Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works

from Mike Mobison, a Josh Wolf to Danny Kahneman. And at the end of the evening, one of the women at the table pulls me aside to discuss my interview with Michael Lewis, and that turned out to be Barbara Tversky, a experimental psychologist, publisher of hundreds of research papers, oh

and also the spouse of a Moost Tversky. And she told me how much she enjoyed my conversation with Mike Lewis, and we started chatting, and it took me, I don't know, maybe four seconds to say, oh my god, this woman is fascinating and I have to sit down and have a conversation with her. But she's back and forth between Stanford and Colombian, and it took us a while to hone in on a time, and I'm really glad we did.

She wrote this fascinating book on how the brain works, how we perceive things, whether it's language or spatial perception, and why action shapes thoughts and how motion impacts cognitive processes. It's not drying clinical, It's really a very fascinating abstract conversation. And we just babbled. At least I babbled for two hours.

It really was an intriguing conversation. If you're at all interested in cognitive psychology, how the brain works, the way language affects thought and vice versa, the way thought affects language, as well as her nine laws of Cognition, you're going to find this to be absolutely fascinating. So, with no further ado, my conversation with Barbara Taversky. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Barbara Tversky. She is a

professor of psychology at Stanford University. She also is a psychology and education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. She has published more than two hundred articles on cognition, psychology, memory, all sorts of fascinating topics. Her new book is called Mind in Motion, How Action Shapes Thought. Barbara Taverski, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So let's talk a little bit about cognition and psychology. How

did you find your way to that field. I'm a bit of a contrarian, and when I entered the field, the cognition revolution was well in progress, so you could open up the mind if you were clever, and find ways of revealing how people thought. But I thought at that time was heavily dominated by language, by propositional thinking that came from philosophy and linguistics, and people thought at

that time. The way we thought about the spatial world, the visual world, was by putting it into propositional format. Explain what that means is So proposition is in philosophy is a minimal statement, like the cup is round or the desk is flat. Their minimal statements where you attribute something to something else. And it felt to me like you could never begin to describe faces that way. We're very bad at describing faces. Emotions are difficult to describe,

fairly easy to detect. Spaces that were in our heart to describe, So thinking about reducing that to propositions, to these simple, minimal statements didn't make sense to me. It made sense to me that the spatial world and the visual world had its own logic, and that logic came first evolutionarily, because you know, babies don't talk. It takes them a while to talk, and even when they talk, everything sounds like bah buss banana bottle and they aren't

saying very deep things for a long time. So they do very intelligent things. Animals do very intelligent things without speech. So it felt to me that, if anything, the spatial visual world preceded evolutionarily and in development and had a richness of its own and that needed to be explored independent of language. So let's talk about language for secon and because it's funny, I first wrote this question how

did people think before language? And then I kind of said, well, now that's the wrong way to think about it, based on some of the things you wrote in the book. The better way to ask that question is how has language changed the way we think? That's a great question and that's one that people grapple with, and you know, people want simple answers. It is probably complicated. Let me start first with how we speak, and a lot of the way we speak about thinking is as if they

were actions on objects. And I think that that kind of thinking of acting on objects got internalized to think about thoughts as objects. So we raise ideas, we pushed them forward, we tear them apart. All of those are the ways we talk about thinking, and there is if we were having actual objects and doing it. So I don't think that's metaphor. I think we have no other way of talking about thinking except as if there were actions. So those are things we do with our hands, with

our fate. We go from place to place, and our thoughts go from idea to idea along conceptual paths, the way our feet go from place to place along spatial paths. And it now turns out that the same brain structures in humans are coding both of them. They're both coding our paths in actual space and our paths in conceptual space.

Explain that a little bit. When you say that we're coded in in conceptual space when we go from thought to thought, are you suggesting our thought processes are somewhat predestined? We all have the same approach to solving the same problems more or less, at least structurally. What do you mean by that? It's again a great question. It's really associations, just the way you'll walk from A to B in a different way than I might walk from A to B for different reasons, but it's still a to be right.

And some of the problem with thinking is we don't know where be is right. We start off with a and we're trying to solve a problem maybe or we're just letting our minds wander. No. I think, if anything, we're gonna If you look at human beings were incredibly diverse and thinking in different ways, and our associations are built from experience, from many different experiences, So thoughts go from association to association, and those associations are going to

be wildly different. So I'll give you a small example. When my husband and I used to walk in streets in cities that yours being a most of our right. This is years ago, because unfortunately he's hasn't been with us for all too long. But we would walk in Paris, in New York, places where we were tourists at the time, and when we'd come back, um, he would say, did you see all those prostitutes. I didn't pick up a single one, And you know, I was looking at other things,

the architecture, maybe what people were wearing. Um I didn't. I wasn't seeing that. But you also noticed, and I picked this up from the book, the way the structure of the cities were lying. You talk about how Japan has there very it's very confusing to foreigners, but they break cities into quadrants, and those quadrants are pretty consistent from Japanese city to Japanese city. It becomes very helpful if you know the code, but anybody who doesn't, it's

just a perplexing mess. Yeah. And and that again is illustrating different ways of thinking and different ways of designing. But both are designed. And I think one of the points are trying to make in the book is that we design the world the way we design our minds. So both Japan and the US New York with its grid system and many other cities with grid systems, even the Romans had grid systems, and some Chinese have grid systems. In fact, Japan has grid systems, they just labeled them

differently from the way we do. But that those designs are go across cultures with with variations, but they have to do with the way we design our minds. Um. So, so let me ask you this question, since since we're talking about visual cognition, how does our sense of spatial understanding and visual cognition affect the way we think? It's so? One way is is I think? Okay? How to how

to answer that? One way are things that I've already said that we think about actions on ideas, the way we think about actions and objects, and we go from place to place, the way we go from idea to idea. UM that probably affects the structure of language. That's my hunch, and I didn't work that out very well. You asked earlier how does language bootstrap our thinking? And I think language isn't one of many cognitive tools that we use.

We can then use language to reason about other things, the way we can use math to reason about other things, or or logic or computer programming. We have a number of these cognitive tools that we have built through culture. Their cultural evolved. We don't we're not born with them,

and they enable leaps of thought. We now have computers that do help us think and help us design, and so we we've developed a number of these cognitive tools that help us structure our thinking and will leapfrog are thinking. We can use them to think farther. So I don't need to compute square roots anymore. I have them amount calculator. I can use that to leap frog and go to other um levels of understanding. So so last question on this topic, what is cognitive collage? I love that phrase. Okay,

thank you. So we did some work on how people understand the environments that they walk through every day, and there are a number of distortions that people have that indicate that people are constructing their images of environments. So the grid pattern, we tend to line things up in in in parallel and perpendicular lines and ignore um ignore diagonals,

and ignore five sided things like the Boston Commons. People often act as if it were four sided kind of quadrilateral, not a pentagon, and it's not really a pentagon, so we we distort. So some of the distortions are really quite remarkable. The most remarkable is probably that people think that distances to a landmark are smaller than distances from a landmark. Explain that because that sounds so obviously incorrect. Exactly, So a number of studies have been done where people

on college campuses pick landmarks. They have the students picked the landmarks, and then another group of students is asked about distances and you get those a symmetric distances. So the example I use is that people think that Jacques's house is closer to the Eiffel Tower than Eiffel Tower to Jacques's house. And one explanation for that might be that the Eiffel Tower defines a neighborhood. Columbus Circle is

a neighborhood, the village is a neighborhood. We tend to form neighborhoods around these landmarks, and we say, if someone says where do you live, you can say I live near Columbus Circle and that tells people the environment. And so the neighborhood is quite expanded. It includes Jacques's house, but Jacques's House only includes itself, so you get that asymmetry. And these are these are This is research I didn't do.

I pointed to it, but it's very related to research that my husband had done earlier, showing that people this is going way back in history. People think that North Korea is more like communist China than communist China like North Korea, or the son is more like the father than the father like this son. So we have these landmarks or prototypes and they draw similar things into them. Eleanor Rosh had earlier done work showing that people think magenta is more like red than red like magenta, so

I could see that. Yeah, they are defining categories really, and these peripheral instances don't. So those are spatial ideas. The distance, whether it's distance and color, or distance in political leanings, or distances in some kind of psychological or physical similarity, the son to the father, those are all spatial concepts. But and and we can show them in

space two. But they are affecting our thinking. We're spatializing those concepts of North Korea, red and magenta and communist China and and thinking about other things in relation to them, but in relation to spatial distance. So everywhere I look, I can find spatial distortions that are reflected in conceptual ones. In group out group would be one. We tend to think that that if we're in one political leaning, that everybody in another political they're all alike. My group is

highly differentiated, but it's because it's close to me. And I can see the differences. I don't see the differences in those others, so we tend to think of them is all alike, but our group is differentiate. That's quite fascinating. One of my favorite parts about the book was the nine law of cognition. And I have to ask you, how did you develop nine rules? And how long have

you been working on these? You know? I started writing the book and I realized that certain of the things that I was saying, again, many of them about space, had generality to thinking in general or behavior in general, and I wanted to point to those and encapsulate them in a way. Then it became laws. And I have a good friend who comes from medical science, very hard noised researcher. After the book was written, and I couldn't

change anything. Sounds confused by that because she was thinking of physics laws, which are laws, and and you can compute them and get answers that will in fact hold. So these are not like that. They're generalizations, and I think that fits with the way social sciences see laws kind of generalizations. Okay, let's go over some of these generalizations. Will start with rule number one. There are no benefits without costs, meaning creativity versus learning. How do they set

each other? Interesting? And I mean it's a nice example. So I think again, the mind is quite simple. We want simple, straight answers. Things are always this, and things are always that. And we categorize because the number of things in the world is huge. If we had to think about each chair individually, each cup individually, it would be overwhelming. So we categorize things as chairs and tables and dogs and cats, and that enables us to know how to recognize them and how to behave towards them.

Now we can miscategorize, and that happens often tragically and certain situations, but we forget that we need those categories on some level because we have to behave very quickly and we have to respond very quickly. Is someone throwing something at me to hurt me, as someone throwing something at me so I can catch it, and our behavior

is going to be very different. So when you say cost versus benefits, sometimes the trade off is speed versus accuracy or making a defensive decision because it's a matter of existential survival versus Hey, I may not be accurate here, but better safe and sorry? Is that what you mean? By the forces of these decisions. Well, I mean it's a cost benefit. I think economists understands that everything is a trade off. I'm not sure that psychologists understand that

that well, So then they'll say people miscategorize. Somebody had a toy gun, not a real gun. That this is we shouldn't be categorizing at all. And I want to say we have to we do it's it seems to be the way we think, occasionally with tragic consequence, exactly right and missteps. So on creativity and learning. We have to learn routines to get through the day, and otherwise if everything is a new problem, it's going to take too long. How do we get a key in a door?

And how do we make toasts in the morning. So we have to get into those routines. But once we have those routines, it's hard to change them. So creativity requires thinking in new ways, meaning outside of the routines exactly, and thinking of a new way to build a teacup or a new way to design a chair. These are what designers have. A new way to design a school, maybe the old way of designing schools isn't as good as it could be. Libraries have changed enormously now that

in a little while there'll be no paperbooks. I mean, I'm happy so further hanging. They are hanging out, and I'm glad to see because I'm a fan. So in order to design, we have to get rid of those old ways and thinking new. And we just finished an experiment asking people to think of new ways to use old things, and the good answers come about the ninth answer, meaning it takes that long before they overcome their natural

tendency towards routine. Exactly, quite quite interesting. What's I think interesting also is the way we got people to generate new ideas for these old things. How do you use an umbrella? And creative ways? Well, it can be sticks to hold kebab, but that was the ninth idea, right, and it's clever and cute. But the way we got people to think creatively was to ask them to think about different roles of people. So how would a doctor

use this? How would a gardener use it? So we ask people to put themselves in mindsets of other professions. And professions are something we know a lot about. We've since we were three. People ask us, what do you want to be when you grow up and we interact with people with different roles, so we know a lot about what those roles do, and that help people generate new uses. So there's a television show that focuses on

improv called Whose Line Is It? Anyway? And as you were speaking, I can only think of the segment they do with props where they give each group a different set of props, and it's amazingly creative, and it seems some people really have a skill set for applying these in unexpected ways. Yeah, and improv is exactly the right example for that, for that kind of creativity. I have a former grand with student who talks about art making. She's an artist. An excellent one is improvisational and you

have to keep your mind open to new ideas. And I think you're right, you couldn't develop really good skills for doing it. Let's let's go to another rule number three. The mind can override perception, really cognitive dissonance, And is the way I was looking at that. If you're perceiving something and you're not going to believe it, how is it that we ignore what's in front of our very eyes if we're not happy with what we're seeing? Well, I don't know if it's not happy, it doesn't fit

our hypotheses. So that's really more confirmation biased than anything, or exactly or disconfirmation exactly. We don't want to see

that which disconfirms our existing but exactly. And one of the early studies that was done on that was by Jerry Brunner, an old friend, and Molly Potter, and they showed out of focused photographs of odd things like if I or hydrant at an odd angle, and they gradually brought them into focus and asked people to keep guessing what they were and compare them to a group that

saw them in focus. So these odd angles, like an odd angle of a fire hydrant, people came up with wild hypothesis and when it was in full focus couldn't identify it because they already anchored to that previous And then let me go to my favorite question, my favorite rule. The mind fills in misinformation. I have a pet theory that we're walking around with the model of a universe in our head that's just wildly wrong, and that we it's mostly misinformation. I'm curious what your thoughts are on

the mind fills in misinformation? Is it just little patches behind our vision that's filled in, or is our world view? Is our model of the universe completely wrong? Well, I don't know that. I would say it's one of the other around there's something in between. But sure we're filling

in all the time. There are some lovely experiments on our worldview now where you show a photograph and then another photograph where something has changed, like even an engine is often a jet plane, and show them in rapid succession, and people think they've seen the whole scene, but they cannot identify what's changed. And those are that you can find them online their wild So you don't know what's changed, but you know you've seen a jet plane, people going

up on it, cargo being loaded the background. You get this feeling that you see a rich scene. But it's because we're refreshing it all the time, internally refreshing it. And I'm sure we're filling in the gaps. So if in a series of photos, in one of them the engine is missing from the plane but it should be there, do we visually fill that in in our own minds? I think we just don't even notice that missing. We see airplane, we're coding it on that level and adding

those details. So this is an example from Scott McCloud, who wrote a brilliant book on comics, and he says, you know someone sitting at a desk. You can't see their legs because the desk is covering it up, but you know they have legs. So we're filling in in that way. We fill in on language, We fill in all the time, missing information, we're guessing, and usually it's

right because we've learned those contingencies in the world. I think almost everybody has at some point experienced an argument with someone that they're close to and say misinterprets what they're saying emotionally, and that can lead to the disastrous escalation of an argument. I mean you were angry. No, I wasn't angry. I was sad, And we get to those sorts of impasses. So the most I have to share something with you because I hadn't experience with filling in.

That was just astonishing and it stayed with me many many years ago. I would occasionally ride a motorcycle and when the time came to get the motorcycle license, the state requires you go through this training program, most of which if you're an experienced writer you don't need, but they fill it in with a lot of safety things. And the one thing that stayed with me probably why I don't ride motorcycles anymore, um, is they wanted to

explain to you how limited your field division is. And when you're looking straight ahead, you have about a three percent range of vision and everything around you is more or less a reasonable guests your brain constructing a model. But that means if something enters that field and you

know you're not aware of it, it's a danger. And the way they showed this to you was they put us in a room, regular square, rectangular room, and you stand on one wall, and then a person um stands directly opposite you, about twenty ft away, and then in your peripheral vision on your same wall in the corners, someone holds a reasonable size playing card and they walk along the wall towards the person opposite you, and you have to say, you have to guess when you can

identify the card is either red or black, and then when you can identify the actual suit and number of the card. And it's not like a regular four inch

deck of plane cards. They're like ten big magician cards, like eight inch day or ten inch, and I was I assumed that I would be able to identify it pretty rapidly, maybe thirty degrees from forty five degrees, and I was shocked to learn that it's almost dead on maybe that instead of straight across from you, maybe it's a hundred and twenty degrees before you can identify just the color. You couldn't even say is this a club or spade? You could say it's the card is black,

and then a little closer before you can identify. And they're practically dead opposite you when you're staring straight ahead before you could identify the card. It was shocking at how little acutey you have outside of straight ahead of you. Your peripheral vision is. You can see images, you could see rough shapes, but there's no specificity at all. It's a beautiful demonstration and we should all have it. Shocking, just absolutely shocking. So we discussed cognitive collage earlier, and

I'm fascinated by that concept. The way we put together our models of the world, how much of that is based on what we visually perceive in reality, and how much of it is based on what we're creating to fill in the holes, it's gonna vary. And what I liked about the College metaphor is its multi media. If you go back and look at Picasso and Bronch, they put newspaper clippings in and paintings in and all kinds

of things in it. And again, people think, or many researchers thought, that our views of our environment are more or less vertical. And I think our research and the research of many other people show it's filled with small biases that aren't coherent. You try to put them together, different perspectives on the world, different landmarks. So you try to put them together, you don't get anything that would

work on a Euclidean space. And in addition to its multimodels, So if I'm wandering around New York or another city, there are some things I know from language that I need to go four blocks this way. In turn, some things I know from recognizing the world, some from my recollections of maps that I've seen. So I'm gathering information from many different places to decide is the entrance to the Bloomer building going to be on Lexington or going to be on fifty nine, and how do I find it?

And so I'm making those decisions. That way balancing that information gathering from many sources. It's not a coherent system, and I do think that's a model for all kinds of judgment. And the context is going to determine what information is salient and what information isn't what I'm bringing up now, what I'm bringing up in other cases. So I do feel that this cognitive collage idea is really a model for the way we make judgments in many situations.

If you think about what's in the brain, there aren't calculations in the brain, there aren't maps in the brain, there aren't photographs of people, and it's all neurons. And we use these terms like language and spatial representations and images of faces and so forth as a way of talking. And in fact, there are places in the brain that are dedicated to recognizing faces or scenes and even rudimentary

concepts of number. There are places that are activated. But in the end it's norns and these are ways of talking. And again, the idea that we gather information from all over the cortex to make a judgment whatever seems relevant seems to me a model not just for space, but for all judgment. So you reference the comparison of people using either verbal or visual thinking. But maybe this is

the American schooling system. I tend to think about the way different people approach the world and either verbal or mathematical thinking, or at least maybe that's what we do with kids coming out of school. He's a numbers person or she's a language person. How did you come up with the economy between verbal and visual and are there any parallels for academia where there's a tendency for the math and science people to go this way and the

literature and language people to go that way? Right? So people think of themselves as visual thinkers or as verbal thinkers or computational thinkers, or I think can aesthetically and meaning in terms of right dancers or right might be think. So those are again ways of talking. They don't have a lot of evidence behind them. Even spatial thinking turns out or visual it turns out to be quite complicated.

It's many different features verbal too. We know people that are can produce words but can think straight, and vice versa who are hard to come up with words but think very logically. So verbal abilities are quite different and spatial abilities are quite different. The bad news is you can be good at both and bad at votes. It's not that one compensates for another to some extent, they

clearly compensate. So I recently had the wonderful opportunity of because of a talk I needed to give, of delving into Leonardo, who's by all accounts, one of the most brilliant thinkers of all times. He thought visually spacially, and he thought through sketching, and he used sketches as a way of understanding dynamic processes that not just static ones,

because sketches are static. And in fact, he used the way he drew as a way of understanding the way vortices are happening water, so the way he drew them, and he used many different perspectives. So he was very much a kind of visual thinker. But he was able to get to enormous abstractions through the visual spatial thinking, and there wasn't much maths then. Quite interesting. One of the things you talked about in the book is our

hands expressing our thinking. New Yorker's notorious with their hands, big, big hand. But what is the significance of gestures to cognition? How important is it you could typically understand what someone is saying on the radio regardless of what their hands are doing. That said, it's helpful to try and express certain ideas with your hands as as you speak. Why why is that? Yeah, I know it's lovely and I think what you're saying that we can get information just

through hearing, we can get it just through readings. So human beings are enormously um adept at learning from different media and where I don't get filled in, but you couldn't if it face to face. Conversation does involve gesture, and we did a number of experiments showing that the way people gesture when they're explaining something changes the thought of other people. Really yeah, so so depending on what

you're doing with your hands, you're very much. It's not necessarily for the speaker, it's for the listener both so for the speaker. So think of cyclical thinking, going from a seed to a flower back to a seed. If we ask people just to represent that, they tend to represent lines, not cycles. But if we gesture in a circle, they'll put down circles when we asked them to put something on paper. We have some other examples of that, but I think the most striking wounds are gestures for yourself.

So we put people in a room there alone, not talking to anybody. They're reading a complicated description of space low catering, say eight landmarks in a larger space. It's new to them and they're going to be tested, so they have to learn it. And if you watch them studying, they're looking at the screen and their hands are making a map. They're drawing lines for the paths and points with emphasis on the table for landmarks. And when they do that, they're more likely to be correct on the exam.

And if we tell them to sit on their hands when they're reading, they do worse. Really, so the process of emoting or or maybe that's the wrong word, of of cognitively expressing what they're learning through their hands helps them learn and helps them retain that. So, if you think about the language is arbitrary and it's very hard to understand a spatial description, what I can do with my hands is modeled the environment. And that's what I do.

I turn the words into a model with my hands that my hands are representing the information in the description. And when you say words are arbitrary, you specifically make a point in the book that most words are completely arbitrary, with a handful of an amount of poetic exceptions. And that's true from you know, a cup, there's a different word for it in every language, and none of which sound like the word cup or or what what this physical object? If it makes a sound, what it would be? Right?

And so we find with environments. We also find it. Teaching people how a car break works, they model it with their hands. So what's again an extra interesting about that is the hands are representing the information. Language also represents the information, and a sketch will represent the information. So with many different ways of representation, So one is abstract, one is physical, and one is a hatch to us

actually part of our body. Right. And what I try to argue is that this kind of spatial thinking is more direct. I'm I'm expressing it through a diagram or expressing it through my hands. It's a direct representation of the knowledge. So even if I'm explaining, if I'm talking to about a situation where people are arguing or whatever, I use on the one hand, on the other I've created a diagram. I've put all the things that go with on this hand on one space, and the things

that go with it on another in another space. If I talk about people rising in a corporate world, I'm going to use my hand to go up. So I'm illustrating all those ways of thinking with my hands, and it helps you understand and it helps me express. Quite interesting. Let's talk a little bit about the project that Michael Lewis did. Theo he wrote called the Undoing Project, and he very specifically said, without you, there would be no

book Undoing Projects. First question, and the book is about Danny Kaneman and his partner Amos Tversky, who was your husband. They worked for many years together in Israel and then came here to the United States. I get the sense from the book that in the beginning you were a little reluctant to participate. Is that a misinterpretation or were you ready to jump in with both feet right from the beginning. No, I wasn't reluctant. Danny Kaneman and Michael

had struck up a friendship. They lived pretty close to each other in at the time. Danny no longer has a home there. And the way Michael tells the story of how they met, Michael did go to business school, but he went too early to have learned Koneman and Firsty, and he came to it quite late, and they came

would indirectly. He'd written money Ball, an amazing book, and Dick Taylor and I think as Sunstein wrote a review in the Republic and they said the book is great and all that, but Michael needs to know about Kanamen and first Key to understand why coaches scouts were missled and Billy Dean. So Michael at that time and now is living in Berkeley. One of his closest friends is Dr Keltner, who was a graduate student in social psychology

at Stanford and tight actually for my husband. As Michael tells the story over beer, Michael asked Dr about this work and doctor says, sure, Danny lives up the hill, I'll introduce you. So Danny was willing, in his generous way to talk about the work explain it to Michael, because Michael realized he needed to know about it if he were interested in statistics, he need it to know about how people misuse them. So I think Danny said, if you walk with me, we'll talk. Because Danny walked,

and they gradually I think struck up a friendship. And I think Michael tells it that he got the idea of writing a book about their friendship, about Danny and amesis friendship. And Danny came to me and he said, Michael wants to write a book and if he doesn't do it, somebody else will. And Michael likes us, and he named another person who was waiting in line and said that person doesn't like us. So I said, Danny, whatever, I trust you completely. Whatever you think, I'll go along with.

So the side part on that story is, I think for a year or two Michael taught a course in finance journalism at the Berkeley School of Journalism. One point he opened it up to be school students. Our oldest son, Oran was a student has at that point and took Michael's course and they hit it off, and he obviously figured out who Oran was. He didn't figure it out at all. Really, he didn't figure it out at all. And I don't know exactly he never put that together,

didn't put it together. And I don't remember if that was before or after money well, but he didn't put it together. And the upshot was that it was Oran who introduced me to Michael, which is sweet over email, which I mean, I think Michael asked Oran Michael. He ended up talking a great deal with my three children and ended up being quite fond of them, which of course warms the mother's heart. So how did you and Michael collaborate when he was doing the research part of

the book. I don't know if his collaboration. Michael sat in my office at Stanford going through Emmessis papers. He really does his search beautifully, complete concentration, and he would ask me questions and I would answer them. If something was in Hebrew, I'd try to translate it for him. He asked me questions by email, and I answered them at great length, and that was I think an easy way for us to communicate. At one point, you know, I came to Israel young bride, within the middle of

graduate school with no Hebrew whatsoever. Where did you go to Israel from from the US? From the US from graduates? That it was the October sixt six day war, right, and AMOS was drafted on the twenty two of May, and the war broke out ten days later. And and by then I'd learned enough Hebrew that I could understand what the chief of staff at Corobbins said on the ten o'clock news. So that's a longer story. I can

tell it. And in fact, Michael asked about that, and I told them, in great detail, turn on your novelist eyes, what's it like to be an American coming to Israel? So I wrote in the sixties. Yeah, I wrote him at great length, what's that was like? And later I found letters I think my brother sent them. I'm found letters that I've written my parents. Everything that I remember

was correct, which is astounding. You write about memory, which we know is not only fallible, but every time we recall an event, we're reconstructing the event on Memories are essentially replaced by a series of bad carbon copies. So it's nice that when you when something is that vivid and you remember it accurately. Maybe it's because it was so vivid it couldn't or that I retold it. I mean, memories start getting distorted them and you use language because

they don't happen in language. I mean, they might happen in part, but they get distorted from the get go, from your perception and so forth. I think I helped my colin that way answering his emails. I gave him a long list of people he might want to speak with, both in the US and people who knew Amos well, and people like can Arrow. He was a close friend and stayed a close friend of mine for many years

after Amos died. Kenneth stayed a close friend. So when Kenneth was one of the early Nobel Prize winners in economics, and he quickly bought into the work, it was clear to him that the work was right from the get go, in contrast to many other economists. So I sent him to a whole set of people that I thought he might give him a picture of Amos because he knew Danny well, but he didn't know Amos. I sent him

to many people at friends of ours and Israel. He went to Israel three four times and met all of them, I mean Michael's research, where he met my sister in law, my niece and talked with them. He was extraordinary in the amazing and he got Amos in many ways. I mean, there are errors in the book, but some people were disturbed by the portrait of Amos is only being interested in his work, because he really was helpful on every way, both personally to people and in the departments in which

he participated in the university. He was a super good citizen, so that he was single minded about his work isn't quite right. That's hard to depict when you're going back twenty five years later. I would imagine when you didn't know the guy, and you know, all of us are complicated and we're different, with different people in different situations, and he probably caricatured Danny, and then you're capturing them at a particular point of time and we're always changing.

I mean, the book's a great story and what impressed me to him? And Michael learned the work and he kept telling me, I feel like it'd be student studying a plus work, but he really learned it. And I think his portrayal of both of the history that Mail and Lou Goldberg and other people have done similar work before their work Robin Dawes people who were influences on them or in the same ecology, and getting the work right.

I thought he did a masterful job of explaining the work to lay people, so he might have gotten some of the nuances about Amos wrong. Did he find anything from speaking to friends, colleagues, relatives that surprised you. Did anything show up in the book that you said, huh? I don't really know about that. No, I don't think. So it's not that Amos didn't have secrets, although a few from me, But no, I don't. I don't think

there was anything there that I didn't know. So you wrote or said, I don't remember where I pulled this quote from about Danny and Amos. Their relationship was more intense than a marriage, so that had to be a difficult thing to balance with your own marriage. What was that like living through that? I'm not sure if I said more intense than a marriage, but it was certainly intense like a marriage. They really loved each other, and they formed a close friendship, and the way they worked

together was gleeful and joyful until it wasn't. When you say gleeful and joyful. There are stories parts of the Undoing Project where the two of them are locked in a classroom by themselves and all people in the hallway here is just peals of laughter for hours. They're back and forth debating stuff and just laughing their butts off. Was it work or was it fun? I had the advantage of understanding Hebrew and English, and the conversations would

go back and forth and be mixed between English and Hebrew. Yeah, and you know, they'd come out for tea or a lot of the conversations were in my house. They'd come out for tea, or they'd come out to tell me something that they were dying to tell me. And when Danny would leave and Amos would be with me, I would hear a recap of the discussion and the conversations and the stories the questions they were asking students. So I had a front row seat to everything that was

going on. It didn't interfere with mine. So this wasn't an imposition. This was just your husband and a professional relationship that worked for him and worked for everybody involved, and gave me a great deal of intellectual pleasure, of personal pleasure. Danny would often visit us, stay in our house when we were at Stanford, he was at Vancouver. Amus tended to work late at night and come wake late in the morning, so I'd have breakfast with Danny.

Danny's great company, and that was a pleasure. So he's in New York. Now you're in New York half the year. You guys still see each other? Sure? Sure? I mean, I'd like to say we we lived down the street from each other, because We both from the corner of Broadway, but hundred blocks apart. No, he's been a really loyal friend and I appreciate that. Can you stick around a little bit. I have a bunch more questions for you.

We have been speaking with Barbara Tversky, professor at Stanford in Colombia and author of Mind in Motion, How Action Shapes Thoughts. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out the podcast extras. Will we keep the tape rolling and continue discussing all things cognitive and psychology related. You can find that at Apple iTunes, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, wherever your finer podcasts are found. Be sure to check out my weekly column on Bloomberg dot com. Follow me

on Twitter at rid Halts. Sign up for my daily reads at rid Halts dot com. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Barbara, Thank you so much for doing this. You you and I can speak off Mike for as long as we're talking on Mike, because these are really really fascinating subjects. And I didn't realize the person who sent me down the behavioral finance Rob rabbit Hole. Um Thomas Gilovich was a student of Amoses and Lee Ross

back in the day. Now, tell us a little bit about Lee Ross. What was his relationship with Amos? How did how did he um have anything to do with Stanford? And and you and Amos? So Lee Ross, who said a dear friend. Um. It was at Stanford working with Nick nasb and they were working on essentially biases, their social psychologists, and they were working on biases in the way that we interpret other people's behavior and our own behavior.

In those years, cognition was really active in social psychology and thinking about an individual. So one of the things they came up with is called the fundamental attribution error, and that's that we attribute our own behavior to the circumstances around us, and other people's behavior to enduring personality traits. So so when I do something right, when I do something right, it's because I'm so skillful, But when they do something wrong, it's they're not that smart. Than that,

they're not good people. That's why they messed up. Is something like that, Or when when if I get angry, it's something that you did. It's a situation, it's not my fault. The circumstances, maybe you provoked me, and and if you're behaving that way, it's because you're an aggressive person, or an angry person or a shy person. So we

all three. So so the that's kind of interesting, And it just goes back to the filter I view these things through is finance and investing in trading, and the greatest thing to do is to speak to traders who were either making money or losing money. And when they're making money, it's because they're brilliant. Hey, I had this trade figured out, I knew where to jump into it,

I understood the value of this company. And when the trade goes south, it's never oh I had it wrong, it's well, the Federal Reserve did this, and who knew about this attack? And I ran And it's always externalities why they lose money. But it's their skills why they make money. Yeah, and you wonder why we're built that way, because it does interfere with learning what's happening in the world and how to interpret it. That it does feel

very strongly that we're built that way. So so if that's the case, is there an evolutionary benefit to that sort of self confidence? Um? And ignoring things that that perhaps might even be your fault. Why would that why would that be hardwired? And you know, you could write an evolutionary story, sure that. I don't know how you know if it was correct or not, but it makes

a great narrative. It makes a great story, right, And I mean evolutionary psychology has taken hold a bit in psychology, sometimes in an annoying way because in some sense all of us were doing it anyway, but it it there's there's a very little way that you can check those deep psychological hypotheses. You can check other sorts of hypotheses about structure eye or structure by raising food flies for

many generations. But it's those deep psychological ones that the connection between any gene and psycho and behavior, and add to that epigenetics and our BioGenome in in our stomach and so genetics has become a huge field recently. Hasn't it that that our experiences somehow impact our our genetics? Am I oversimple? Well, again, I'm not an expert on this.

I went to UH symposium on it and quiz the biologists mercilessly on the mechanisms, and yes, they seem to they seem to believe in this is some of this is animal work where you can check it that that actually it is affecting the genome, the germ cells that are being passed on to the next generation. And so if you starve the grandfather, the grandchild who never knew rat that never knew the grandfather has different eating behavior

than if the grandfather wasn't solved. So a lot of that is looking at negative things that maternal deprivation, starvation, and so forth. So I asked, does it work for positive things? If you enrich an environment, does that get passed to the grandchildren? And they said it looks like it might. It does. And then I asked, are these big effects? And they said no, they're small effects. In

the larger picture, they're small effects, but they're detectable. So since you mentioned rats, I have to ask this question, um, how do animals? How do the way animals think differ from human thinking? Or are there many parallels? Do animals and humans have a lot of similar thought processes? So again we're getting out of my own research research that I reviewed. But if you look, primates can't count the

way we can count. But then there are many civil as nations still around in the world that don't have number words, and numbers are a cultural phenomenon. Not hardwired, yes, but one to one correspondences. Things that you have in tallies are old and are We have an estimation system as well as an accurate system. There are kind of two mass systems in the brain, and they are somewhat integrated and somewhat independent. But making estimates, are there eighty

three things or ninety things? Primates can make those estimates quite well without counting, right. That's interesting, No, it's fascinating. And one of the things you mentioned earlier that I was kind of intrigued with, I wanna I wanna just do a slight um variation of so you mentioned some people are good with language and other people are good with thinking processes, and not every he has both. But one of the things I was kind of fascinated with

about language and creativity and thinking. So I write a lot and I speak a lot. But I found that my writing it's much more intel actually sharp, and at a higher grade level than my speaking, and I was kind of surprised. So when I worked on my first book over a decade ago, I thought, oh, this will be easy I'll dictate a bunch of stuff and it'll take me a couple of weekends, and I'll have a hundred thousand words, and I'm shocked as I'm rereading my

spoken word. This is terrible. Why are the things that I laboriously pound out on a keyboard so much more articulate and intelligent than what I say? And eventually it wasn't a big leap to think, well, you have a part of the brain for speech and a different part of the brain for creativity and writing, and hey, maybe that speech part in is well developed as your writing part. Is that an oversimplification or is that a fair way to look at it? And no, I think it's probably.

I don't think there are separate parts of the brain for speaking and writing. What happens when you write is you put something in a page and you would edit. Yeah, but my first drafts of writing are much more articulate than my first drafts of speaking. And the best speaking things I do are when I write them out in

advance and come up with the structural language that I want. Okay, so then you're you're putting on your your writing hat and supposed to your speaking is more spontaneous, sure, and the writing hat you're deliberately thinking about what what am I going to? What are the thoughts I want to express, and how's the best way to express them? So you some particularly adept at that. I had to. I have a colleague at Stanford named alband Or who writes many books,

and they're all good. And you ask them a question and it comes out in paragraphs and pages full answers, like first draft. I have a friend like that. It's just fully formed, coherent, organized like I wish I could do that. I could do that on on pen and paper. I can't do that, verbon No. It's astounding, and I think it's he's practiced so much so if you think about musicians that write music or play music, they can do it very rapidly. They have the scheme as they

can generated very quickly. It's highly practiced, like any sport would be highly practiced. So perhaps you're writing, you're thinking, at this metal level, how am I going to organize my thoughts. I've got an outline for organizing them. I'm gesturing the outline and and you're thinking that through and filling it through. This interview is different from spontaneous conversations, because again I'm crafting and thinking ahead and crafting in

that way. So my convenent of dissonances. I'm going to stick with the two different brain sections because I like that idea, but also the way various aphasi acts and people who have had brain damage lose the ability to speak, but they can sing, or they could they could write, but they can't read. That's what led me to think it's a speech center and a writing center. You're telling me there is no difference. I don't know. I sort

of doubt it because I think each involves many areas Aphacians. Yeah, Aphacia's brain damage, and it's usually not pointed. It's not it's a cluster of neurons probably and and and there. It is losing certain kinds of words and not others. Right, So this is a general So so the other thing I want to ask. Art comes up in the book in several places. I'm curious as to why you use art as an example. And then there's one specific example I have to bring up to you because I was

intrigued by it. Um, what's the relationship between art and thinking and between the concept of spatial motion and how we express ourselves artistically. Yeah, so right, So how would I come to naturally? I drew a lot as a kid, and my mother's an artist, and my cousins that are so art is very much in my life writing too, for that matter. M but I happen to have I got interested in design, So I first got interested in how do we put the world in our mind? How

do we get space in our mind? And then I got more and more interested in the spaces that we create to improve our own cognition. So diagrams would be one. Even the alphabet would be at one. Sure, developing the alphabet which was invented apparently only once, but invent it only once? What do you mean? The sound sound too, symbol correspondence was developed once since spread and then just variations based and otherwise. Alphabets were representing meaning the way

Chinese went from symbology to phonetics. It's whether it's representing meanings directly the way Chinese does, or whether it's representing the sound of language of speaking. And that's what the Phoenician alphabet that spread everywhere and got varied and was apparently only invented once and then spread it is fascinating. So so let me have you disabused me of another thing I probably have wrong? Um? Have have you seen

the trick in the Federal Express? Uh? So, the way that was first explained to me is the reason we don't perceive the arrow in the FedEx. And just pull up a FedEx, any picture of FedEx, and you'll see between the E and the x um there there's an arrow. That's the part of your brain that recognizes language is a different part of the brain that recognizes symbols, And when you're reading the letters, your brain isn't primed for

seeing a symbol like an arrow. So that's fascinating, and it would be arrows are fascinating anyway, and they've gotten me fascinated, and somebody needs to do that work. The the lateral occipital parietal juncture, that area of the brain that is recognizing objects and recognizes fruits and vegetables and so forth. There are many different sub areas, is like a mosaic. There is only one area in all of

those areas that recognizes left right asymmetries. Otherwise, your face mirror reversed is more places in a good example, but it's mostly the same the special there's a special area for faces, but most things, it doesn't matter. If it's a left right, turning it upside down matters, but left right doesn't matter. There's one area of the brain that is primed to recognize left right aberration, so we can tell a small B from a small D and differentiate.

So that area is used for reading no matter what language you read. Now what that area would do with arrows, I'd be absolutely fascinated to know. So maybe the way I heard it might be right, I'm not going to be exactly. And and the problem there is the arrows embedded in the letters. So the embedding is going to interfere with the perception anyway I'm not. It's like a relief. Are you looking at the white or the black? Exactly?

The negative? There could be another the negative space. So let me bring that back to ouray, because we we started talking about that. You reference the linear how how linear things are when we're moving through space, the way language words after another appear. You use a whole bunch of examples, and you talk about, um, the space within an art and painting and how it had a form of linear progression. Until Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock come

along where they just explode that concept. And the the reason that stood out to me is so my wife used to she's now retired, but she taught fashion, illustration and design. I've been dragged at every museum in the world, and initially a lot of some modern art just didn't resonate with me. Stella, I would look at just nonsense. Always was fascinated by Jackson Pollock, um, but I didn't care much for Mark Rothko until I don't know, fifteen

twenty years ago, and I can't explain what happened. But suddenly, maybe having just seen it enough time, suddenly this is really fascinating stuff. There's there's it's not only abstract, but there's all sorts of different things going on, whether it's the space, the border, the color choices. Suddenly I went from not caring anything about roth Go to really, this is one of the most fascinating modern painters there are. And the fact that you used it as him as

an example. I'm not a big fan of the black period, the later stuff he did when it's all black and gray and white, but hold that aside. The example of that having no linear narrative and no structural. Here's where your eyes going to naturally lead by the figures. I thought that was fascinating as an example early in the book Thank you. I'm not an art critic, I'm gonna appreciate it or either. So it gets back to the learning versus creativity. And when you're learning, you want things

very straightforward and structured. When you're being creative you want to go in many different directions. And what I think both Roscoe and Pollock do and it took me a while to appreciate them as well, is there's ambiguity built into the paintings, and every time you look something different, you see something differ. And as you're looking at configures and reconfigures, and what Roscoe especially does is you get the adapters of the eye to color adapting, so colors

change in them because of the way you're looking. You can get after images that are very interesting. With Rothco, look at a blank wall, but those adapters in your eye to the different colors keep changing, and that means that what you're seeing changes because it's not it's there, it's you're in your eye. And and Leonardo, by the way, knew that that it wasn't in the thing out there. It was in your mind, m through your eye. So I think, to me, that's what's intriguing about Roscoe. You

commune with it and it different structures appear. It stops being flat and gets into depth. Oh, it's definitely dimensional. And maybe that's the switch that flicked onto me. Suddenly it wasn't just an orange or purple square. It's like, this really has a dimensionality to it and a depth.

And I watch people going in there are those galleries in the in the tad and in what in the east wing of the National Gallery where there are lots of roth calls, and I watch people just going through and looking very quickly, and you have to sit there and commune, and then it's it. It becomes spiritual. So and that got me. It wasn't that, But earlier on I started looking at design and looking at architects how

they design. We looked at experienced architects and drawing while they were designing, and there were early sketches are ambiguous, and it allows them to make discoveries in their own sketches. So they drew for one reason, and when they look at their sketch, they see new things. They see patterns, they see implications like this is a building, the traffic will not be right, or the light will fall poorly. So they see new things in their sketches, and it's

the ambiguity that allows it. And then one of my graduate students started We studied them drawing and studied that process, and one of my graduate students started studying artists for whom drawing is their major practice, and for them, the drawing is a conversation between the eye and the hand and the page. There are no words, and if they try to talk about it, they can't. It interferes with the whole process. So this is a different way of

thinking than language. It's thinking with the objects that I'm creating, with a body that's creating them, and with the thing that's perceiving them. And I'm sure something similar goes on in creating music and even in imagining your words. If you're thinking about speaking, you're thinking about how the words are going to sound, if you're if you're practicing it. So I wanted to call attention to that way of thinking. It's not going through language. It's an important way of thinking.

It's the way I find my way in the world, and it contributes to many other kinds of It's the way I understand other people when I'm watching their bodies and their faces as are responding. So I wanted to call attention to those ways of thinking with the body and the world and the things that we create in the world. Is an important way of thinking that compliments language. That's different from language. I mean, I love language, So it's it's obvious you do. So I know I don't

have you all day. I only have you for a little bit of time. Let me jump to my favorite questions that we ask all our guests, and let's see if we can learn a little bit more about Barbara Tavski. Um, so what do you? Uh? What are you listening to? Watching or downloading? Are you? Are you watching anything on Netflix or Interestingly? Movies affect me too much, too much. Yeah, so I'm very picky about what I see. So what have you seen that you've liked recently? Um? Synonyms, synonyms.

It's an Israeli film about and because I lived in ISRAELI especially resonates it's about but it has universal appeal. It's about a man who was traumatized by being in the army, by what he had to do and it went to Paris and decides he needs a new identity. H quite quite interesting. It's a fascinating movie. And they add that to my Netflix. Cue. What's the most important thing people don't know about? Barbara Zavarsky. Oh, I don't. I'm pretty much out there. I think you probably don't

know that I, or maybe I hinted. I have three wonderful children, and they have produced eight wonderful grandchildren who are all lively individuals with personalities and who adore each other. Who are some of your early mentors, So that's interesting. I don't think I had much in the way of human beings. It was more books that were influential, and

when I was a teenager, the existentialists, particularly um were influential. UM. Later philosophers like Russell Quine, Wittgenstein, especially late Wittgenstein, were all influential. Eventually, when I got into psychology, the early cognitive people like Chomsky, Miller, Brunner, Broadband, um kun who talked about scientific revolutions, but they were really intellectual revolutions.

They were about the human mind. So those but more than that, the colleagues, I mean, I always, even as an undergraduate hung out with the graduate students and and learned an enormous amount from them. They were indulgent and that stayed with me. I'm fortunate to have had amazing colleagues who were also friends, including the one that I lived with for thirty years, and our overlapping friendship groups. So in your work, what other psychologists affect the way

you approach the world of psychology. I think that, like you, I'm a generalist, and at I mean I had Amazon the house and that whole circle and Danny and other colleagues at Hebrew University when I was early on then moved to Stanford. Stanford's way of hiring people is wallpaper. You want the whole field covered, but you don't want

to overlap. And and I've seen other departments build little nuclei of everybody's working on speech perception, and then there's a nucleus some myself working on other and you don't communicate. So what was really wonderful to me at Stanford was having wonderful people and developmental and social in rain In and people in cognitive doing different things from me. And

I learned a great deal from that. I loved that, and now I have people from the arts and people from technology, people for many arts, music, drama, UM, painting, and who are dance? Who are influencing me? And everything goes through the human mind. I mean you've said that, well, you see it in your book. You talk about everything from you reference dance and moving through space as well as art and music. It's it's clear that all those

different folks are influencing you. Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorite books? What are you reading these days? What do you like to recommend? Is? So I went from reading fiction voraciously to reading UM, to postmodern fiction to reading nonfiction so UM a long history and a lot of foreign fiction that I've loved and still love because it brings you to other worlds. But I'm reading So Sapiens, which I recommend to everybody. UM.

Danny's book Thinking Fast and Slow is wonderful. UM anything Jared Diamond or Sapolsky as you recommended UM and UM Hans Rustling's factfulness I found very uplifting and and it gives you a right, the right perspective on long things you mentioned Jared Diamond, guns, germs and steel right would be one of them. And that again is a broad way of thinking that makes sense to me. Um, I loved Misbehaving Dick Taylor's Frock was just a lot of fun.

So those are probably that's a great list that'll keep someone busy for a full semester. To say the least, UM tell us about it time you failed and what you learned from the experience. So that was a hard question for me. I I don't try things that are really out of reach. But if you think about being an an experimental psychologist, which I have been, every experiment is a risk. You build it and you build it on previous work, on your previous experience, and many of

them fail. I mean, I think the failure rate is lower than the failure rate for startups. So the failure rate is about meaning that you just don't reach any conclusion by the experience, and if something happens that you didn't expect and you might be disappointed in But for me, that's the adventure on the phone, and you learn something from that. Now, learning from failure is problematic because it's just one experience and it's so easy in hindsight to

explain why you failed. I mean, you saw that with people in stock picks all the time, need do calls this uh resulting where the poker players they learn the lesson the wrong lesson from the result as opposed from the process exactly. So it's only one um, one sample, and you're interpreting at it in in the hindsight. So failure has become popular now everybody's talking about failing is good and you learn from failure, but you don't necessarily

learn the right thing from failure. So we're failing at failing. We're doing it's getting a little a little fractal there, but I think not letting failures get you down is probably a good lesson. Okay, that's that's that's good. Um, what do you do for fun? What do you do when you're not doting on the grandkids and doing research? Oh? In research is fun. I'm one of the few people that loves writing because it's making things sculpting. Sculpting. That's

such a good turn of a phrase. Um, the library areing of Congress. Daniel Borston used to say, I write to figure out what I think, But you've reduced that to one word sculpting. Yeah, I'm a fan of Daniel Borstein. Two Explorer exactly are great books. Yeah, really, uplifting and just so well researched and so beautifully written. Yeah, and he gets the essences of these things in an exciting way.

Not not small books. Those are that's a summer. Each of those books is like there's your July and August. Yeah that was, and they're they're great. New York is full of fun. I mean the most fun is good conversation with friends, and I happen to have good friends

who are good conversationalized. But I love music. I've developed a late passion for opera, for opera really interesting, and that took many years and now it's over the top and the stories are often you know, the men are bastards and the women are saints and the women die. But the end that's ever been yeah boham and right. But I've learned to love opera just by going. I'm no expert, but you learned by experiencing. And it's again a different way of learning than book learning. And I

think that's the way you pointed out. You learn from our you just look just watching. There's this stuff to be picked up. So you're in New York a couple of months a year in California, Well, I'm now I'm actually Mrita at Stanford, so I'm there for summers and many breaks, but I'm still teaching at Columbia, so I'm more here, um right, and yeah, and hence I understand there's an opera or two here. Part I understand there's

a couple of operas here all the time. The next one on my list is What's Sick, which is a very hard opera org It's it's human tragedy at its worst. But William Kentridge is doing this production and the sets, and he, in my mind, is the most inventive and interesting artist alive by a long shot. Wow. That's quite interesting. Um. So what are you optimistic about in the world of psychology today and what are you a little pessimistic about.

I'm optimistic in general by the arts and sciences, um and they both have young people who are doing really innovative and creative things. In my own field, I happen to be past president of the Association of Psychological Sciences. I gave out a lot of prizes last year, including

to young investigators. And they know math, and they know big data, and they know the brain and they know behavior and they're doing mind blowing things, and you can't help but be in all of these young people reasons to be optimistic about the future and about the the arts, politics, global warming. I'm worried about the same things. You know, a reckless leader of a major country doing impulsive things that that would never happen. You know, of course the

adults are going to take charge. No one would behave recklessly like that. Yeah, you have to be optimistic that we will get past all that sort of Well, global warming is more of a worry. But so I'm worried about the things that normal people are worried about. But so I recently I agree with you on those I recently read something. So there are reasons to be frightened about global warming, but there are also reasons to be optimistic that will transition to sustainable energy and we'll find

some technological solution that will reduce the negative effects. And then I read this column with a person and they look at all these surveys of people and my optimistic viewpoint on technology, what happens if it's wrong, And lots of lots of people seem to believe, oh yeah, we'll we'll see the skies, We'll find some way to reflect the sun temporarily and lower. There seems to be a belief amongst a lot of people that yeah, yeah, well we'll come up with a magic bullet, will be fine,

and that's not usually how things work. They usually aren't magic bullets. And when somebody explained that, like lots of people think this, I'm like, gee, maybe it really is much worse than uh. I know it's bad, but I'm trying to be optimistic. And that kind of was like a reality check that maybe it's gonna be harder to fix this than we think. Yeah, and what what if you look for optimistic things and I think we share that looking for it. I don't know that there's going

to be a magic, single solution. It's more gonna be many. But what is impressive. Despite the government's policy, which is not pro green, many companies have discovered that they're better off. It's economically in their interests, and so that that's happening. And you look at younger people and and you know, I once left the water running while I was brushing my teeth and one of my four year old grandchildren said, softer,

turn off the water, stop wasting, stop wasting water. So coal is a perfect example of exactly what you're talking about. Coal has been and coal just plummeted in usage, but we have made natural gas not as good as solar, but much better than coal. It's become so inexpensive that coal fired electrical plants are rapidly going away. It's so much cheaper to switch to natural gas that the economic insensives are doing a lot of it on their own,

just the cost of the material. You don't have to have scrubbers with natural gas, you don't have to have all these complicated carbon recaption systems. Now mining for natural gas releases methane another thing. Natural gas has a lot of its own problems, but on any comparison basis, it's just so much better than coal. Hopefully we see more of that moving in the right direction organically, um but we'll see and solar and wind and see and people

are moving. The real question is can we go fast enough? Because the warming has already happened, The glaciers are mounting, the coral reefs are dying, and that's our fish population. So you could see the Great Barrier reef dying from space. There are satellite images that are showing it bleaching. For

miles at a time. Um, I'm trying to Douglas Adams wrote a book maybe it was he's no longer with us, so it had to be like years ago called Last Chance to See And it's all these environments and species that this was before eco tourism was a big thing, and he said, hey, if you want to see these, you better go see these now because they're not going

to be here in fifty years. And the great barrier brief is literally you know, they're much more sensitive to one degree increase in sea temperature than you know, even enjoiant populations of fish. So that's a really interesting book if you want to be depressed. So my last two questions, let me ask you this, Um, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate who was interested in a career in experimental psychology. If it's experimental psychology,

you have to learn brain and data. Um. Right, it's it's hard now, in much harder in some ways than and I was coming in. It's harder to get grant money, and you need grants, and so it's hard. I would tell people to be strategic. I wasn't, but it worked out. I was very lucky that is a theme on this show.

Lots of people say how fortunate they were and how how lucky they were by their circumstances, and you just can't count on that happening always, right, And I think some of it was the meandering that I did seemed at first like me andering. This is the research track that I took. But eventually then I saw this isn't neandering, this is deliberate, and then I was able to craft what I was doing along the bigger vision that I had.

But it took a while to get that. And if I look at Picasso at an artist Roscoe, if you look at early Roscoe is very different from later. It was representational, wasn't even abstract. And I think that a certain you do a certain amount of me entering, and that's probably a good thing of exploring and exploring widely before you get to help you get a vision, and also to give you the tools that you need to

do something bigger. And so you build up the technical skills and then you get a leap off from conceptual skills, and you've tried many different things. It took a while before Picasso got his vision, and then he ended up having many visions because he was especially fertile in that way. And our final question, what do you know about the world of psychology today that you wish you knew thirty or forty years ago when you were a young student. Well,

here's something I'm glad I didn't know. It's political, really, and I feeling like tenure at universities or what get published or or a little bit everywhere. So I thought it was grant money to or I thought I was going into a field that wasn't that was just intellectual. And you know, I'm aberrant that way of really enjoying ideas and playing with ideas and contributing to them and wanting to be around people who are thinking. And I thought academics was going to be the purest place on that.

When I was studying, there weren't that many opportunities for women. And I was self supporting my last two years in college, so I I knew there was no I had nobody to fall back on. I had to make a living um. But sure, it's even who you site in your articles and and and so forth. So I thought, this is a level playing field. All that matters is good ideas. But there's not quite a meritocracy not right in meritocracy has come to be a bad word, but really in

some cases. But I thought all that would matter with the ideas, but which ideas get picked up on and who they get attributed to it. Here being a woman was a bit of a disadvantage, and again I was oblivious, and I'm glad I was oblivious. But there are those political things are really social dynamics, and they're they're they're about human beings. And in the end, even if it's intellectual and ideas about science, it's still human beings that

are making the market quite fascinating. Barbara, thank you for being so generous with your time. We've been talking for about two hours, and I could go for another two hours, but I know you have places to go and people to see. We have been speaking with Barbara Traversky, professor of psychology at Colombia and Stanford and author of the

book Mind in Motion, How Actions Shape Thoughts. If you enjoy this conversation, well be sure and look up an intro down an inch on Apple iTunes and you could see any of the three hundred prior such conversations we've had. You can find that on iTunes, Google, podcasts. That's your Spotify overcast wherever final podcasts are sold. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Give us a review on Apple iTunes.

I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that helps put these conversations together each week. Paris Wald is my producer, Mark Sinnascalce is my audio engineer. I'm Barry Rehults. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio