Interview With Steven Pinker: Masters in Business (Audio)

Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week. On the podcast, I had an absolutely fascinating and fantastic conversation with a rock star professor of neural linguistics and cognitive psychology and all sorts of other interesting uh fields of study within the world of cognition and psychology, Professor Stephen Pinker at Harvard University. This guy is a rock star. This was really one of those conversations that was just

so fascinating and went in so many different directions. Uh. He's a psychologist, but he also has a really fascinating uh quantitative background, and so he's a guy that's actually especially driven by data. When you think of things like neural linguistics or or visual cognition, you don't think in terms of of how's the math behind this? But he has a mind that looks at the world very much through a quantitative filter. Uh. He he wrote a number, by the way, uh one a ton of awards at

at Harvard and throughout the sciences, highly highly regarded. His books have are also really really well reviewed, very notable. Uh the book Better Better Nature of Our Angels, why violence has decreased around the world and indeed when you look at it quantitatively, violence and war and crime or at record low levels. I know it doesn't look that way when you when you see the news, but that's a fascinating conversation. It's I love that sort of counterintuitive.

Here's what everybody believes, it's all wrong, here's the data and proving it. Uh. And and he brings that approach to everything he touches. His His work on how the mind works is really fascinating. How children acquire language skills and why that is a significant evolutionary development amongst humans

is really, you know, groundbreaking, fascinating stuff. Um. You may not think that there's an immediate application to the world of investing, but he's just one of these people who are so interesting and so knowledgeable and has such an interesting model in his mind for how to approach thinking about the world that I can't help but think that there are lessons for investors in this. So a little off the beaten path, but absolutely fascinating. Here is my

conversation with Professor Steven Pinker. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Professor Steven Pinker. He is a rock star professor of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard, where he holds the title of Johnstone Family Professor in the psych Department. He is a psychologist, linguist, and popular science author, specializing

in visual cognition and psycho linguistics. I think you can find a lot of what we talked about today absolutely fascinating. He's won numerous awards from the National Economy of Sciences, the Royal Institute, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He is the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, the Better Angels of Our Nature, The Stuff of Thought, and most recently The Sense of Style. He is also on the usage panel of the American Heritage dis Dictionary. Professor Pinker,

welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you. First question, I have to ask you what is visual cognition and psycholinguistics? Those are two sub topics in the field of cognitive science, which is how do we think? What? What is the nature of intelligence. Visual cognition is how we um interpret what we see, or how we think about what we see. How do you recognize the face of a friend? How do you find an object when you're rummaging through a drawer?

How do you imagine things that that are hypothetical, like what would my living room look like if the couch was on the other side, or what would the smalllecule look like if I rotated in three dimensions? How do we allocate attention across the visual field? How how does your airport screener look for the hidden weapon in those false colored X ray images and so on, or not find them? So we have learned indeed, so that is

a problem in visual cognition. It's not vision in the sense of seeing color and motion and uh and sharp detail, but it's the next step up in the brain, namely, how do you how does the visual world um interact with what you know, what you see, what you think about. So that raises an interesting question. How much of what the average person perceives as a three hundred and sixty d Greek construct of the universe around them, how much of that is accurate and how much of that is

the brain filling in projecting. I don't want to say fabricating, but filling in the blind spots and blank spaces is what we see actually there or maybe not so much. Well, when when we're not hallucinating and we're looking at something, then we can we can see things vertically, and we do it much better than any robot or artificial intelligence system. That's why it's taken Google so long to develop a self driving car. They're trying to bring it to the

and exceed the level of a human visual system. On the other hand, there is an illusion that we have a wall to wall tableau of visual detail. Uh. And that is constructed by the brain because even if you if you hold your hand out maybe eight inches from the where you're looking, you can't even count the fingers your vision. The acuity of your vision falls off really dramatically,

but your eyes are constantly flitting around UH. And so your brain constructs an illusion of a continuously detailed visual world. But outside the phobia, the spot that you're actually looking at, vision is surprisingly course, and we rely on expectations and memories. I could picture hundreds of listeners holding their arms out and saying, you know, I can't count how many fingers I have, And it doesn't have to be in the in your peripheral vision. It just has to be a

few inches away from the direction of your gaze. So, and people talk about tunnel vision or hyper focus. Really that's the normal state of there's a sense in which we all have tunnel vision. We don't realize it because our eyeballs move around so quickly. And then psycho linguistics, that was the second half of your question. That's another topic in cognitive science, and that is the psychology of language. How do we understand speech, how do we produce speech,

how do children learn their mother tongue? Where does language come from, who decides what the rules are, how does it change over time? How do we read? All of those are topics in psycho linguistics, the psychology of language. So, I don't remember which book it was. It might have been the Stuff of Thought, or it might have been

um How the mind works. You talked about how words sometimes are aunt amount of poetic, and it just made me think of the mel Brooks call Rehner routine the two thousand year Old Man, where they discuss how egg and shower are automoto poetic and I won't spoil it.

People should go find it on YouTube. It's hilarious. But how much of actual language is because things sound like the way they are a bit uh, and so it's not a complete coincidence that, say, the word malefluous solus and the word cantankerous reminds you of a person with a lot of sharp edges. On the other hand, that only goes so far, because if you could really predict what a word meant by what it sounded like, then you wouldn't have to go through the laborious process of

learning another second language. All the words would would be the meetings would be obvious. So most of the language is arbitrary, but there is a little bit of correlation between sound and meaning. So I just got back from Europe, and I know most of what you've worked on has come out of the English language. But why is it that when a non speaker of let's say, French or Italian listens, it sounds so melodic, or if you listen to German it sounds so harsh and guttural. What is

it about those languages that give those things that that sensation. Well, it's a component of language called phonology, the the the sound pattern of the language, and that includes the set of vowels and consonants that you're allowed to use. We don't have in English, but you have it in Hebrew and in uh German. Uh. It also includes the melody

and rhythm of speech, what's called prosody. Prosody, yes, so that that's kind of the aspect of language that you can hear behind a closed door, and you can often recognize a language just from its prosody. I'm Barry RIDHLTZ. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Professor Stephen pinker Uh. He teaches at Harvard in the Psychology Department, studying cognition and psycholinguistics.

One of your more recent books was called The Bitter Angels of Our Nature, How violence has declines, And when you see the data on this, it's pretty it's pretty astonishing. In the pres reference to Better Angels, you say the present day we are blessed by an unprecedented level of peaceful coexistence, but that seems to be contradicted by the news headlines we see every day. How do you reconcile the two because you can't get an accurate picture of

the world by looking at the headlines. The headlines are about things that happen, they're not about things that don't happen. And as long as the rate of violence hasn't fallen to zero, they're always going to be enough violent incidents to fill the news. And we can lose sight of the vast amounts of the world that that are at peace. Currently. The there's a there is a zone of war that stretches pretty much from Nigeria through um Sub Saharan Africa,

into the Middle East and then down into Pakistan. But five six of the world is at peace. And areas of the world that had were torn by war for centuries haven't had a war in in decades. Western Europe one of the most historically violent part so the world, hasn't had a war in in seventy years. Southeast Asia, those of us who grew up remembering the war in Vietnam, Yes, and and there has not been a war in Southeast Asia and since a small skirmish between China and Vietnam

in the late eighties. Uh then, and it isn't just war, it's also one on one crime, which actually kills more people than wars in most years, other than in world wars. But the rate of crime has gone down. Everyone knows that it's gone down in the United States, but it seems to have gone down globally as well, especially if you look at even earlier periods in the history the Middle Ages, the rate of homicide was about thirty five

times what it is today. So there was that wasn't even more dramatic decline, and it's homicides that killed the majority of people. So you mentioned the Middle Ages in the book you described the six major historical clients of violence. Let's skip ahead too. I think it was the third or fourth decline, which was the the invention of the printing press and the spread of literal Why is that

someonepactful on reducing violence. Well, it's a conjecture. The the phenomenon we're trying to explain is why there was a cascade of humanitarian reforms around the time of the European Enlightenment the second half of the eighteenth century. Also, of course the time of the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, which was a kind of product of the Enlightenment. Why why did people wake up in the eighteenth century and say, well, maybe we should stop burning heretics,

or maybe we should stop executing people for stealing a cabbage. Uh, maybe slavery isn't such a great idea when you come down and try to justify it. Maybe we should stop watching animals tear each other apart for entertainment. Maybe we

should stop throwing debtors in in prison. So all of these reforms concentrated in a in a few decades, and we have to ask why, then, why did it take people millennia to figure out that might be something a wee bit wrong with slavery, and so one the first hypothesis is, well, maybe people got richer, and uh, if your life is more pleasant, then you value life more generally,

and so you value the lives of others. But the timing doesn't work because people only started to get rich other than the kings and aristocrats in the nineteenth century, and these reforms were really products of the eighteenth century. So I suggested that maybe it's the rise of literacy and printing in the exchange of ideas, and that was the only technology that showed an increase in productivity prior to the Industrial Revolution. The cost of printing a book

plunged in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. There was kind of an early version of Moore's law if you look at the cost of producing a book. More and more people were reading. They were best sellers. There were novels. They're also pamphlets in the first newspapers. So the world got more connected. People could exchange ideas, bad ideas could

be criticized. People would get together in also in cities, in uh coffee houses and pubs and saloons to exchange ideas, and it's possible that first of all, that could increase your your circle of empathy. It's harder to dehumanize people when you read their words, when you see what life was like from their point of view. And also when you have ideas being brought together and people debating them and arguing them over them, then bad ideas tend to

be filtered out. So the idea that the reason that there was a crop failure is because of witchcraft, for example, the reason that there was an epidemic is because the Jews poisoned the wells. Slavery is a good thing because Africans can't do anything but be slaves. All of these toxic ideas could start to seem ridiculous when you know more about the world, and that was conceivably accelerated by

the exchange of printed matter. So education helps reduce violence by making people less likely to believe silliness and nonsense and more likely to understand basic science and the logic of This causes that not witchcraft on average over the long run, not in every case, because there have been toxic ideas that have been advanced by intellectuals. Uh Communism, for example, responsible for massive numbers of deaths, was an intellectual movement, and Nazism there were plenty of Nazi professors.

But I think that when you have freedom of speech, freedom of expression, so you don't get thrown in jail by criticizing a bad idea, then it's more likely that the bad ideas will be exposed. And it's not a coincidence that repressive regimes are also repressive in um clapping down on free speech. So we've seen a huge decrease in crime and violence in the United States over the past thirty years. Some people have attributed it to things

like the ending of lead paper and apartments. Other people have looked at the removal of various outlives to gasoline taking the lead out of gasoline. UH. The guys from Freakonomics even have gone so far as to suggest Roe v. Wade is a factor. Why the huge fall off just in the most recent few decades. Yes, so, starting there was an eight year decline of violent crime in the United States, which brought it down to almost half of its peak UH. And then surprisingly around O seven oh eight,

there was a second decline which no one predicted. Everyone said, well, we have great recession, unemployment, crime is going to go up, in equality UH and and crime went down instead of going up. H. The honest answer is, no one really knows what all the causes were. Probably the cute theories like lead in the gasoline abortion are are wrong um the AUH. And it may be that a number of

things went right around the same time. Among them were an increase in the number of police in a change in police tactics of policing got smarter nationwide, The homicide rate absolutely plunged. In rates of other types of crime like rape and assault and UH and robbery also went down. And then there are also changes that no one really can completely explain in the culture because there you also had a decline in teenage pregnancy, decline in insurance fraud,

a decline in drug use. So somehow people got a little bit more civilized starting in the nineties on top of these other changes. So last question. You've noted that the economic benefits of affluence, really a post nineteenth century phenomena, did not have a big impact on on violent crime. Well,

what why do you imagine that is? Well, it didn't have an impact on institutionalized violence, on slavery, on grizzly torture as a form of criminal punishment like breaking on the wheel and burning on this, on the stake um, on hundreds of capital crimes on the lawbooks, so it's really meaning crimes that there was a death penalty for but did not involve homicide exactly. That's right, criticizing the

Royal garden being in the company. Listen, I understand some of these other things, but if you're going to criticize the royal that's it. That's amazing that a capital It is amazing. England had four capital crimes on the books and the prior to the nineteenth century, So the affluence didn't didn't institution I think affluence does affect certain kinds

of violence. So, for example, countries that are at the rock bottom end of the poverty scale and make less than less than fift dollars GDP per capita are much more likely to have civil wars, although once you climb above that level then there isn't a clear relationship between civil war and affluence. But certainly rock bottom poverty is a contributor to civil war um in general, but not not always. It's the poorer sectors of psycho of society

that are more crime prone. So there is there is some relationship, but it's not a not a perfect relationship. I'm Barry rit Halt. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Professor Stephen Pinker. He is professor of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard, author of numerous books, winner of numerous awards. His most recent book is Sense of Style. And let's talk a little bit about the way people communicate today with the

written word. What's the impact of the digital realm on writing? I don't think there's a simple answer to that, because there isn't one thing called writing. And when people it's a question, I get a lot. Well, now that people are writing a hundred forty characters for Twitter and instant messages and emails, isn't the language going to deteriorate? And the answer is no, because we don't just write in tweets or in instant messages. We all command of variety

of styles for different formats. We don't speak the same way when giving a lecture as we do um speaking to our family across the dinner table. Uh. Text message is going to be different from a funeral ooration. And so just looking at one kind of writing and saying well, that's what's going to happen to the language in general just isn't valid because we tailor our our language to

the medium. What about technologies like power point and the tendency for people to try and communicate by numbered bullet points. There there's good power point, there's bad power point. Uh. In science of scientific presentations are done in power point. Um. Science has not shut down or or even slow down. It's, if anything, accelerating, and power Point by mixing text and images can be and video and audio can be remarkably powerful.

We've all sat through horrific power point presentations where just binalities are are broken up into bullets. Uh so, but it's like it's like writing and saying, like, what does what does print do to the language? Well, there's there's a lot of drivell that people write down, and there's a lot of brilliance that people write down, but they met PowerPoint medium opens up huge possibilities. Sturgeon's law applies

to everything. In other words, exactly. Um So, so let's talk a little bit about how vocabulary and grammar of English have changed, what drives these changes, and how much has the English language changed just over the past century. Uh, it hasn't changed so much that you can't understand uh writing that was set down a hundred years ago. You know, if you have a look at a copy of the New York Times from and we can understand pretty much all of it. But it feels different. The style was

more formal. There's been an informalization of style that might parallel the informalization of everything else. The fact that gentlemen don't wear ties everywhere, and that women don't wear white gloves, us, the fact that we refer to each other on a first name basis instead of Mr. And Mrs So and so all the time, and writing has gotten more casual as society has gotten more democratic, or at least the look and feel is more democratized. Uh, And vocabulary definitely

turns over. If you look at an episode of contemporary show that was set in the past, like Downton Abbey, linguists of often had a field day at flagging all of the idioms and figures of speech that just didn't exist in the nineteen teens that the writers, UH kind of anachronistically put in. There's all there's a lot of turnover. A lot of it is. It is kind of random.

There's drift in and out. People an old saying will will just sound fusty and old fashioned, and younger people stop using it, and they'll introduce new figures of speech. And so there's a constant turnover, which is why if you go back more than a hundred years, so you go back to Shakespeare, it's not often not that easy to understand what the references were because the vocabulary is obsolete. One of the things you you wrote in the book that I thought was quite interesting, many of the alleged

rules of writing are actually superstitions. Explain what that means. So many of us have been under the impression that you wouldn't ought not to split an infinitive. So instead of saying um, as Captain Cricket did, too boldly go where no man has gone before, you should say to go boldly where no man has gone before. That's a perfect example of a superstition. There's absolutely no reason to

avoid a split infinitive. The whole rule came from a kind of thick witted analogy to Latin, where you can't split an infinitive. But there's abolutely no reason to avoid spending with the proposition. Exactly so Shakespeare wrote, we are such stuff as dreams are made on. You're gonna go tell Shakespeare that he made a grammatical error. Absolutely not. I'm Barry rid Helts. You're listening to Man Sessters in

Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Professor Stephen pinker Uh, professor of psychology and linguistics at Harvard University. Let's jump into some of the really fascinating things that you have written about. There's there's one that really struck me. Let's go start right off on the wonky linguistical things. What's the difference between common knowledge and shared knowledge? Because they seem so similar. Yeah. Shared knowledge is when you

know something and I know something. Common knowledge is a term from game theory and logic is when I know something, you know something. I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know that you know that I know it, at infinitum, and that makes a difference. It makes a difference in um logically, there's certain things that you can deduce if something is commonly known that as you know that I know that you know it, and it makes

a difference. I think in our everyday lives when we have an expression like the emperor's new clothes, what are we referring to? And the little boy said, the emperor is naked. He wasn't telling anyone anything that they didn't already know. They could see the emperor was naked. So

why did it? Why was it such a big deal? Well, at that moment, everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the emperor was naked, and that allowed them to challenge the emperor's authority by breaking out into laughter. But before the little boy said that, people didn't realize that they had a shared knowledge of his there was could there could be a you know, a little scintilla of doubt. You know, I can see it, but how do I know that

everyone else can see it? And how do I know that they know that that I know? And that makes it by it makes a difference in technology, especially for uh what they call network externalities, That is when the advantage of a technology depends on everyone else using it, and so to generate a next network externality, you need to generate common knowledge. And the best example is from Michael Choa is when Apple introduced the Macintosh back I

think it was the most expensive commercial ever made. They introduced it and the Super Bowl played once directed by Ridley Scott, exactly the famous commercial. Now, the thing is, no matter how good a computer Macintosh is, no one is going to buy it if they think that they're the only one buying it, because there won't be enough software, there won't be enough peripherals. You have to know two things. You have to know. Number one, it's a good computer.

Number two, everyone knows that. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that it's a good computer. And that's why you had to introduce it with a um with something that made a splash that you knew when you were watching the super Bowl that the whole country is watching the super Bowl, and so you knew that this product was going to be its advantages were going to be common knowledge as opposed to share knowledge. So so it's more than just the network effects like a fax machine or what have you.

It's the network effect plus everybody recognizing that this is now. Well, that's how you create the network effects. You have to generate common knowledge. And the easiest way to generate common knowledge is if there's an event that everyone can witness while knowing that everyone else's witnessing the super bowls. That's why the ads in the super Bowl get almost as much coverage of the super Bowl itself, because that's where companies that introduce a product that depends on a network

effect will introduce the company. Monster dot com is another example. Might be a great employment site, but who's going to go there unless they think that employers are advertising jobs and vice versa. Who's going to advertise there unless you know that people are going to be looking for jobs, And so you make a big splash on a super Bowl at Let let me continue along u surprisingly interesting things. Why do we have facial expressions and what functions do

they serve. Yeah, it's not just too you might say it wouldn't it be best to keep a poker face

and not to know, not to show your cards. Uh. Facial expressions can um can signal the credibility of a threat or a promise, and in a study that I did with Ian Reid and Peter de Sholey, we found that threats are more credible when they're delivered with an angry expression and tone of voice, because they are involuntary unless you're a really really good actor, unless they're perceived as real as sincere, because they are sincere in most cases.

So people aren't that good at controlling their facial expressions. So we've seen I've read about other studies where they look at people smiling and apparently an actual smile involves the eyes, and a fake smile just involves the mouth, and on a subconscious level, people can see and and tell the difference. Is am I telling that right? Or

absolutely sure? When the you know, when the flight attendant says bye bye, bye bye with the grin pasted on her face, you know that she's not actually experiencing joy. And it's usually because the sincere smile as along with a crinkling of the eyes, not just the mouth in a U shape. So this combines both the visual cognition and the uh the language aspect of this as well,

doesn't it. Indeed, And talking to speaking of common knowledge, which we discussed earlier in the program, why do people blush? That's a puzzle that I've thought about, and I think that which is unlike other facial expressions, which are conveyed by contracting muscles, with blushing, You've got this rush of blood to the face. And I think it's because it's um. It generates common knowledge. That is when the thing about

blushing is you uh. When you blush, you feel it from the inside and you display it from the on the outside, and you know that everyone knows that you're blushing. And in fact, when someone says you're a blushing that makes it all the worst. You blush all the more beat red. So with the genuine and sincere and both parties understand what it means exactly, it's I I messed up, and I know that I messed up. And I'm not trying to pull anything over on you. I'm not not

a psychopath. I'm not a cheater. I have the same standards that you did, and I know that I messed up, which is a way of knowing that the person is less likely to mess up in the future if at least he recognizes that he messed up. So blushing embarrassment isn't acknowledgement of common ethical standards? Is that? Is that

how common morality? Am I mistating that? That's right, common norms, that's right, But in particular the common knowledge, in that technical sense of if I'm blushing, then not, I know that you know that I know that I've messed up, and that means that I, by blushing, I'm acknowledging that I'm playing by the same rules. So I mentioned morality

and ethics. One of the columns you had written, I think it was for The Times talked about three people, Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, and Norman Borlog And if you were to ask various people, who's the most admirable of these three people, who is the most um has had the greatest impact on on humans? Most most people get the answers to that wrong. Yes, I mean the common answer as well. You know Mother Teresa, she said, you

know a saint. She is the most. In fact, if you ask someone who is the most moral person of the entry, they would say, oh, I guess Mother Teresa. And I think, what exactly did she do? I mean, you know, she washed the feet of some you know, lepers and brought them well help them. I mean, how did she actually make them less poor? Temporarily for a

meal or two? But for a meal or two. But then you look at um Bill Gates, and I used the example at a time before he became famous as a philanthropist and was just starting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Um, he's trying to conquer infectious disease in the developing world with a the chance of improving the lives of tens of millions of people, of saving tens of millions of lives. Then Norman borlog I threw in, because that's a fascinating so I never heard of him.

He won the Nobel Peace Price for uh inventing the Green Revolution in the nineteen sixties, developing crops and methods of farming that multiplied the amount of food that an acre of land would deliver. He's credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone in history, and no one's heard of him he wins, and yet is totally unknown. So what it shows is that our sense that our own ascription of morality, who we revere, who we don't

care about, who we even maybe even revile. By the way, the other reason I chose Bill Gates was at the time that he was associated with ms DOS and windows everyone hated and so everyone hated him. He got up someone through a pianist face. There were I Hate Gates websites at the time. Uh. It so our our description of morality, who we give brownie points to is very loosely related to how much good they do in the world. And uh, it's actually a quirk of our own nature

of who we admire. I think it relates to who we would like to have on our side and our foxhole part of our community, and it isn't really closely related to how much good they do in the world. So, if people want to find line more of your writings online in addition to all your various books, where's the best place to send them? Stephen Pinker dot com is my website that has links to all of my articles, as well as two pages for each one of my books.

If you enjoy this conversation. Be sure and stick around and listen to our podcast extras, where we keep the tape rolling and continue to chat about all things cognitive and linguistic. Be sure and check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter at rit Halts. I'm Barry rit Halts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Are you looking to take your business to the next level? The accounting, tax

and advisory professionals from cone Resnick can guide you. Cone Resnick delivers industry expertise and forward thinking perspective that can help turn business possibilities into business opportunities. Look ahead, gain insight, imagine more. Is your business ready to break through? Learn more at cone Resnick dot com slash Breakthrough, cone Reisneck Accounting Text Advisory. Welcome to the podcast, Steve, I don't want to call you Professor Panker. Steve, what Steve? Thank

you so much for doing this. This is really I love this stuff. I find it endlessly fascinating and anytime I can weave cognition into what investors should be looking at, thinking about, and just stimulating their thought process to develop better mental models and better processes to approach this stuff. I think it's just fascinating, and it's your work is so diverse that you're obviously fascinated by so much of this. It's apparent and everything I read of yours absolutely and

thank you for having me on. Well, it's been it's been my pleasure. There are some questions we didn't get to before I do my standard questions, but some of these I just have to come back to. So in the ninet fifties, comic books were going to turn juveniles into delinquents. And what happened subsequent to that, Yeah, the nineties were was a decade of very low crime, and then the nines same thing. Video games We're going to cause people to become ultra violent, especially the first person

shooter games. It's easy to imagine how that might happen, but it didn't happen. That was the era in which crime plummeted, and then in general, television, transistor radio's rock and roll music videos were decades where people were supposed to get stupid. That's right, and actually i Q scores have been increasing for decades, the so called Flynn effect. Well, crime did go up in the nineteen sixties and it stayed high from the sixties through the early nineties, so

not all of so. So the people who said that when rock and roll was coming in that they would lead to a breakdown of order and safety weren't completely wrong, and that there was a crime shot up by a factor of more than two. So it was rock and roll. It wasn't an ill considered war in Southeast Asia. It

was music. Well it wasn't rock and roll. But but although it wasn't, the war in Asia probably didn't lead to a rise in street crime in uh in the United States either, but it did lead to So what what I remember New York City in the seventies was a disaster. What led to a breakdown in those basic societal norms of not robbing and killing and raping? How does that go off the rails? Again, the the honest answers that we don't know for sure, but a number

of things happened. The baby boomer generation reached its crime prone years in the sixties. That wasn't enough to explain it, that would explain why violent crime would increase by violent crime in fact increase, But it may be that having a whole generation coming of age at the same time overwhelmed societies defenses, and it was a time in which there was a civil unrest, change in rights. There was a whole bunch of a whole bunch of things, and a general you know, we we grew up uh in it.

There was a decline respect for authority. The police backed off. There is some truth to the the explanation that the criminal justice system was less likely to put people behind bars? What about the broken window thesis? To any of that, there there is evidence that that that the broken windows effect is real. That is, if a neighborhood shows signs of disrepair, the famous broken windows, graffiti, turnstile jumping, and so on, then that conveys the message that that this

is a place where the rules are not enforced. And there's some experiments that show that increasing the general appearance of order leads to a decrease in in the rate of crime. It doesn't deserve all the credit, but it may be deserved part of it. I find that I find that fascinating. Let me see what else I skipped through. Oh, let's talk about the long piece. When we were talking about from Better Angels, the various six phases of um decrease in violence. What what exactly is the long piece

and what was the cause of it? Long piece refers to the fact that war between great powers that the eight pound guerrillas of the world um has kind of stopped. The last one that we had was in nineteen fifty three with the end of the Korean War, with the United States on one side in China on the other. Was that really a US versus China though, I mean, I know there were a lot of proxies, but it wasn't like World War Two where Germany and Russia and

US and Japan were literally doing battles with each other. Well, there was a coalition that the United Nations authorized, with of course the United States contributing the most troops and weaponry, and of course the North Korea had its own army, but supported by overtly by China and with the USS

are definitely helping, although not sending troops. But through most of history the great powers were always at each other's throats, and then after World War Two that that kind of um went out of style, as did wars between developed states, that is, rich countries. We we think of war is something that takes place in the poor, backward parts of

the world. But it used to be that it was the rich countries that were constantly at war, and that has gone out of style, and wars between countries in general. Most wars now are civil wars, wars between interstate war as opposed to interstate war, and UM. A number of things. One is that the world has become more globalized. When you when there's more trade, there is less of an incentive to go to war. You don't. You don't kill your customers because your supply chain or your supply chain exactly,

you don't. It's cheaper to buy things than to steal them than you don't. Uh, You're you're less likely to plunder and invade. There's been with the United Nations, there has been a norm that borders are pretty much grandfathered in, So you don't push borders around by force. You don't swallow states that states are are now considered to be immortal. They can break apart, but they can't be swallowed by

their neighbors. Uh. There is more democracy, and on average, democracies are a little bit less likely to wage war, at least on each other. And I think there's more of a respect for human life. The idea that you should die for your country, that it's glorious and sweet and the best thing that you could do. And conversely, that leaders can sacrifice millions of their own young men for the glory of the empire is uh less an

operation now than it used to be. So before I get to my favorite questions, I would be remiss if I didn't ask about the debate over gene editing. If people not familiar with Crisper. There's been a huge number of articles, most recently in Wired magazine, describing how this has made what was once time consuming, complex and expensive,

very inexpensive and relatively easy to do. What is the advances in biotech say about current morality and why are some people on one side or the other of that debate? There's there's a widespread fear that first popped up when Dolly the Sheep was cloned in and it's been revived now with the development of Crisper Cassinine making it easy to edit genes that will be designing our own children

very soon. We'll we'll put in the gene for musical ability, or athletic ability or high i Q. I think that's very likely, unlikely. I think it is possible. That you could edit out disease genes. But having looked at the genetic basis of personality and intelligence, I can tell you that there ain't no i Q gene. There are. There may be a thousand genes, each one of which raises or lowers your i Q by a tenth of a point, but the single gene that's going to give you musical

talent or athletic ability just doesn't exist. That's just not the way genes work. There is a genetic basis to talent and personality, but seems to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of genes, each with a tiny effect, many of which may have side effects. That is, there may be a gene that increases your um likelihood of being smart, but also slightly increases your rate of having bipolar disorder

or of some kind of degenerative disease. So I don't see parents taking the chance with their children at any time soon of mucking around with the with the embryo by putting in a few genes, each of which might increase the i Q by a tiny fraction of a point, but might also introduce some some risks. So I'm glad I brought that up because us. I've read some of the pieces you've written on that and thought it was interesting.

Let me get to my I know I only have you for another ten minutes or so, so let me get to some of my favorite questions I asked all my guests. So your background is really kind of interesting. Did you know you always wanted to be a professor? Did you always want to go into teaching? I certainly enjoyed teaching from the time I was in uh in college. I put myself through college by tutoring high school students

in math and science. Uh For a while, I thought, you, maybe I'd would be fun to be a high school math teacher, but I UH my mother, among others, convinced me that university was really a place for me. That adding to knowledge as well as transmitting knowledge was seemed to be what I enjoyed doing. Nicely done, rose Um.

Next question, early mentors. Who were some of the people who uh um entered you and gave you intellectual direction As an undergraduate, I was a student at McGill University and was in the psychology department there, and I worked in a lab of a cognitive psychologist named Albert Bregman. Who studied auditory pattern perception, how we the brain makes

sense of the world of sound. In university, one of my advisors was Roger Brown, the great social psychologist and founder of the study of child language acquisition in children and a gifted writer, and I think I took lessons from him on writing how to try to write stylishly. Stephen Kostlin was my mentor in visual cognition. He's now the academic dean of Minerva University, a startup university based

in San Francisco. Interesting is interesting group, and it seems, um, you took something from each of those folks and took one more is a Joan Bresnan, who is a linguist at m I T. At the time she was a student of Noam Chomskys. She was my post doctoral advisor. Ah, there you go. That that's quite a quite a list. You referenced Chomsky quite frequently in many of the books, obviously, Um,

he is a leader in this field. Uh. My next question is what are some of your favorite books, whether it relates to UH language and and linguistics or or anything else. Noam Chomsky was my colleague a M I T for twenty one years. And he was in a different department, but he was certainly an influence from the time that I was an undergraduate, particularly his books in in linguistics. Language in Mind was a book that I

read as an undergraduate. I don't certainly don't share his politics, but uh and I nor do I subscribe to his particular theory of how language works. But he broke open the field of language and really deserves credit for the modern understanding of language. Any other books stand out as whether it's fiction non fixed in related Uh, Well, I'm married to a novelist, Rebecca Goldstein, and her book The Mind Body Problem I read many years before I met her.

They really remember that old ad? The guy Victor Kayam and got a Shavery said, I liked it, so what the company bought the company? Well, I liked the novelists so much that I married her. That that's very very funny. Um, So, since you really started in psycholinguistics and and visual cognition, what are some of the major changes that have taken place in that industry or that field of study? I

should really call it, certainly the rise of neuroimaging. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was revolutionized the field, being able to see what part of the brain lights up in response to different stimulus, different processes. Is that is that specifically what you're referring to exactly, yeah, and that that has been the single biggest change, And how does that manifest this often in the study of language, well, you can see how words are processed in the brain. UM. You

can see how um grammatical processing is implemented. That is, by and again by grammatical processing, I don't mean rules like avoiding dangling participles. I mean just ordering words in a way that makes sense what we do every time we open our mouths and produce a sentence. And you can see also the pattern of information flow from one part of the brain to another, because it's not as if one blob of the brain is responsible for all

the language there is. You have to coordinate your understanding of what words mean, your knowledge of in English syntax, the control of the muscles of your tongue. UH. In conversation, you go back and forth between speaking and listening, So it also involves hooking up uh speech information coming in from the ear. UH. You have to hold things in memory as you start a sentence. You have to know

where you're going. So, a lot of different part of the brain are involved in language, forming a kind of network, and narrow imaging helps you see the different parts of the the network and how they interact. I recall reading about aphasiacs and other damages to physical damages to the brain. How important is looking at damage, physical trauma and disease too learning about language. Is that something that we did decades ago and figured out, oh, this injury causes this result.

Have we moved beyond that or is that still a key part of recognizing how these brain components developed. It still is a key part. It used to be the only way that you could understand language in the brain.

Um Now it's still important even in the era of neuro imaging, because your imaging tells you what is active when you are engaged in a task, but it doesn't tell you what's necessary for all you know, it could be like the lights that flash on a on a computer, that you turn off the lights, the computer still does

its thing. It's kind of a spell low for effect, and you never know just from the fact that blood is going to a particular area of the brain whether actually at part of the brain is necessary for the person to do what they're doing. With brain damage, you're removing a component and or nature is removing a component, and you're seeing what they can no longer do. So it's still a supplementary form of information and an important one. So you work with a lot of college kids, people

who are just starting out their career. When a millennial or recent graduate comes to you and says, I'm thinking about a career in linguistics and visual cognition and in any of the subsectors of psychology that you focus on,

what sort of advice do you give them? If you're if you're passionate about something, and if you're if you can see yourself throwing yourself into it, doing a lot of work, then you should pursue it as a career, even if the academic jug market is discouraging, which of course it is um it has been at various times, such as when I was a student, and I remember, I remember the advice that I got from Ronald Melzack, a professor of psychology at McGill, pioneer in the study

of pain. He said, look at the bright side. People die, people, people retire, people get higher paying jobs. In industry. There's always turnover, even if the market is contracting, if you think you're good at it, if you're willing to to dedicate yourself to it, if it excites you enough that it doesn't feel like work but it feels like play,

there will always be openings. And so I tell students, if they're really passionate about some intellectual topic, not to just automatically go into law or finance or consulting because that's the easy path, but that it really is still possible to make a career in what you what you love. And our our last question is what is it that you know about cognition and linguistics today that you wish

you knew when you started thirty years ago? Oh? Well that UM, I think that any cognitive or psychological trait both has a heritable basis but is distributed over hundreds or thousands of genes. That there is not going to be a gene for x UM, That that there's a lot of information that can come out of looking at

large data sets. That you're understanding of a subject is only as good as the data that you can examine, and that to understand something you've got to um look at as large a set of data as you can find Professor Panker, thank you so much for being so generous with your time that this has been just absolutely fascinating. If you enjoy this conversation UH, and others like this, be sure and look up an inch or down an inch at any of the other ninety two or so

such conversations we've had over the past two years. Be sure to check out my daily column. It used to be Bloomberg View dot com, but I am now seeing that it is Bloomberg dot com. You can follow me on Twitter at rid Halts Um. I would be remiss if I did not think Uh, Taylor Riggs for being our booker, Charlie Volmer for being our producer engineer, and Michael Batnick, head of research. I'm Barry Ri Halts. You're listening or you've been listening to Masters in Business on

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