connections. 

People recognize videos of their own body motion better than they do strangers or even friends. It’s like trying on a piece of clothing to see if it fits—"and here it’s trying on a pattern of motion."

Moving in space can be better for old people to preserve cognitive alacrity than doing crossword puzzles. 

And here are Barbara’s Nine Laws of Cognition. I'm not sure about calling these laws--I'd be more inclined to downgrade them to the 9 Observations of Cognition. Because they seem to be more heuristic than theoretical: 

1st law: There are no benefits without costs. 

E.g. being creative is the antithesis of learning. 

2nd law: Action moulds perception.

E.g. our perceptual learning is done by moving in the world. 

3rd law: Feeling comes first

E.g. you know you like something before you recognize it. 

4th law: the mind can override perception

E.g. there was a study in a mental hospital where fake patients quit faking it after a while and began to act "normal," but those psychologists continued to interpret their actions as symptomatic of psychoses. 

5th law: Cognition mirrors perception 

E.g. within mentally imposed categories, differences are ignored, while between categories differences are exaggerated. 

6th law: Spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought

I.e. we learn how to manipulate abstract ideas by imagining prepositional relationships between them--over, under, above, within &c. 

7th law: The mind fills in missing information

E.g. If you see a guy sitting behind a desk, you guess he has legs, even if you can’t see them.

8th law: When thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it in the world

E.g. cavemen blurted out their thoughts into carved bones, indigenous people into hieroglyphs, and modern people into tweets.

9th law: We organize stuff in the world the way we organize stuff in our minds

E.g. we keep food in the kitchen, tools in the garage, children in school, and art in museums.