We Are All Scientists

aren't you guys hitting this information right now? Um, And certainly we've touched on some of these topics before in the past, and it's because we're hitting the road with

this act. Uh. One week from now the time we're recording it, we're gonna be at the E four conference Excellence in Elementary Engineering in the Twin Cities, and we're gonna give a keynote when we're gonna talk about this idea that we are all scientists, because we're gonna be talking to elementary school teachers who are who want to engage with children and and get them excited about science and engineering, and there's often this false idea that it's

something alien to them, where it's kind of like, let's let's give some children into a room and let's teach them to love sardines and broccoli. You know, let's let's get them excited about asparagus. But no, it's it's it's something that they already have in them, and it's it's it's ultimately more about about connecting with the inner scientists that is in all of us. Right, we're gonna make the case today that science is not a part of us,

it is actually intrinsic to our nature. And I will say that having worked on this podcast, I feel like, uh, it's very interesting to look at science as something that is innate rather than, as I've mentioned before, looking through the windows of science, because I feel like this podcast has really informed my worldview on how it's not apart from us, how every gesture, word, thought can be pinned

back to what you know. We've often talked about the magic of reality, and when I say the magic of reality, it's this idea that a single celled organism created an unbroken lineage extending fourth and time four billion years until we are sitting here before you guys, recording our voices. To me. That is amazing and it all points back to the fact that science has helped frame our understanding of how we came to be in this world. Um,

as well as why things are the way that they are. So, as we discussed in the previous podcast about being like a child, one of the big things here is that as as we get older and as we become adults, we take on all these different world views. We take on all these preconceived notions of how what the world is and how it works, about who we are, how do we fit into the world, What is our group,

what is our society? Who are the others? What laws are in place that we're obeying, What laws are in place that we are neglecting, What laws are in place that the other guys and gals out there should be obeying, but are not. All these complex, illusory ideas. We end up building this this fortress of ideas through which we

try to understand the world around us. And we use a lot of labels, right like you begin to understand yourself as you're growing up, right and you people say that you're good at X, Y or z, and then it's a liberal, you're a conservative, You're you're in the model, You're you're creative or number minded, you're you're very sensible. You know. We end up taking on all these labels, pinning them to our jacket and and that's who we

are and that's what the world is now. But I would argue that in addition to what other label or the many labels that we can put on ourselves, we are all inherently engineers. Right. Okay, Now, think you're probably like kind of know what you're talking about. I don't use blueprints, or maybe I do use blueprints, but I don't build things times. Yeah, but now think about your

childhood and think about treehouses or building something. You don't have to build a treehouse, It could be at all the things that if you're a lego person like I was, and I am not an engineer, I have to check things two or three times when I do simple calculations with a Google calculator. You know, I'm that type of person. I'm more of a liberal arts person. But as a child, I had the out of legos and had build everything under the sun. You know, I'd see a helicopter, I'd

have to build that helicopter. Then I have to crash the helicopter because we shut down by another one. That was the evil helicopter. But then I would build another one, and then it would be maybe I'd build build a building or a tank. I mean so even as as a child playing with blocks, or even if we're not playing with actual physical blocks, we're building things. We're building stories,

we're building ideas, we're engineering something. When we're engaging in play, well, you're also learning how the world works, how gravity works, right, and if you don't stack those blocks in a way that can support weight, then whatever you're creating is going to fall or just not work out. So every kid wants to build a giant tower, but you quickly learned that you've got to You've got to figure out how the base is gonna work. You gotta build a broader base to make the tower go up all the way.

Otherwise it's just gonna be blocks falling over and making a loud no. Yeah, I see that. I've seen this so many times with kids, and kids can, by the way, with legos, and I know everybody knows this, but really they can create some of the most uh some of the coolest, most innovative buildings I've ever seen, because they will take these risks and put things where they're not really supposed to go. But then again they figure out

how things are weighted. So again we don't think about it, but this is really the mind of an engineer at play. And by the way, kids are also born Euclideans. So when I say kids are this, that also means that we are Euclideans. And when I say Euclideans, I mean that we use geometric clues to navigate the world. Because you have bottom line, we are born into a world of numerous fixed and movable objects. We live in a

in a world of space and time. As a creature, you know, if you're a human and you're listening to this, this applies to you. If you're if you're a cat and you're listening to this, or a dog, this applies to you though in kudos for understanding the English language podcast. But you have to engage in this world that is physical, that has space, that has time, that has physical laws

governing what goes on. So part of our our evolutionary advantage is our ability to understand in that world to interact with and to do that we have to have a certain amount of numbers, since a certain understanding of how physics work more or less inborn. We've discussed in the past their concepts such as say teleportation, you try and you try and sell a kid on the idea that teleportation exists. They're not gonna believe it because they

already have it in them in their selves. They're inborn this disbelief in the in the idea that could even be possible, because it doesn't conform to reality. To believe in something like that, you have to painstakingly build this fortress of ideas and beliefs as an adult, and then you can make the impossible seem plausible. Right, Because even little babies know about object permanence, meaning that I could

have two cups. In one cup, I could deposit two cookies in another cup, I could pretend to be depositing cookies, same motions and everything. They will always want them one with the actual cookies in it. They understand that that is mimicking, that that is not object permanence. Uh. In addition, kids using geometric clues, they're more likely to use the length of walls in a room to remember where toys hidden.

And this is true of kids even at ages three and four, when they can name the color of the wall um to orient themselves, they still navigate rooms by length references. I also see this with my daughter at play with puzzles. You know. She she will be four in January, and she loves to put together puzzles using solely the shape. Now she can read and she can use the colors to try to piece together the clues

of how they fit together. But always in this drives me crazy because to me, I'm oriented in the other way where I'm like, hey, that says that that's part of the North Carolina for the for the map um she will always try to see how it fits together. And this is really interesting. Kids that play with puzzles between the ages of two inform perform significantly better and

spatial tests by ages five and six. And again this is this idea that they can mentally transform shapes, and this turns out to be a really big predictor of abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. What we call stem. Another inborn ability that kids have that adults forget and then have to relearn is Bayesian logic. Beaesian logic is a branch of probability theory that allows one to model uncertainty about the world and outcomes of interest in that

world related to common sense knowledge and observational evidence. So this is a concept that plays heavily into statistical evaluation of things such as ongoing elections, etcetera, any kind of situation where there's a there's a certain a group of

chaos or unpredictability. It's also something that is key to our creation of aiyes of artificial intelligence, because we want to create something that thinks intelligently and can analyze the world and create believable recommendations on what's going to happen. So we're using Baisian logic to create the machines will solve the problems of the future. But Baisian logic is

already present in children. Experiments have shown that when a child looks at the world, they're able to weigh the observational data in the statistical data that they have observed in a way that is free of the conflicting judgments that adult humans bring to the table. Yeah, I mean much like looking at a puzzle and seeing what fits and what doesn't. Bayesian logic necessitates that children use a pattern of co variation. Co variation meaning correlated variation of

two or more variables. And we talked about this blicket machine in the last podcast How to Think Like a Child, and this blicket machine is something that is lit up when you place an object on it. This object can be vary shape, sizes, colors, and kids will again use this co variation correlated variation of two or more variables to realize that if they do this, then this happens. If you do that, then that happens. Now, by the way, these objects aren't static, meaning that you know, it's not

just the red squares that make the machine go. You know, it could be the orange squares that have blue dots on them, or the triangle and so on and so forth. So they are taking in a lot of data and trying to figure out, you know, like the three types of shapes that are this color and this configuration stacked on top will make this machine go. That's actually pretty sophisticated.

And as we mentioned last time in our podcast and how to Think Like a Child, kids are actually better in this exercise and figure out how certain toys work on the blicket machine. Then adults are, which brings us

to mathematics. And this is a big one. As adults, so many of us, myself included, throw any kind of thing mathematical at us being and figuring out how to split a bill at a dinner party or trying to figure out I've got it down now, but for a while there, I didn't even understand how to properly figured tip before I figured out just generally that bad at math, and so we often fall into this idea that that we're born bad at math and then we just simply

fail to learn it. And certainly there's a whole case to be made about what needs to be done to to engage children and the age students so more thoroughly in mathematics. I do want to mention too, that there is no gender difference in abilities in science and math. And this has been something of subject that comes up

again and again. But if you want more information on it, check out Elizabeth Spelky spe l k E and her debate with Stephen Pinker on this point and the thirty odd years of research into child development in which she makes the case that this does not exist. This is some cultural garbage that we tend to heap on kids, because again, we all have to interact with the same world. We're all organisms that have all the equipment to interact

with that world, and part of that is a number sense. Okay, so our brains naturally extract numbers from the surrounding environment in the same way that we identify colors. All right, we call it number cents, and our brains come fully equipped with it from birth. In fact, studies even show that while infants have no graphs of human number system, you know, and it doesn't know what five is, doesn't know what ten is, but they can tell the difference between five and ten on a on a non numerical

level because they can tell identify change in quantity. Show a kid five cookies and a kid ten cookies, and they will know the difference they have. There is an inborn math that governs that that kind of quantity differential. Yeah, they are essentially born accountants. And you will see this with babies who can estimate quantities and distinguish between more

and less. For instance, and an experiment in which babies were shown an a ray of four dots and then an a ray of twelve dots, it turns out that they will pay attention to the four dots sequence when four sounds are played, okay, correlating that, and they will gaze at the twelve dots when the twelve sounds are played, even when the sounds are manipulated in terms of the note length. Kids still no babies still know that twelve noted song has to do with the twelve dots and

that four noted song has to do with the four dot. Yeah, we can even drag in your own imaging research into it, and we found that when you when you look at an infant's brain, when they're say, looking at the five cookie tin cookie difference, they're actually engaging in logarithmic counting, alright, counting based on integral increases in physical quantity. And this is so apparently this is something that we move away from as we get older, this logarithmic thinking, because we

think in different modes of mathematics. But again, route to the baby, route to children is this logarithmic thinking. So we end up taking on human number systems. But the thing is, again, the human number systems are even this is not something that's coming from the outside. It's it's

something that's coming from within. At some point in our ancient past, prehistoric humans begin to develop a means of augmenting their natural number sense, all right, they started counting on their fingers and toes, and that's why so many numerical systems depend on groups of five, ten, or twenty, So based ten or decimal system stem from the use of both hands, while base twenty or vegicial systems are based on the use of fingers and toes. Yeah, these

vegicimal systems, I think are really interesting. Larger numbers are simply multiples of ten, right, because that would be a base of ten system. For example, ten tens make and we're so used to our base ten system that it may seem like the only possibility. But the green Landic number system has a base of twenty and others have a base of five, and of all the number systems ever invented, five, ten, and twenty are the most common.

So again, if you doubt that mathematics is something that is inherent to you, all you have to do is split down at your fingers. In fact, in Greenland, the word for seven, which is pronounced our punick marluk translate or something like that, translates as second hand to okay, So you put one hand up and then two fingers from from the next hand, and then thirteen is translated as first foot three, meaning both of your hands plus your first foot three toes. So again our digits are fingers.

Just even think about the terminology have been the gold standard for how we itemize the world around us. All right, we're gonna take a quick break on that note, and when we come back, we're gonna shift a little outside of the mathematical understanding the world and we're gonna get into a little something called storytelling, because, believe it or not,

storytelling is science before we move on to storyteller. So that's just reminded as you were talking in that sponsortive message about mathematics and certain truths that they hold, and I was thinking about the Fibonacci numbers, which is that sequence of numbers, the golden ratio that we see again and again in nature. Yeah, it's like in a snail shell,

it's in some cauliflower. You see this mathematical truth making it self evident just throughout the world and then in the cosmos and on your body, right, because even the ratio between your hand, the length of your hand and the length of your arm, and the length of your arms to the height of your body, or even the space between your eyes and your nose in your mouth, these are all predicated on the golden ratio. So again,

inherent within the blueprint our numbers. Yeah, we haven't. A past episode we did about mathematics, we asked a question, is mathematics a human discovery or human invention? Where we really go into the philosophical deep end about this, because it's really fascinating question. Again, mathematics, as we've discussed, is something that comes from within. But is it something that is purely a human creation based on what is inside us? Or is it something that really permeates every aspect of

the universe? Right? Is it the tail wagging the dog? Yeah, it's really really mind blowing stuff. But we're moving a little beyond mathematics at this point and we're getting into something called storytelling. Storytelling is of course, is old as human language. The idea that we can set down and we can tell a narrative, that we can talk about

this character and what they did. Are these people and what they did, what challenge they overcame, how they came from point A to point B, And we naturally engage

in it because the stories are linear. They have beginnings, they have metals, and they have ends, much like our lives, much exactly like our lives and exactly like our our experience of the world around us, so we naturally engage with stories well, and within this, I think about the neo cortex as part of our brains that was locked on is pretty much an upgrade, uh to the human brain.

Scream ice cream style, swirled up high. It changed everything because no longer did we have just our reptilian brain, which was really concerned or is concerned with basic survival instincts like fear. But with the neo cortex, you have something that can manage so many different sophisticated, complex elements of life of modern life, from parenting to higher cognitive functions like number systems and the prietal loop which which

governs these number systems, and abstraction. So when I think about number systems, I think about abstractions because really that's what they are. And uh, these obstractions are stories, and these stories really are data. We're taking data, we're organizing it, and we're making it into a pattern that makes sense to us that can help explain our world. So when you think about storytelling, you don't normally think about it is involving science, but really you're you're talking about some

of the same basic principles at play. So again, storytelling us how we see the world. I mean, on a very basic level. I've talked about this before, and this is where especially adults get in get into trouble. And no, I mean even in an early age, you're you're engaging in your ego. You're creating a story about the world in which you are the central character. And uh, you know, so everyone's life unless you can you can force yourself

to think beyond it. After a while, it becomes this this very limited novel with this one character engaging with other people with their surroundings, with various successes and disasters that that line the road to death and elegant and then an uplifting way of putting it. But I mean, that's what kind of what comes when you when you end up viewing the world that way. But we end

up viewing the world that way. So telling other stories ends up being this interesting way of tweaking that worldview um in a way that can be both good and bad. There's a book called Tell the Wind, Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story by a film executive, Peter Goober, and he makes this argument that the stories function as trojan horses. All Right, we all know the idea of the trojan horse, right, So you have you have the city of Troy. The opposing army wants to

get inside that besieged city. So how do you do it. You give him a gift, a fabulous wooden horse hitting away, and that horse's belly happens to be a small group of soldiers, and after after the lights go off, after the sun goes down, they're going to creep out of the belly of that horse, unlock the gates, and let the rest of the army in. So the idea here is that. And we've discussed this about the power of

storytelling before. You know, when when you have a story that contains a different idea, a different way of seeing the world, it can kind of virally infect our worldview and we end up trusting an idea more if it's presented to us in the form of a story, which is why you see we've we've talked about the importance of sitcom's You're Just in popular history, um or or

or novels as well. When you engage a new cultural idea in the form of a narrative, we're more likely to take it in to eat it than we are if someone says, hey, here's the way you should maybe view the world. Why don't you do this? And then people are gonna double down. They're gonna say, no, no, that's not the way I view the world at all. Presenting a story, however, that's the spoonful of sugar on

the medicine. Yeah, but I would I would actually argue that every single scientific paper that's ever been published has a trojan horse of sorts in the narrative. In other words, something that happens that's a surprise that turns our assumptions on its head, right, because because you've got to have conflict and story for to be good. Nobody wants to read a story about, hey, there's this person they marry and everything happened the way it needed to happen. It was.

You know, you need some sort of conflict where suddenly something doesn't happen, there's a fall from grace, or there's a conflict that had or some sort of of enemy that has to be overcome. I mean, that's the stuff of great narrative. No one wants to read three long books about Bilbo setting at home, drinking tea and crumpets. This is true. This is true. Something has to happen, change has to occur in order for the reader to

better understand him or herself in the greater world around them. Right, And this I think if you look at it, pretty much every publication of a paper, there's going to be something within it, even if it's something like in a paper that ended up in Ignoble, right, which we did a couple of podcasts. There's always a story. Like there's the story of the guy that said, hey, there's a dead duck outside my window, and then another duck came and started copulating with that dead duck and he had

to make sense of it. So there's the study. There's the story there's a man and getting in encountering a mystery in the world, well something to overcome and have to solve it, having to an analyze it and learning something from it. Right. So that's what the basis of

storytelling is about. You don't want learn. You generally, when you engage with a story, you want a character that's going to learn and grow, or on the optic, you want a character maybe that doesn't learn and grow, but that's that's still part and partial to who that person is and getting even know that. So I'm actually thinking about the paper that was published by the kids. We talked about this on how to Think like a Child and uh blato, who did the ted talk about it?

And those kids were trying to find out whether or not humans and insects had things in common in terms of the way that they think, the way that they forage, that they organized. Is it possible that insects could have as complex thought processes as humans? And this was the story they were after, and they got their trojan horse because they found out that these bees were forging in ways that we had never known before, that that were

really nuanced. You changed the conditions and they could adapt, and again you have a story about how a we're not that far from from the rest of the natural world. In other words, a lot of the blueprint of who we are comes from everything around us. Right that there's there's something intrinsic to bees that is intrinsic to us, and so you get this idea of how the natural world orders itself. But also that kids can think critically.

That's the other part of this story that has to do with us published paper that kids can see through the mind of a scientist and in fact do so every day it is again something that is not apart from them. It is underscoring this idea that we are all inherently scientists. Robert Cowitch Coast of Radio Lab a great science podcast that we listen to it and I think a number of our listeners listened to as well.

He gave a great keynote a few years back on the importance of storytelling to the scientific community, which is really really great talk, really inspiring tall whether you stand on the inside or outside of a scientific institution, because he was he was very much going with this idea of storytelling is a trojan horse. His whole thing was, if you're a scientist and you're engaging with with people and someone asks you what you do, which, what are

you studying? What are you what's your research consisting of? Don't blow them off, Don't just say I you wouldn't understand it. Try and explain it to and trying to explain it as a story, because narrative is powerful. And if you if the scientists are not telling a story that makes sense, if they're not telling a story about how the world works, then there are gonna be other competing stories out there, stories that stem from myth stories that stem from religious or spiritual views of the world,

stories that stem from just complete Internet generated quackery. We've all received emails like that about how Mars is going to be as big as the moon and the night sky, and other such nonsense, about how Satanist in your area are going to kidnap your cat on haw Halloween. The list goes on and on. But all the quack ideas out there, they already have narratives, and some of these these idea as are old. We've been telling some of these stories since the beginning of human history, and so

science has to compete with those. So we need science that tells stories. We need to engage with students and with adults, people of all ages with a science that is wrapped inherentive. Yeah, and because you know, we we've talked about how in the past, the human storytelling has really revolved around mysticism, and we've defined ourselves in these in these ways. We think about mysticism more as the creative expression now, but there's still a bit of that,

But that cannot be said for everyone in the world. Yeah, I mean, it's still in the cultural fabrics. So um, I think if we can begin to understand ourselves in these different terms as these Euclidean space explorers, and looking down at our fingers and realizing that we have ordered an entire world around digits numbers. Again, we can begin to understand that this is not something in a separate

from us. Yeah, we're born scientists, and that's something we need to cultivate, we need to nurture, and we don't need to learn to be something other than a scientist as we grow. All right, Well, on that note, let's call over the robit and get a little bit of listener mail. All right, this one comes to us from Pedro. Pedro writes and says, Hey, Julian Robert, I'm a truck driver. We have a number of those, so always nice to hear from the truckers out there. I'm a truck driver

and recently started to listen to your awesome podcast. I literally have listened to most of your podcast to date in about a week. Wow. Anyhow, I finally got home and wanted to write to you guys and share a little story that popped into mind when I heard the Gigantism episode Julie mentioned on the topic of hissing cockroaches that she thought there might be flying cock roaches. Yes, I grew up in Puerto Rico and in my native town,

Vega Baja. As a team, I moved to a more isolated part of town, near a farm close to the tree line of a jungle like part of the island. Uh. It was in the twilight hours and my father and I were standing on our porch when something hit me in the face, more like slapped me. My father kidded that it was a bat, which freaked freaked me out enough, But when we turned on a few lights, I was surprised by a whole bunch of huge, disgusting flying cockroaches.

Not one of the selling points of my wonderful island anyway. I love the podcast, and I'm only disappointed in the fact that I'm almost up to date on him. All Right, so it's saying that these cockroaches are hitting cockroaches with wings. Yeah, that's that's what he's saying, Okay, because I know about palmettos, and those suckers can get big even here in Georgia. Yeah.

Put the hissing cockroach three or more inches with wings hissing at you as it comes in the lands in your ear cannut unless there was a kid out there in the shadows with a slingshot just pelting the porch with these things, but I doubt it. Alright, Alright, something

to add to uh to the nightmares? Well, um, you can certainly add to our nightmares and you can add to the listeners nightmares by by connecting with us, sharing your stories about your scientific understanding of the world and how you engage in science and if you're a teacher, would love to hear your thoughts on engaging students in science. You can find us on Facebook and you can find

us on tumbler. We are stuff to Blow your Mind on both of those and you can also seek us out on Twitter, where our handle is blow the Mind and you can drop us a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com