How to Think Like a Child

one Matthew eleven. At that time, Jesus explained, I give praise for you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learning, you have revealed them to the little ones. The little ones, little being the children. And then there's another one where he says, I tell you the truth. Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And I think there's

a little more there about needles and rich people. But needles and rich people, yeah, yeah, Like it's easier for a camel to go through the eyeban needle than for a rich man. And can all you know, lots of the you know, New testament wisdom that Jesus is spouting

and in this book. But these two passages in particular interesting because they both talk about the this childhood nature, this there's something special about children that enables them to see the world as it really is, to to see through the grown up bs and and get at the truth of the matter. And it's something you see, I mean throughout the human history. I mean you see it a lot in fiction Chronicles of Narnia, Susan becomes too sophisticated, well,

too grown up for Narnia, can't go there anymore. Puff the magic Dragon, as you remember a little Jackie Paper Paper reaches the point where you can't see Narnia the children and Stephen King's it you too. In order to defeat this evil clown shifting monster, you have to have this spirit of a child. Yeah. And my neighbor Totoro, the farest spirits, adorable as they are, he's got to be a child to see them. And and so then

there's of course this longstanding thing like that. There's the whole kids say that darned as things right, where like Bill Cosby show, wasn't it it was? Yeah? And I think it was. It was an older show even before Cosby took it over, but he's the one most remembered for it. But the idea being that you bring a kid on and you just let them talk, and they're you're just gonna drop truth bombs on you because they

don't know any better. Though, I found it interesting that Bill Cosby is also quoted as saying it's saying quote, a person with no children says, well, I just love children. And you say why, and they say, because the child is so truthful, and that's what I love about them. They tell the truth. And Cosby goes on to say, but that's a lie. I've got five of them and the only time they tell the truth is when they're having pain. Even that sometimes can be a lie, as

I have discovered. Yeah, you're you're a mom. What's your take on the the innocence and the truth bombs of children? The truth bombs? Um, Well, I mean I think everything is is new to them, right, so immediately kids see things an entirely different way because they're piecing together context and being able to see things, um from an entirely new perspective, as we know, is a completely liberating thing.

And there's a power to that, and we've talked about that before that as we age, we tend to let some of that uh slaw off of us, right, because we're so used to sort of establishing a pattern, going with that and then moving forward. But to paraphrase Picasso, he said he took his whole life to think like a child artistically to reach that place where he could once again delve into novel ideas or novel representations of the human experience. And in fact, I am looking at

Picasso right now because in our podcast Booth. I don't know if we've ever mentioned this before. I don't think you have not in the podcast. Uh well, we have a couple of photos in the podcast Booth, and the one that I get to stare at is Picasso in his underwear. So I think about this idea a lot, so that I don't think about Picasso in his underwear with a bat for a while. But then then someone moved it. Yeah I did. I covered up his private

parts in this one. They did. Um, But there is this I think he puts a you well that you know it takes a lot of effort to try to bust out of these constraints that we because we have to we placed in our lives, um, and to be able to think in a way that is completely mind blowing a new Yeah. I mean there is something about the creativity alone of a child. UM. I think I've

mentioned this before. There's a in Atlanta. There's a there's an improv company called Dad's Garage and they do if you go at night, you've often get a lot of very blue material from these improv actors. They're getting up there. They're blooming dirty dirty. Yeah, they're doing free association and it's and all sorts of outlandish things are coming up that I couldn't even mention on the podcast, but they

would all. They also do a show and I think they still do it called Uncle Grahampa's Hoodaily story Time. And in this show, it's the same improv actors, these same same guys and gals that are just really tearing

it up at night with ranching material. But now they're in the a m and they have they're performing to an audience of mostly children, but they're also doing improv and they're getting tips from the audience, so they'll they'll ask the kids in the audience, Hey, what should the name of this princess be and what should the story

that we tell be called? And uh, I've been to it a couple of times, and there it is always amazing because from these children, they're able to come up with the craziest ideas, like stuff that these these these experienced and highly creative improv actors would never be able to pull out. Like like I remember one when when they asked what should the princess be called, the little girl said that the princess name should be quote Batman

the Girl, which is incredible. You know, it's like that kind of like strange, free association that you're just not going to get from an adult. Well, yeah, I remember seeing this Ted talk and uh, I'll show this up

on Facebook or in a post. I don't remember the name of the Ted talk right now, but they were starting they were talking about accessing again this this childish thinking, and they were talking about um an arts program in which the kids were making different kinds of clay models, and one of the kids came up with Bacon Boy and it is so I've got to throw up an image of this. It is awesome, you know, sort of

a superpower figure. And again, these are not things that we as adults go around thinking like I'm going to sculpture Bacon Boy today and really start to think about this mythology of this character. But that's what kids do. And um, if you have ever taken a walk with a toddler anywhere from two to when they started to get preschool four five years of age, you know there

is no linear path. That this is going to take a long time because everything is going to be picked up and inspected and stories where will begin to just

organically arise from their experience with with their environments. And we have talked about this before, but I thought it would be good for us to mention that this is this idea that when we are adults, we have a focus that is that's pretty laser focused, this flashlight focus that kids starting as infants grow into that flashlight focus, but they begin at the lantern of light experience where everything, uh is it has light cast upon it and they're

considering everything in their world. Yeah. Like, one thing that comes to mind when I think about this is the the Alan Rogue Grulay novel Jealousy, where the entire book and this is not going to really sell it well from most people, but the entire book is this guy staring at a wall or occasionally staring at its has banana plantation and trying to figure out whether his wife is having an affair with another band of plantation owner.

And so a lot of it is him staring at at a sneer on the wall where he killed a centipede and just obsessing and obsessing, obsessing. It's that laser focus, you know, and that he's getting nothing done the whole novel because he's just obsessed with one thing. And I feel in his adults that we often do that it's not an actual smash centipede on the wall. Then it's something like, you know, some you know guy starts losing his hair, and then that's the thing they come back

to over and over again. Oh my goodness, what's happening to me? Am I I'm getting older. I'm dying. You know, we end up obsessing over something, or we get obsessed with with one particular material thing or another, or or we attached our ego to a sports team or something. Whereas how many how many child children do you know who are rabid sports fanatics, who are rabbid fans of a particular team, you know, how many reliduced fundamentalist children

do you know? How many neurotic children do you know where they're obsessed with? Uh, I don't know if their weight gain. Yeah, that's just not really something that you you commonly see until they get a little bit older, right, they get into grade school. The thing about this, and psychologist Alison Gothnick has talked about this, is that when you're an adult, you have, uh, you know, certain neural connections that have been pruned away because you don't use

them anymore. And so if you are that character in the book who is staring at the wall, well, you're gonna be squirting a lot of neuro transmitters on that part of the brain to really keep it activated in focus. But if you are an infant, your entire brain is just steeped in neuro transmitters. It's marinating in it. And this is what she says results in this information rich world, this lantern vision, trying to take every single thing in. Yeah.

She mentions in her in her writing that in the past it's been difficult for us to try and study exactly what's going on in the in the minds of young children, and certainly in the minds of of unlanguaged children and infants, and and even if you can get them to talk, it's going to be a stream of consciousness mumbo jumbo about I think her example is birthday parties and horses, obviously for for girls and for for

little boys. Birthday parties. Uh, fire trucks and boogers. You know, it's I mean to go across gender, across gender, fire trucks, but yeah, um so. So I found that interesting because a lot of her studies is about getting beyond that and really finding ways to not only look at what children and infants are saying, well certainly not infants so much, but what beyond what children are say, and also look at their actions and how they're interacting with the world

around them. And what she gets out a lot is the idea of this plasticity, which we've talked about before, the ability of our mind to change, the ability of ourselves to to to roll with the punches, because when you were a a zero to three year old, you have to really be able to roll with the punches.

And so even in even in a very comfy environment, if you grow up in a very civilized environment, a very safe environment, there's still a lot of a lot of trauma around you when you're that alert to the world, and certainly in in less advantageous environments, you've gotta be

really hardy to survive. Yeah, she alson. Gopnik actually has this great quote about what it's like to be an infant, and she said, and this is the kind of more romanticized version of it, as opposed to just you know, having to deal with all the noise and the different stimuli. She says, it's like being in love and perish for the first time after you've had three double espressos. Yeah, so there is this idea you are being bombarded by

all the different elements out there. She also mentions the study of Eastern European orphans who were adopted by parents in the UK and about how in in in most of the case it's not all but in most of those cases, and these were kids that were they're growing up in like extreme um situations of you know, they're just not exposed to enough sensory information, enough personal interaction.

They're starved for all of this. But they're so but the child is so resilient zero to three that most of them were able to just really bounce back without any kind of significant problems. And she says that this is because of this different consciousness that kids have that they grow out of again into the more flashlight focus. But she's saying, and this is this is kind of looping it back on how you can try to retain a bit of this for yourself as as an adult.

She's saying that the creative people are able to hold onto this different consciousness to be able to inhabit this mind space where you can transfer your consciousness from flashlight to lantern and began to take more things in all

while being a reasonably um responsible adult. Of course, one thing that comes to mind here, and so we're comparing adult artists with young children, one thing that instantly comes to mind here is children running around in the yard naked, and then artists inevitably running around in the yard naked, or like our friend Picasso here in the diaper um because it does kind of his head where it does look like a diaper, Because art, like childhood, is kind

of a judgment free zone. And as it turns out, that plays into this mind of a child, this creativity as well. Yeah, and in fact, in kids and teenagers frontal lobes the seat of judgment. Right, these are the last pieces to be fully connected to the brain, okay, or be fully connected to parts of the brain that deal with judgment, inhibition, self awareness, cause and effect, acknowledgement, um, all the things that are sort of the bane of

our existence with with teenagers that we normally look at us. Ah, man, they just they're crazy there, you know, look at their hair. What are they think? Yeah, yeah, they're just there's not a lick of sense. And that kid um, that actually can be a real boon two kids because they lack again this idea of this inner judgmental voice that can sometimes stop us in our tracks when we're trying to do something novel um. So again, trying to silence that

part of the brain is really important. And we have talked about this before, but surgeon and jazz musician Charles Limb wanted to look at this a little more carefully to say, how how are musicians so adept at just getting in there and improvising? What makes them able to

do that? And it turns out that musicians are really good at turning off the part of the brain again this uh dorsal lateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions, dimming that and instead bringing online the medial prefrontal cortex, which else them to express themselves better. And so the frontal lobes they dim a bit because they're like, yeah, you know what, I don't need you right now. I really need to kind of flex this part of my muscle.

So he saw that in all these m r I scans of these musicians, which really pointed to this idea that certain things are play. In fact, neuroscientists, Rex Jung also talks about how highly creative people usually have less white matter integrity and less brain tissue in the frontal lobes. Okay, that doesn't mean that they're you know, less intelligent or

that they lack something. It just means that the frontal lobes again the seat of judgment, Uh, it's not nearly as taxed with neural connections, these glial cells, white cells, and therefore those people are a bit more unencumbered when it comes to creating something new. All right, we are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we are going to talk about the importance of play in this idea of uncertainty in our lives. All right,

we're back. We're discussing again the minds of children. Uh, this old idea that children see the world as it really is, or they see it in in a unique way. And if we as adults can simply recapture some of that childhood essence, and I mean not in a drain essence from a child's skull in a like a skexy way, but in an actual let us let's change the way we perceive the world and how we interact with it too,

to improve our creative output. And and when I say creative, I'm not just talking about finger painting on the wall. But as we'll discussed here, actual scientific achievement as well falls under this category. Yeah, really engaging critical thinking skill. According to neuroscientists, Bolatto and he has that great Ted dot com talk, He says that uncertainty for adults is

really problematic. And this is particularly true in the context of evolution, where uncertainty, you know, not knowing if there's a saber tooth tiger in the weeds over there or if it's just the wind rustling through through the leaves, could result in death. For us, we need to be certain about certain elements of life Yeah. That's the thing about uncertainty is that, for the most part, most of us tend to want to get away from uncertainty because

uncertainty brings potential disaster. Uncertainty as you're walking down the street means maybe I'll get run over by a car, maybe I'll get mugged. Maybe again the saber through tiger will jump out at me. But it's out of that uncertainty that so many amazing creative ideas arise. And the way that we combat uncertainty, of course, is to sort of apply a script to the world, to cling to certain world views that that bring order out of chaos.

So look at any particular world view and it may and generally it's about positioning yourself, your group at the center, creating a barrier between this group and outside groups. I we think like this, They think like that. These are the rules of the environment in which I live. These are the people who don't abide by those rules. These are the rules that apply to me. We we steadily organized, We build a little fort of ideas in which we feel safe against the chaos of the world. And that's

that's certainty that we're talking about. That really helps us to predict how things will come out. But he's saying that for children, uncertainty is a game, and it is a necessary game because if you look at animals and humans, all species play in some way. And we've talked about this before, um in terms of the amount of time

it takes for a creature to mature. We've talked about the New Caledonian crow, which has a relatively long childhood as as a bird, and then we've talked about the say, just you know, your run of the Milk chicken, and the consensus there was that the New Caldonian crow really needed that time to mature because it's pretty sophisticated in terms of its tool use and where's the chicken so much doesn't need a lot of time to play to to have a long childhood. And as we said, one

ended up in in a pot. The other one, the New Caldonian Crow, ended up on the cover of Nature magazine because it does have these very sophisticated tool using abilities. So when you look at children and you get uncertainty, it really is necessary for kids to throw away the rules and to begin to like a scientist, approach their

environments and play with that environment. Yeah, it's easy to look at children and play and and just sort of discredited to say, oh, that's just children wasting time instead of doing chores, which they should be doing, or to look at it in terms of all right, well that's a that's a boy and he's playing with tools and beating stuff with hammers. He's just he's just kind of practicing for his life. Or oh, there's a little girl and she's playing with the baby doll. Well, that's just

her rehearsing. That's a little there's a kitten fighting another kitten. They're just rehearsing for their their lives. It's aggressive hunters, but there's a lot more going on speci Typically, as a bow Latto points out, play be it whatever the kittens doing, what the child is doing, or what an adult artists or scientists is engaging in, boils down to

five different things. First, celebrating uncertainty. It's not you're not entering the environment and saying saying, oh, there there might be something I'm unsure of outside of this fort of ideas. It's about venturing outside of that fort of ideas and seeing the world anew uh. It's about being acceptable to change, engaging in this in this world, beyond the fortress of ideas, and realizing that what you see may change you, It may change how you assemble your fortress of ideas when

you return to it. You have to be open to possibility, open to the possibility that you're gonna change, open to the possibility that your preconceived notions are going to fail. You need to be cooperative, certainly if you're venturing outside of that fortress of ideas with other individuals, and finally, intrinsically motivated, you're doing it because you want to You want to see beyond this fortress of ideas that you've

used to understand the world previously. Now, as um, you have probably witnessed before with kids that the rules can change pretty quick, right, They can throw them out or sometimes just completely change them. One second the floor's lava, then it's then it's a never ending pit, and then it's okay to walk on, which is great, right because it kind of gets very good narrative consistency. No, nobody

gives them a certain amount of flexibility. And you have mentioned like giving a girl a baby doll and giving a boy tools. Um, really, you give a kid a stick and they are going to turn it into something in which Tory, Yeah, to interrogate the world around them. And I see this again and again with my daughter making Pulley systems out of you know, um buckets, because the buckets are full of Pixie destin she needs to

skewer some pirate or something. Um. But I think it's really interestinging that Lotto looked at this play, this uncertainty, and then he sought out a group of children ages eight to ten because he wanted to know could they approach an experiment or could they create their own experiment? And could we actually get something on the other end

that we could use. Because again he's saying that those those five circumstances that you talked about, this openness, this um intrinsically motivated cooperation, and so on and so forth. He's saying that this is really the play of a scientist. This is what scientists do. Yeah. I mean again, it's easier to make the initial comparison to creative work because like I think, if like, if I'm writing a story

or something, I'm entering it with an uncertain mind. I don't know where characters are gonna end up, or what's going to happen in maybe one rule or two that you're trying to stay too, and those rules may they break by the time I finish it. I mean, I can't think of the number of times that I've I've started writing a story and when I end up getting is entirely different because I've because you've got to be

open to it to change. And then, certainly in science, when you start looking at these these five things from a scientist per spective, imagine if a scientist goes out to figure out why something in the world works the way it does, or something in the outer cosmos works the way it does. You're going to go in there with some preconceived notions, but you have to be able to to dispel them and ignore them. It need be for commisically and you have to celebrate uncertainty, it be

acceptable to change, open to possibility, cooperative, and intrinsically motivated. Well, a lot of wanted to see if these codes could see themselves differently through the process of being a scientist, because again, when you say let's let's do some science, that's pretty weighted because people approach it and thinking that science is something that is separate from them as opposed to well, it's actually science really plays to our strengths as human beings. Yeah, this this comes into sort of

the puff the magic dragon thing again. There's kind of this false idea that when you're a child, it's all interacting with imaginary creatures and engaging in this creativity. But then you learn to be a grown up and you learn science, and then you put all that crap behind you. But as as we're discussing here, being a scientist is as much about embracing that spirit of childhood as it

is about growing up and becoming more mature. So a lot of worked with twenty five children in conjunction with their headmaster, again ages eight to ten, and they studied black wotton bees to see if these bees, again this is something that kids came up with, could solve problems in a similar way that humans do. And the kids

asked the questions and they actually devised the experiments. Um. According to Biology Letters, which published the paper, the children's findings show that bees are able to alter their foraging behavior based on previously learned colors and pattern cues and a complex scene consisting of a local pattern within a

larger global pattern. This is pretty sophisticated for an insect um and then in Biology letters that says, as there has been little testing of bees learning color patterns at small and large scales, the results contribute considerably to our understanding of insect behavior. The kids managed to not only published a paper, which we'll talk a little bit more about how they did that, but to to get a

novel understanding of an insect. And what I love about this is that the paper actually begins with once upon a Time, which largely written in kids speak, but the methodology that they came up with, the observations, the hypothesis, all of this is so solid that they, you know, the people who actually ended up reviewing this and writing a commentary on this could not deny that they had

found something that was very valuable. Well, it reminds me of your daughter's interaction with the trial bide and how she granted she gave it, that she give it a name, called it Gonk, but then also created the story about how it was going down to the water and eating plants, if I remember correctly. So it wasn't living in a

fairy castle or anything. It was. She wasn't creating a a plausible story for that creature based on her knowledge of the world well and more importantly of her observations of the world, then she had a context for it, and she of course subscribed emotions to it and all this sort of stuff. But yeah, I mean, do you just give kids a couple of things and they will run with us? And UH and began to see the

logic inherent in there. I wanted to also point out that the paper that they came up with actually had hand drawn figures and tables in it as well. And if you check out that TED talk um by a lot of you'll also see a presentation by Amy O'Toole, who, at the time of a twelve year old student who helped run one of the science experiments that it was

inspired by Bolto science approach and UH. At the age of ten, she became one of the youngest people ever to publish a peer of viewed science paper, and she was also at the time the youngest person to give a TED talk or to help give a TED talk. Since you get the second half, but that was really motivating as well, because then it comes down to the idea that when you got these kids in the room, you got him thinking about science they were already asking

questions that were significant to science. Yeah, I mean this is pretty life changing for a lot of those kids, because again a lot of wanted to see how they would see themselves after going through a scientific process and you know, help them to gell this idea that science is again a part of them and not apart, not some sort of It's not something you learn, it's something you are from the earliest. If anything is we grow older more many of us we forget science rather than

have to learn it. Well, it just seems like something that we look through the window at, right. But Loto said this, and I thought it was really interesting. He said, the point is what science does for us. We normally walk through life responding, but if we ever want to do anything different, we have to step into uncertainty. That's what science offers us. It offers the possibility to step

into uncertainty through the process of play. Yeah. It reminds me of a quote badly enough by Timothy Leary who talked about before he gets his childlike was childlike. Yeah, I mean he was, you know, he was very free thinking dude. Um for some of the other faults aside, but he has this great quote where he says to think for yourself, you must question an authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open mindedness,

chaotic confused vulnerability to inform yourself tune in. Yeah, and of course the thing is, you know, you need to remind mrr Larry that ultimately don't need any pharmaceutical help to achieve that. In I mean, all you have to do is either be a child or try and think like a child, and you can achieve that that level

of of chaotic, confused vulnerability. Well, here's the thing about Larry is that he was a trained scientist, and so he had a background in the best ways to go about thinking critically but also thinking in a way that could really open up the mind. And when I think about ways in which you can look at probabilities and try to predict the future in a new way or

an interesting way, I think about Bayesian modeling. Yes. Now, this is UH something that is named after the Reverend Reverend Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth century mathematician, and according to Alice and Gopnik, studies show that kids at least unconsciously are Asian UH masters themselves. Now here's the thing about Beiesian logic is you can really get into the weeds

trying to understand what it is. Essentially, Baisian probability theory is a branch of mathematical theory that allows one to model uncertainty about the world and about the outcomes of various aspects of that world by combining common sense knowledge with observational evidence. Okay, it sounds very mechanical and straightforar this because it is. It's actually figures into some of our AI constructs that we're working on today. It's a central part of trying to figure out how an intelligent

creature thinks. Yeah, it was actually going to mention that Bayesian modeling actually came online in I think the early nineties, around the same time that psychologists were beginning to look at kids and wondering if this Baisian modeling was inherent to them. And it's funny because AI, artificial intelligence and kids really go hand in hand because people who are interested in AI are interested in looking at kids as

the root model. In other words, if we're going to build a computer that can think like us, act like us, make decisions, then we want it to be based on this root material. A k a. Kids. And you know, as we're moving forward to the future, we we inevitably come back to this idea of of robots solving problems, computers solving problems. We want to know the weather's doing in ten days through a computer model at it, right, And it's just gonna become more and more like that

as we move forward. So it's it's fascinating to think that the ais that we're building today to solve the problems of tomorrow, children are already born with that, with those mechanics in their mind. If they get older and they become adults, it becomes clouded. So in a way, adult humans are having to build robots that think like children so they can solve the problems that they no longer can. And one of the reasons that can because

of preconceived notions. And these again, these these fortresses of ideas that we build because whether you're looking at questions of I want who's gonna win the election, I wonder, I wonder what choice I should make in my life regarding my employment, uh, any number of questions that may

come up. We're we're handicapped against applying the Asian logic to them because we have these these world views in place, these preconceived notions, this fortress of ideas that we have to somehow navigate, and it could because of all those preconceived notions, they end up flowing the data. Yeah, it's true.

And um, you know, kids can really be better problem solvers when it comes to Bayesian logic, because, as you say, there are certain things that as we get older, we have these priors, they get stronger and stronger, and they actually need to in some ways to help us survive our experience in the world. But we're already relying on that too heavily and less on new data, right, so we rely more on our past experiences, and these strong

priors are really actually very comforting to us. But Bayesian inference inference, excuse me, it considers both uh, new evidence and prior probability of hypotheses, and this gives Baisian learning a character characteristic combination of stability and flexibility. So here's the key to it really working really well in science and with kids. In science. Uh, if if you have a really crappy hypothesis, you're gonna throw it out. Kids are going to do the same thing. They don't have

emotional investments or really strong priors. So this allows them to go through the information much better. Okay, so how do we know that kids are better at some reasoning when it comes to to be Asian modeling, um than adults? Is it because they say the darniest things? It is Alson Gopnik again, who is pretty much the centerpiece for

this podcast. She used something called a Blikic detector. This is a machine that lights up and plays music when certain objects which are controlled by the experiment or are placed on top of it, plays like a cube onto this little platform and lights up and it starts playing music. Right, you might have different shapes, you might have a star or a cube, or different colors, and so the idea is that you begin to understand the relationship of what

makes the machine work. Well, what she did is she asked both adults and children separately in separate experiments, to try to figure out these objects and how they would make the machine work. I mean, essentially, she was saying,

go make this machine work. Well, the kids were a lot better at it, because what what the adults did is they observed what the experiment or did with the blocks to make the machine work and there's a really strong priors, and so they were holding onto the this idea of what happened in the past, whereas the kids were able to take every single angle of the blocks the colors put together, you know, various points of data to figure out how to best make this blicket machine work.

Another example of this is give an iPad to a child and your grandparents and see who figures it out for Yeah, and in some not to say that's a complete divide, because you're gonna have some older people that really dive with new technology and again are really able to pass that booket test. Like my wife's grandmother in her nineties use the Kindle all the time, which is awesome. Do you think kindles in the beginning like an early

early adopter of that technology. Well, and see there's again there's this idea of holding on see this bit of your your childhood thinking or your childness, or this openness to new ideas and experiences and not saying up a machine for a bug, give me my old books, Just give me my paper, my paper, I just move with my finger. Yeah, yeah, you can do the same thing with kindle. Um, all right, So there's this idea. Another

pcassa quote that everything you can imagine is real. Now I would say that I would add this, you just have to make it fit into that bay Asian model. So anything you dream of could be real as long as you can make it fit into the constructs of our physical world. And that's where Okem's razor comes in. Yeah, all comes razor. Is this idea that basically the simplest answer is the one that is probably the most likely answer. Yeah,

Akams raisers. It's interesting because the term first appears around eighteen fifty, two centuries after the death of the guy's named after, who was a fourteenth century Franciscan friar by the name of William of Oakum. Uh. Really fascinating dude. Um. If you've ever read the Name of the rose By and Burn of Eco, the main character in that, who's

a Sherlock Holmes styled monk named William of Baskerville. He's always talking about his friendship and camaraderie with Oakum's way of thinking, because despite being a Franciscan friar, he was you could you imagine, all right, what he's gonna be a really religious dude. He's gonna see the world through religious goggles and to a certain extent you, as we've discussed in a recent podcast on witchcraft, that's gonna be

a part of the way you see the world. You just can't help with us the world you're born into. But Oakum was a realist, and what we call a nominalist. Nominalism is the theory that there are no universal soul, essences and reality. He argued that only individuals exist rather than super individual universals, essences, and forms. So to break that down in a really sustinct way, I turned to Catholic Encyclopedia of all places. They have a really nice

paragraph and we're just gonna read this. They say, exaggerated realism invents a world of reality, corresponding exactly to the attributes of the world of thought. Nominalism, on the contrary, models the concept on the external object, which it holds to be individual in particular. So it comes down to how are you gonna understand the world around you? Are you gonna start with the ideas about the world and work down to the world itself, or do you start

with the world and work out from there? And so that's that's a large part of Lum's Razer. Right there is is looking at this idea, this possible theory for what's happening, and then asking yourself which hypothesis conforms to the world that we observe and not the world that

we think exists. This is the basis of the scientific method, and so when we talk about science and scientists and play, this is really essentially we're talking about because in a way, this is a bit of a thought experiment, although with the thought experiment you're just trying to kind of throw everything out there. You're not really looking for for something

that's going to stick. But it's the same idea that you you try to figure out every hypothesis you can and then you call out the ones that don't make any sense or at least probable. Um. Now, this is really an awesome game to play with kids because it fuels their imagination, but it also gives them the tools to sort through all the data that they have and find a line of logic. And it's a particularly a nice game to play when they're at that age where

they're asking a bazilion questions about how the world works. Right, Yeah, like why is that? Why is the sky blue? Well, because it has to do with reflectional well, why is that the case? Then? Why is that the case? And and you can either give up like the lady I observed at a zoo once when the child asked, Mommy, why does the commode dragon? Why does he look like that? And she just responded because that's just the way God

made him, honey. Right there, there's a complete non answer, and not engaging with the child's curiosity about the world and instead saying, here's a big wall of the fortress of ideas, let me erect that in in the way of the horizon. Say I'm going to say that that parent probably had low blood sugar. So before you engage in augms phraser, make sure you eat something because you're gonna need that energy because kids will ask a million questions, as you say, and it can get a little bit like, oh,

you know, like after fifteen million questions. But you know, obviously, my daughter asked me a ton of questions every day about everything, and um, one of the things that I noticed was she's starting to enter into that territory where the unknown is frightening her. So she's really looking for answers, she's looking for comfort, Like the skeleton thing you mentioned. Yeah, she's she's very frightened of skeletons, even though we've talked

about how they're inside our bodies. Um, you know, they help us to walk, so on and so forth, a very practical things. She said, I don't care. I just don't want to see them outside of the skin, which is a reasonable request. What are you know what you're gonna say to that. Um, But one of the things that drives her nuts, or has in the past, is that we'll she'll hear things on the roof of our house. Well,

I know it's magnolia pods. There's just falling and they're huge and they're I mean, they do sound like someone's on the roof. Yeah, oh yeah, the squirrels. It's a racetrack actually on our house, particularly this time of year in the fall. But um, so if I hear allowed that, what I've done in the past is I've said, okay, you know, let's look out the window and see what's on the ground, and they will observe that there are

magnolia pods all over the yard. So then I can ask my daughter, and I've done this before, which is, hey, okay, what else do you think could be causing that noise. So now we're entering into this idea of blackham threachers, where we're going to gather as many hypotheses as possible, and so she's come up with before you know, again,

the skeleton is a skeleton. It's trying to come down the gym name get me um Or she has observed that there's construction in our neighborhood, and she said that it's a construction crane, and she thinks that it just came down the street and crashed into our roof. Okay, but she's already going from from least believable hypothesis to

a slightly more believable hypothesis. Yeah, because actually, if you count the number of assumptions for all of the hypotheses, you will see that the Magnoli pod is one assumption it fell from the tree in Atlanta on the ground. But a skeleton, well, that is requires the assumption that even though it's dead, it doesn't have any flesh around it somehow alive, it somehow has a functioning brain. Those three it can scale a roof and show me down a chimney that's for maybe even five um and then

it has some business with us. It's got some some reason for coming down the chimney and talking to us about that too. Is it makes me think, well, to make the skeleton down the chimney idea makes sense. You really need a working um understanding of necromancy, which is just say, you need a fortress of ideas that has

been carefully constructed by adults to make the unlikely seem plausible. Yeah, you need so, I say five assumptions there, but really, if you're going to detail, there's probably about a hundred different assumptions there. So then you get to the crane and now you have the crane down the street scenario

that it can operate on its own. That's an assumption that it has somehow managed to make its way through four houses and and and and still has momentum that it has bumped into the roof, and that somehow, even though it's bunched in the roof, there's no damage done to our house. There's four assumptions. You're right, there's getting better. Yeah, because if if the if the walking skeleton necromance, the idea of that is like it's like a cathedral of

ideas with flying buttresses and stuff. Whereas the claim moving on its own. That's more like a decent um cabin in the woods, kind of fortress of ideas, modestly constructed but still constructed. Nice. Nice. I like that, Yes, flying buttresses as opposed to like a modest cabin. So you present all those which I've done with my daughter before, and she'll just laugh and say the magnolia pod because then she's starting to understand that these are outrageous things.

But we've been able to talk about really cool different ways that the world might work, which is the imagination in the creativity part. But now she has something to hold onto that is concrete, that is logical, that makes sense. Yeah, so she can imagine the flying buttresses and the crazy cathedral of ideas. I mean, everyone wants to be able to imagine something that that rich and and and just engaging, you know, kind of like uh, like say Dante's Inferno.

I love that that's the cathedral ideas that there ever was one. But when I actually think about how the world works, I choose to go with a far more modest construction of ideas um and certainly at times of the less the less building there on the horizon, the better, And you can actually see the world as it perhaps really is now. Gothnick says that these cathedral of ideas, this is really the evolutionary juice of our species. We have to have this imagine a because she said, you know,

think about every single thing around you right now. Think about this microphone in front of us. This was once an idea in someone's head and it was part of their imagination, and they just used their available knowledge to create this thing. Uh, you know, given a couple of constructs of what is possible what is not possible. So you know, she's saying that if you are um, a human fifty thou years ago, this is incredibly important as well, because you're trying to imagine or predict really what the

year is going to look for you. So you start to really pay attention to seasons when some animals might be migrating, right, and you start to sort of imagine yourself participating in this future self or this future part of yourself. So again, just all of this is ah I think, an evolutionary boon to us, this stability to imagine, create, play and essentially become scientists. All right, Well, on that note, let's call over the robot and get some listener mail here.

The first one comes from a listener by the name of h. A. H A writes in and says, greetings Robert and Julie, regarding your mention of Bloody Mary in your recent podcast Light as a Feather Stiff as a Board. I've always, personally, i albeit humorously, believed that the Bloody Mary myth that she would appear of her name was spoken a certain number of times in front of a mirror was real, but that everybody that's tried it so far had just gotten the number of times one has

to say her name to invoke her wrong. I believe the correct number is three hundred and thirty three. No, I've never tried it anyway. Thank you for the entertaining and informative podcast. We'll see there's a there's an interesting, uh cathedral of ideas that only not a cathedral. But let's say there's a modest cabin of ideas, and our listener here built a little extension. Well, yeah, what is half of if you double three three, what is that? Well,

that would be six D sixty six. Yeah, so curious to know why it would be half of the devil's numbers, and that their math is wrong, that the actually needs to be doubled up or I don't know, maybe maybe Bloody Mary is going to match that number on the other side and then there then becomes complete. Well, it reminds me of pretty much every attempt to predict to the end of the world, be at the rapture or something else. Inevitably that comes a point where that where

someone says, well, the math was wrong. We need to do the math a little more correctly to figure out exactly when the world's gonna end. So I'm sure if if someone were to count up to thirty three, uh, there would be a need to revise our predictions speaking of when is the next end of the world, Oh like now or something that the mind calendar. When what's happening right now outside the door? Oh yeah, that's what that was. I just thought there was a lot of traffic.

We also heard from a listener by the name of Kristen. Kristen writes and says, hey, guys, in the Maps episodes, you talked about how humans are just wired to respond to vertical and horizontal and diagonals and mess things up. It triggered a memory for me three summers ago, I visited my friend in Colorado and we went to an old West type town. They had a mystery house there.

You went inside. It started out with the hallway floor slanted at a slight angle, which was fine, and then it opened up into this huge room and the floor there was at a forty five degree angle. I guess my brain totally shut down because as soon as I stepped into the room, I just fell down into the wall and couldn't move or stop laughing. My friend's dad had to help me out because I could not move. L o l uh. It's my favorite memory. Thanks for

the great podcast. That's because that draws us right into the episode we did on Haunted Houses to how if you screwed around with the shape of rooms and engage more of that diagonal construction, then it throws us off. It throws throws off our ability to predict what's going to happen, our understanding where we are in a space. That's right because we have many more neurons that are dedicated to the X Y access than the diagonal access.

So it makes sense that our brain would like this very clean lines, and of course haunted houses like to play with that idea, so that's fascinating. Thanks for writing into us, Kristen and h A. We always love to hear from our our listeners and if you have anything to add on this podcast, let us know. And we know we have a lot of parents out there as their listeners, and then many more who have children in their lives, and many more still who are very talented artists,

uh and creative people. We'd love to hear from you guys as well. How do how does the child inside you come out when you engage and creative act? Send us an example of what you do to We'd love to share it on Facebook and let us know how the young lauarvel human in your life, How they seem to see the world around you, What kind of questions are they asking, What unique inside are they bringing the

table when they construct their own fortress of ideas. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on both of those and on Twitter we go by the handle blow the Mind and you can always drop us a line at Blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.