#168 — Mind, Space, & Motion
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
138.1451
Summary
Barbara Tversky is an emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University and a Professor of Psychology at the Teacher s College at Columbia University. She is also the President of the Association for Psychological Science, and she regularly speaks about embodied cognition at conferences. In this episode, Barbara talks about her new book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought, and we talk about the evolution of mind prior to language, and the way in which our sense of space and motion have governed our capacity for thinking. We talk about cognitive tradeoffs, and other topics, including the role of memory, and how our categorical thinking is derivative of space. And we discuss the importance of the hippocampus, which occupies half of the brain, and is responsible for memory and other cognitive functions. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.We appreciate what you're doing here, and would greatly appreciate it if you became a supporter of the podcast. Please consider becoming a supporter by becoming a subscriber. You'll get access to all sorts of great shows and resources, including The Making Sense Podcasts, as well as access to our most up-to-date episodes, and access to the latest podcasts, books, and much more! Sam Harris and Sam Harris' newest podcast, Making Sense: A User's Guide to all things Making Sense. . Making Sense is a podcast all about making sense in the world through the lens of psychology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, history, and philosophy, and everything in between. It's a podcasting, and it's made possible because of you, the reader's love, not by you, by you. This is a show about the reader, not the reader. , not the writer, the listener, the maker, the creator. - Sam Harris and the reader and the writer. -- it's all about the making sense of it, by the reader -- and the listener. ...and the story of it all, by us, by me, again, again and again, by her, the viewer, and so on and so much more. Thanks for listening to this podcast, again & again, thank you for listening, again again, for listening. Thank you, Sam Harris, for your support, and your support and all of your continued support, agains, and more, and again and more.
Transcript
00:00:10.880
Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
00:00:14.680
feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.420
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
00:00:24.060
There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
00:00:30.520
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:35.880
So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:54.080
Barbara is an emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University.
00:00:58.360
and professor of psychology at the Teacher's College at Columbia University.
00:01:03.520
She's also the president of the Association for Psychological Science, and she has published
00:01:08.860
more than 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, creativity, and she
00:01:16.820
regularly speaks about embodied cognition at conferences.
00:01:20.400
And she was married to one of the most famous and influential psychologists ever, Amos Tversky,
00:01:28.100
who partnered with Danny Kahneman in all those studies of judgment under uncertainty, and
00:01:33.620
he would have certainly won the Nobel Prize along with Danny had he lived.
00:01:38.840
Anyway, Barbara and I talk about her new book, Mind in Motion, How Action Shapes Thought,
00:01:48.680
We talk about the evolution of mind prior to language, and the way in which our sense of
00:01:53.620
space and motion have governed our capacity for thinking.
00:01:58.260
We talk about the importance of imitation and gesture, the sensory and motor homunculi in
00:02:04.540
the brain, the information that's communicated by motion, the role of mirror neurons, the sense
00:02:11.660
of direction, natural and unnatural categories, and the way in which our categorical thinking
00:02:20.540
We talk about cognitive trade-offs and other topics.
00:02:24.360
And now, without further delay, I bring you Barbara Tversky.
00:02:45.440
I think our conversation will be largely focused by your book.
00:02:49.260
And the book is Mind in Motion, How Action Shapes Thought.
00:02:54.860
But before we jump into the book itself, can you summarize what your intellectual history
00:03:01.260
What have you focused on, and who have you been?
00:03:07.120
Let me start with graduate school in psychology.
00:03:13.040
But when I entered cognitive psychology, and it was an exciting time, everything was open,
00:03:21.140
brilliant people were around me, the language was king.
00:03:32.460
It came from propositional thinking and philosophy.
00:03:40.700
And both of those areas were very much on everybody's mind, exciting us.
00:03:47.500
It came from our own intuitions, that somehow, when we're thinking, we're talking to ourselves.
00:04:10.140
And it came from psychology, where people were showing that the length of a verbal description
00:04:28.080
We can remember faces that we haven't seen in years.
00:04:36.680
And if you think phylogenetically and brain-wise, space in one way or another, and it's multimodal,
00:04:46.960
It was around evolutionarily long before language came.
00:04:51.800
So it struck me that, first of all, it must have its own logic that's different from language,
00:04:58.720
and that, if anything, space served a foundation for language and thinking, not vice versa.
00:05:06.760
So that governed more or less what I was doing.
00:05:15.080
Later, I realized it was pretty systematic, and that helped me carve future research.
00:05:22.640
But in many ways, spatial thinking was marginalized because of the hegemony of language.
00:05:29.000
So people thought it was maybe like music or like smell, some specialized interest, but not central.
00:05:38.260
What seems to have changed that, and now everybody's jumping into space,
00:05:43.560
was the Nobel Prize in 2012 to O'Keefe and the Mosheers for place cells and grid cells,
00:05:54.820
And then very recent research has shown that those same cells in the hippocampus don't just
00:06:04.840
gather information from all over the cortex to code a place, but they also code events and
00:06:11.180
time and people, again, gathering multimodal information from the cortex, and that those
00:06:19.420
place cells are mapped in a two-dimensional array on the grid cells.
00:06:23.960
So the grid cells in rats map space, but in human beings, they seem to map conceptual relations,
00:06:35.640
So that helps me argue that spatial thinking is the foundation of thought, not the whole edifice,
00:06:52.600
At first glance, I think we can easily argue about the primacy of space and movement through
00:07:00.600
space because just in evolutionary terms, if you can't move, if you can't sense the environment
00:07:06.960
around you and respond with any action in that space, there's no basis to evolve intelligence
00:07:15.780
Intelligence only matters because you can do something with it that affects your survival.
00:07:22.080
A sense of space and the world and a capacity to move within it had to have come online very,
00:07:30.440
And as we know, long before language does, the point you made about describing faces is fairly
00:07:38.880
revelatory about the, with regard to the impotence of language compared to a memory for, in this
00:07:48.640
case, the visual object of a face, which we know is represented uniquely in the brain.
00:07:53.320
When you imagine trying to describe a person's face so that others could recognize it on the
00:07:59.700
base of your linguistic description, apart from, you know, describing someone who has a huge
00:08:05.200
scar or, you know, is missing an eye or something, I mean, it's just, it's a completely hopeless
00:08:11.640
And yet, as you say, we instantly recognize faces out of among the thousands or tens of
00:08:22.220
So, and I'm just going to kind of just feed in you more areas where we might go here.
00:08:26.960
The other thing that occurs to me is that our sense of space is really the foundation of
00:08:32.860
our ontology, our sense of what is real or what exists.
00:08:37.260
When you think of the existence of something, you're really thinking of, you know, by default,
00:08:44.280
And then there are abstract ideas or abstract quantities that people, you know, philosophers
00:08:50.300
have wanted to argue for millennia now that have some existence.
00:08:54.520
But because it's not obvious where they exist, that has always been somewhat inscrutable.
00:09:01.240
So when you think of things like numbers, right, does the number seven exist?
00:09:06.080
In what sense is the number seven an invention?
00:09:12.040
Well, the impediment there to our thinking about this seems to be the question of where
00:09:17.780
You know, without people, where would the numbers be?
00:09:20.480
And, you know, so I would add that our sense of what is real and what can be real is also
00:09:33.980
You've gone over a lot of what I tried to do in the book.
00:09:38.360
And number is fascinating because animals, many animals, many species, every day there's
00:09:45.540
something new or another new animal that can count or not really count, but estimate quite
00:09:52.680
accurately. So animals without speech, without any complicated language like ours, can solve
00:10:01.780
all kinds of fascinating problems that are very difficult to solve. Babies can do that. And
00:10:09.620
all of that seems to be without language. So there are other ways of thinking that aren't
00:10:16.860
language. And number seems to be tied very much, as you suggested, to space. Those of us who have
00:10:24.720
number words, and not every language has number words, tend to line up numbers on a line. The spacing
00:10:32.180
between numbers affects how we collect terms in algebra. If you look at the notation system that we
00:10:40.940
now use, and there were many notation systems that preceded it that weren't as successful,
00:10:47.980
the notation system depends on space. The most right-hand column are the ones, and to the left of
00:10:55.620
that are the tens, and to the left of that are the hundreds, and so forth. And that spatial way of
00:11:03.100
arraying numbers becomes essential to our thinking, and we do it without even realizing.
00:11:12.020
That's one of the reasons why the Roman numerals screwed everybody up. There are many things you
00:11:16.060
can't do well with Roman numerals. Right. They use space in a complicated way,
00:11:21.260
right, that didn't work. Right, exactly. So, right, space is underlying how we array things in the mind,
00:11:30.400
and how we then array them in the world. Our natural state of awareness of ourselves in the
00:11:38.140
world presents the body as a kind of object in the world for us. You know, most people feel that
00:11:44.820
they're interior to the body in some ways, the subject, and that their body is out there among the
00:11:51.800
other bodies, you know, and vulnerable to the impositions of the environment. How do you think about
00:11:59.720
our sense of embodiment? So, I've got five different tracks running in my mind. I'll see if I can keep
00:12:08.380
them and organize them. First, I avoided that term because it's used so differently by different
00:12:15.460
thinkers, and because it's become a buzzword, and I always worry about buzzwords. They're first
00:12:21.700
celebrated and then vilified, as any fad is, so I worried about that. And I thought if I brought it up
00:12:29.320
in a book meant for the general public, I'd have to go through all that philosophy, and what did Andy
00:12:37.980
Clark mean? What did David Korsh mean? What did Larry Bob? And I didn't want to do that. Right. But I do
00:12:45.160
think I've shown many phenomena where the body is involved in thinking. Certainly, the mirror neuron
00:12:52.400
system that we internalize facial expressions that we see, we internalize actions that we see in our
00:13:02.400
own motor system, and often that gets expressed in squiggling and moving the body in one way. We also
00:13:10.420
imitate, and that is a way of thinking, and it's a way of remembering, and it's a way of understanding.
00:13:18.960
So that's one component of embodiment. Another that I've looked at and other people have looked at is
00:13:26.500
gesture. And there we're re-externalizing internal thoughts by setting up some sort of spatial motor
00:13:38.560
representation of whatever it is worth thinking about. So if you ask someone for directions, they'll
00:13:46.000
almost inevitably use their arms and their head to indicate how you should move. And often those
00:13:54.920
gestures say more than the words do. The words are more brutal. People can't necessarily express that
00:14:02.280
information well in words. They forget turns and so forth. So you want to watch the gestures, and
00:14:11.160
usually we do, even implicitly, we somehow pick them up without conscious awareness that we're looking
00:14:19.080
at them, or when we're making them, that we make them. So those gestures can serve your thinking. They
00:14:27.620
can also serve my own. So if you sit on your hands and try to describe a route, a complicated route to
00:14:35.660
somebody else, you're probably going to have trouble doing it. And we brought that phenomenon into the
00:14:43.540
laboratory. We had, and I wish I could show you the videos because they're quite fascinating.
00:14:52.080
We asked people, we put people alone in a room. They're reading complicated descriptions of space,
00:14:59.700
locating eight or nine landmarks in an array, and either you're walking through it, and this is on
00:15:05.980
your right, and that's on your left, and now turn right, and now you see that sort of route description
00:15:12.420
or a north-south-east-west description. So people had to read these. They're hard. We were going to test
00:15:20.460
them, and while they're doing it, 70% of our subjects, of our participants, are staring at the screen, and
00:15:29.620
their hands are essentially sketching a map. So that's an abstraction, right? It's lines, lines for paths and
00:15:38.720
points. They stamp on the table for places. People do it quite differently, though the lines and dots are pretty
00:15:47.800
similar. We've done the same for explanations of mechanical systems, like how a car brake works.
00:15:56.080
And again, people are reading it. They're enacting it with their body, often in huge gestures,
00:16:02.520
sometimes smaller. People, again, do it differently. And when we tell people to sit on their hands while
00:16:10.420
they're reading, they perform worse on the tests. So it's not, it's 70%, it's not everybody, but a good
00:16:21.360
portion of people spontaneously gesture. They're not looking at their hands. So somehow that representation,
00:16:30.120
that encoding is spatial motor. It isn't visual. And again, if they do it, they're better.
00:16:43.740
And again, that's not our research, but again, it's, and they can't know that their gestures
00:16:49.540
are communicating something to you, or they're unlikely to at four years old. So it seems to be
00:16:56.460
helping their own thinking. And that feels like a mystery to me, that those actions of the body that
00:17:04.500
are actually abstractions are helping you comprehend and remember. And when you watch these people
00:17:15.080
gesturing, you get the feeling, first of all, you see them thinking, and that's exciting, but you get
00:17:22.140
the feeling that the gestures are translating the words into thought.
00:17:27.400
Yeah, no, I can feel that internally sometimes when I speak, that gesturing is helping me complete a
00:17:35.840
thought, and that if I were prevented from gesturing, it would be a kind of impediment.
00:17:41.540
Right, right, right. So, but words too, I'm happy with. I use them a lot, and I rather like them. But if
00:17:53.460
you look at our language, it's again expressing actions on thought, we raise our ideas, we put them
00:18:01.580
forth, we tear them apart. These are all ways we talk about objects. So we're thinking of ideas as
00:18:09.580
objects and acting on them. Lakoff and Johnson went through many of these metaphors, and Tommy and
00:18:17.120
other people before him, or before them. But there almost isn't another way of talking about thought,
00:18:30.300
So the role of action and the ways in which we represent it and the body that can perform it,
00:18:40.940
so much of this is counterintuitive and unconscious. And some of it's in principle unconscious, some of
00:18:47.920
it I think we can become conscious of, or we can become conscious of some of the related facts. I'm
00:18:54.760
thinking of things like the sensory and motor homunculi in the brain, which is the strange proportions
00:19:02.640
with which various parts of the body are represented and tied to action. So for instance, we have a much
00:19:10.920
most people who have seen this from a psychology textbook, this is something you talk about in your book
00:19:16.060
as well. But we have much larger areas of neural real estate devoted to representing the hands and the lips
00:19:23.780
than the feet or the shoulders. And so that the fact that those areas are so much better mapped is tied to the
00:19:35.880
fact that we do much more with our hands and lips than other parts of our body, and we derive much more
00:19:43.720
information. We can act on the world with much more precision. And yet it's not, you know, looking internally, you
00:19:52.120
don't, you can't necessarily sense that your sense of your body is warped in that way. And people are surprised, you know,
00:20:02.880
when you can perform this experiment on yourself, and see just how different your, your two-point
00:20:08.720
discrimination is. You know, if someone puts, you know, two pencil tips on the palm of your hand, you can
00:20:14.880
differentiate that, that it's two with those pencil points very close to one another. But if you, if they do
00:20:20.800
that on your back, you know, you, you, it feels like one point even when there's something like, you know,
00:20:25.840
I forget an inch or a half an inch between pencil points. So it's, it's not necessarily intuitive and
00:20:32.400
available for direct inspection. And so too with things like, I mean, you mentioned mirror neurons,
00:20:39.120
and these are, these are neurons in the brain that, that were discovered by Rizzolati's group. And
00:20:45.840
actually one of my advisors at UCLA did work, Marco Iacoboni, on this topic. And, you know, much has been
00:20:54.000
made of mirror neurons and perhaps too much has been made of them, but they're the regions of the
00:20:59.520
brain and, and now more than one, which respond to the actions of others. And, and certainly a case can
00:21:05.680
be made that we understand the actions of others, both their, their intent, intentions and goals,
00:21:11.920
by mapping them back onto our own bodies, you know, essentially moving in our imaginations as we,
00:21:20.160
as we, as we see other people move. And I think, I think this is something you say in your book. I
00:21:25.600
mean, we can notice this in the difference between the way experts will watch certain kinds of, of
00:21:34.000
behavior. I mean, if you're an expert in yoga or ballet or some sport, your brain will show a different
00:21:40.000
response to the movements of another expert performing those disciplines than a naive brain will,
00:21:46.800
because you know what it's like to move in that way. And, and I think many of us can appreciate
00:21:52.640
this internally from watching sports where it's different watching a sport that you've spent a lot
00:21:57.840
of time playing yourself because you really, you, you know it from the inside and, and, and it's,
00:22:02.800
it's just amazing to see the best people in the world perform that sport because you can sort of
00:22:07.440
emulate what they're doing in your imagination, but then they, they exceed what you, what you've ever done.
00:22:12.320
So I, I guess I, you know, I just deluged you with a lot of, of your own information, but I guess,
00:22:18.480
you know, I want to hear whatever you have to say about what's available to consciousness here
00:22:23.600
for us in, in how we represent the body and the, and the bodies of others and, and our actions and
00:22:30.160
So I'll start backward. Well, no, I'll go back to the beginning. You, you've summarized a lot of
00:22:36.640
things that I wanted to say and things that I've learned since then and frustrate me because I
00:22:42.800
want to add them. So going back to the, to the homunculus map, which is exaggerated, as you say,
00:22:51.440
and we did find that recognizing other parts of other bodies is often more tied to their neural
00:23:01.360
size than it is to their actual size. So, and those were studies done long ago. If you look at
00:23:08.560
children's drawings all over the world, they tend to be these tadpole drawings that are heads, big heads,
00:23:15.680
and arms sticking out and legs sticking out and the rest, those and feet and hands, often lots of
00:23:22.560
fingers. And these again, seem to be how children think of the body, even though what they're seeing
00:23:31.600
is very different. So I think some of that is coming out nicely that a child is drawing what they think
00:23:39.280
and they think of their body as the, the really big moving parts and functional parts and, and not so
00:23:47.200
much the actual sizes. And I get frustrated when parents want drawings to be, or teachers to be more
00:23:54.720
realistic. I mean, there's something to learn from drawing realistic things, but I also appreciate the
00:24:02.480
expressiveness of drawing what you think and certainly modern art is full of that and charming and
00:24:11.280
frightening. And I mean, those kinds of abstractions that, that are always fascinating. So that's bodies.
00:24:21.280
One research project that I admire, and this is related to the mirror system is work of Maggie Schifrar and
00:24:28.400
her colleagues. And she brought, so there are these point light demonstrations. You take somebody in a
00:24:35.520
lab, dress them all in black, put lights at their joints, and ask them to jump, play ping pong, dance,
00:24:44.320
do all sorts of different things. When observers see those light arrays statically, they make no sense at
00:24:52.880
all. You hardly even know it's a body. But when they move, as they naturally move, you can see
00:24:59.440
it's a man, it's a woman. You can see if somebody's happy. You can see if somebody's heavy. You can pick
00:25:06.720
all that up from these lights and there are fewer than ten of them scattered at the joints. You pick up
00:25:12.960
all that information and you pick it up quickly, again implicitly. And it helps small women like me,
00:25:21.040
walking dark streets at night, to pick up somebody else's movement quickly. So I know if I'm in
00:25:28.320
danger in some way or not. So those skills we need quite quickly. What Schifrar and her colleagues did
00:25:37.760
was bring in pairs of people, friends, and have them do these different videos, and bring them back
00:25:46.720
three months later and watch those videos. And they were watching videos of themselves,
00:25:53.120
of their friend, and of a stranger who was part of another couple. And their task was to identify
00:26:00.880
what the people were doing, playing ping pong or dancing, and that they did pretty well. But they
00:26:07.360
were also asked, who is it? And naturally, not surprisingly, they were better at identifying
00:26:15.920
their friends than perfect strangers. But they were best at identifying themselves.
00:26:23.840
That's actually kind of counterintuitive because you spend less time actually seeing
00:26:28.640
your own, certainly your gross body movements. I mean, you don't actually see your leg movements
00:26:34.480
very much, or your body moving through space. So that's kind of surprising.
00:26:38.320
I agree. It's surprising. So what's the theory? And there isn't a better theory than mirror,
00:26:48.800
that you watch that movement, you implicitly map it onto your own body and the way your body moves,
00:26:56.720
and it feels right. It's like trying on a piece of clothing and it fits.
00:27:02.880
And here it's trying on a pattern of motion, and it fits. It feels like me. So that is,
00:27:12.160
I think, counterintuitive, as you say, and quite surprising, and relates certainly to the work that
00:27:20.320
was done later on recognizing motor activation. When you're watching something that you're expert in,
00:27:29.520
the classic experiment was comparing capoeira dancers with ballet dancers. And for both observers,
00:27:38.800
both kinds of observers watching either kind of dance did arouse the motor cortex, but the dance you
00:27:46.480
knew aroused more. And that gets into your observations about athletics. And here,
00:27:52.800
again, it's split-second inferencing that we're doing, nonverbal. There's no way in a fast-moving
00:28:01.760
basketball game that you can figure out what your team is doing, what the other team is doing,
00:28:08.320
what they're going to do. Who's faking me, right? How do I fake? I mean, the levels of complexity
00:28:17.200
that are required for those sports are extraordinary. And again, split-second, of course,
00:28:24.400
they depend on expertise and practice and so forth. But none of that is, it's much too fast for words.
00:28:32.080
It just couldn't happen otherwise. So one more thing on the inferencing. This is work of a talented
00:28:45.360
group in Genoa, in Italy. And I worked with them a little bit, but they did the major part of the work.
00:28:52.480
They can show videos of an arm reaching for a bottle. And they truncate the video before your hand
00:28:59.920
even touches the bottle. But you can tell from watching those truncated videos, whether the
00:29:07.200
person about to grasp the bottle is going to drink from it, is going to pour, or is going to give it to
00:29:15.680
you. And you know that before the hand gets there. So those intentions of other bodies, even normal
00:29:23.120
people are reading very quickly. It turns out, and this, again, I learned later, that children on
00:29:31.200
the spectrum have a harder time with that. And they also have a harder time making the movements.
00:29:40.960
Yeah. And as you know, mirror neurons have been implicated in autism spectrum deficits.
00:29:47.120
Yeah. Exactly. And in exactly that way. And to think that it's a motor action deficit that underlies this
00:29:57.200
very deep and disorder that seems to have huge implications for people's lives is fascinating,
00:30:06.400
right? Yeah. That it's a motor. And again, coming back to motor, it turns out that for people who are
00:30:12.800
aging and I belong in that category, moving and moving in space is more essential to preserving
00:30:22.400
cognitive function than doing crossword puzzles. Right? That emotion, again, is not just important
00:30:30.720
for our immediate survival, but for our cognitive facilities, and certainly for emotional and
00:30:37.520
social and just about every aspect of our lives. Yeah. I want to bring you back to sports for a second
00:30:45.200
because you referenced a study that I hadn't heard of related to this gesture study you just described
00:30:52.240
with videos of reaching behavior. There was a video study of basketball players shooting free throws
00:30:59.600
where they would stop the video before the ball reaches the basket at various distances from the
00:31:07.600
basket. And it showed that basketball players were better than coaches and fans and sports journalists
00:31:14.160
at predicting which free throws would make it into the basket. So you have kind of an expert audience,
00:31:19.600
but still the basketball players themselves were better at making these predictions based on the visual cues.
00:31:25.520
Right. It's probably being mapped in one way or another on their own body, and they've had enough
00:31:33.280
practice. People talk about basketball players as being free throw machines that they can sense
00:31:40.800
whether it's going to make it or not. I mean, that study I don't think has been done, but it would be nice to do.
00:31:47.520
What about sense of direction? I think we've all been enrolled in a vast psychological experiment where
00:31:58.320
we systematically degrade our sense of direction and also our sense of map reading because we're now
00:32:03.920
totally dependent on GPS. But some people famously have great senses of direction and some people have
00:32:11.680
terrible ones. I can attest that my wife Annika has a sense of direction that's so bad it's truly perverse.
00:32:19.440
I mean, it's actually what's fascinating to me about her sense of direction is that it's reliably wrong.
00:32:24.640
It's not just randomly wrong. It's just it actually contains information. She wants to go more often than not
00:32:31.760
in the wrong direction that is just diametrically opposite the direction we're supposed to be going in.
00:32:37.920
And it's almost like she knows what the right direction is and then has to flip it somehow to
00:32:44.560
go in the wrong direction. I don't remember if you touch sense of direction in the book.
00:32:49.120
Well, indirectly, right. And again, there's a long answer there. And it's complicated. You can remember
00:32:59.040
routes as procedures. You go down the street, turn right, turn left. You can have a more global map.
00:33:07.600
of the environment you're in, but you still have to place yourself in it. So you have this overview
00:33:14.640
perspective and then you have this immediate surroundings perspective where you're placing
00:33:19.760
yourself in it. And that's a trick that's hard and harder for some people than for others.
00:33:27.760
Russ Epstein at Penn has done beautiful work on the myriad components that it takes to navigate space
00:33:36.880
and understand space. So there are levels of understanding space. And I have a suspicion that
00:33:43.520
what your wife is doing is something that one of my kids and I sometimes do. And that's if you go in
00:33:52.240
a street or enter a store by turning left, when you get out, you turn left again. So then you're in the
00:33:59.120
opposite direction as opposed to reversing the direction and turning right. So it's a kind of
00:34:05.120
heuristic that is 90% or 180 off. And that might be what Anika's problem? I have no idea. My father was
00:34:18.560
hopeless. He kept getting us lost. And so it turns out that that ability to keep track of yourself in
00:34:26.480
space is independent of other spatial abilities. And that's fascinating too. The spatial abilities
00:34:33.920
are a complex of things. And people have tried to make sense of them and interrelate them as some of
00:34:40.800
it three-dimensional, some of it two-dimensional, is some of it imagining yourself moving, imagining an
00:34:47.440
object moving. There are sensible ways of trying to make sense of the abilities, but they don't seem to
00:34:54.720
make sense of the abilities. And navigation seems to be independent of these other spatial abilities.
00:35:03.200
I want to also, I mean, going back to some of the threads that your question raised, the overview
00:35:12.480
and the root view and perspective taking. Because that's core, in many ways, core to our lives. Taking
00:35:21.360
other perspectives and taking other perspectives on the ground when I'm facing you and I have to explain
00:35:29.120
something to you. And do I take your perspective or mine? When I'm interpreting your behavior, am I
00:35:36.400
taking your perspective or mine? And then going above and getting a map of a territory. So we can think of
00:35:44.720
those overview maps, not just of a spatial array of places, but also of ideas. We said the grid
00:35:54.000
itself map conceptual relations or social relations or political relations, and people can map their
00:36:02.560
social networks, right? These are networks. They're points for people or ideas, and the lines between
00:36:11.360
them are the relations between the people or between the ideas. And that's again like space. We
00:36:22.320
Yeah, I'm actually glad you raised that point about ideas, because that's fascinating.
00:36:26.640
In your book, you discuss how categories can be presented to us.
00:36:34.880
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
00:36:38.560
samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,
00:36:44.160
along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've
00:36:50.160
been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener
00:36:55.840
support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.