Mind in Motion

by Barbara Tversky

  We saw that time, too, can be viewed from an inside point of view, with the future in front and the past behind, but time can also be viewed from an outside point of view, as in a calendar. Outsider and insider perspectives, maps and routes, networks and paths pervade many kinds of information.

  Route/survey; path/overview; procedure/organization; solution/problem space

  Routes are essentially sets of directions, sequences of turns at landmarks, strings of actions at choice points, paths or procedures that will take you from A to B. Directions to bake a cake or filet a fish or solve an algebra problem or put something together, be it Lego or furniture, are similar; strings of actions, here on objects rather than at landmarks. So are explanations of cell division or how an engine works. Or how to complete a tax form or buy a ticket online. Step-by-step actions that lead to an outcome. Guaranteed success recipes.

  Maps aren’t like that, they aren’t instructions or recipes. They do not provide routes, procedures, or sets of actions. Maps are surveys of a space of possibilities. Maps provide an overview, a skeleton, of the organization of a set of places—or objects or times or organisms or ideas. Overviews enable the evaluation of many paths, perhaps to select one, but they don’t favor any one. They tell you what’s there and how it is arranged, they show you how things are related to each other, but they don’t tell you what to do. You have to figure that out, but the overview gives you (or should give you) the information you need to do that. And much more, sometimes too much more, too many places or objects or ideas and too many relationships among them. Too many possibilities. Then it takes creativity to discover felicitous paths, to find a good solution. Where to start and how to proceed. Routes show a single set of actions; surveys show a large set of possible actions. Routes are active; surveys, static.

  Routes are egocentric and maps are allocentric. Now extend those perspectives to spaces of organizations, say, that of the boss and that of an ordinary employee. We see the boss as on top, and employees as lower down, in varying degrees. Bosses are often seen as insensitive. Power is up, and power is, well, powerful. It’s also complicated, and complex. But there’s more than sheer power; there’s a right-angle shift of perspective. First, a spatial example, spatial in two senses. If you’re a mail carrier or a bus driver, all you need to know is your route, where you start, how you go, where you end. If you’re the supervisor in charge of all the routes, you need an overview of possible routes and carriers or drivers to design the most efficient routes and to keep track of the carriers or drivers. If you’re a salesperson, all you need to know is how to get to your customers. Not if you’re the boss. If you’re the boss, you need an overview of all the salespeople and all the customers. If you’re the president, you need to oversee multiple government offices; if you are the secretary of one of them, you need your path to the president. At the same time, you need an overview of those you supervise, and each of those has their path to you. Supervisors, bosses, CEOs, presidents, and the president need to keep track of a large number of individuals as well as the goals and procedures of the organization they are in charge of. They become leaders—hopefully!—exactly because they are perceived to take everything into consideration, that is, to advance group goals and interests. Supervisors, bosses, and presidents have more power than the people they are responsible for.

  Many complain that people high in power lack empathy. Perhaps this is inevitable. Remember route perspectives are egocentric; survey perspectives are allocentric, other-centric. People in power overview and oversee a large number of individuals, and they need to weigh the needs of each of them with the needs of the entire enterprise. Individuals oversee and only see themselves, their routes to the boss; they can’t have the boss’s survey perspective.

  WORDS: OPENING THE BOXES

  Pay attention to words. As the insightful art theorist Rudolf Arnheim said: words point to percepts. Hmm? All words? Those three certainly do: word, point, percept.

  Here are two words that enter children’s vocabularies early on: see and look. What’s surprising is that these words appear in the vocabularies of children blind from birth at about the same age as for children who have sight. The implication: even children who cannot see understand that “see” means “understand.” And “look” means “attend to.” It’s the mind’s eye that sees and looks.

  See and look are in excellent company. See (or look at) how many other words of seeing are used so often with nothing in sight but a thought in the mind: behold, distinguish, discern, detect, discriminate, eye, focus, gaze, glance, glimpse, inspect, notice, observe, peep, peek, recognize, regard, scan, scrutinize, search, spy, stare, survey, witness, view, watch. And here are more words of seeing that seem to be used mostly for seeing with the mind: envision, visualize, speculate, introspect.

  You will remember that we observed that the mind regards ideas as objects. Now I propose a game. Below some words I plucked from the air. The list is suggestive, far from complete. They are all concrete words. Some are used to describe actions that the body performs on objects or in the world, some, actions of objects themselves. Others describe spatial relations among or between objects. Still others describe shapes of objects and their parts. For each, find a literal use, like exploring a city or in a store and then find an abstract use, like exploring an idea or in a quandary.

  Ways whole bodies move in the world: explore, navigate, guide, lose/find one’s way, confront, emerge, escape, surround, descend/ascend, fall, rise, float, move, approach/avoid, wander

  Ways that bodies act on things: touch, blend, mix, combine, separate, join, gather, dump, ground, add, subtract, rotate, reverse, distribute, attach, take apart, fill/empty, overlay, lift, raise/lower, put, push, throw, stretch, grasp, kick, shove, toss, shred, cut, slice

  Ways things in the world change: expand, contract, increase, decrease, disappear, spiral, circle, dissipate, dissolve, fall apart, come together, melt, freeze, boil, start/end, close/open, crumble, crack, sublimate, burst, blow up

  Ways things relate to each other: meet, separate, adjoin, abut, surround, lower/higher, before/after, on top of/below, closer/farther, overlap, connected/disconnected, near, far, part of, inside/outside, in front of/behind, horizontal/vertical, parallel, diagonal, inward/outward, tangential, contain, collide, straddle, span, touch, penetrate, intersect, support, foreground/background

  Where things are: far out, close, near, far, up, down, on top, above, below, in between, at the bottom, in the middle, here, there, everywhere, ubiquitous, in the clouds, under water

  Things and shapes: forms of objects (e.g., tree, carrot-shaped, heart-shaped, snake-like), circle, spiral, square, other geometric forms, places, field, area, region, barrier

  Size: big/little, tiny, infinitesimal, huge, enormous, gigantic, wide/narrow

  Parts: body parts as prototype, head, hands, feet, arms, legs, fingers, belly, belly button, shoulders, fragments, pieces, periphery, center, focus, middle, edge, boundary, juncture, seam, membrane

  Pattern: striped, dotted, speckled, rough, smooth, angular, craggy, cluttered, bumpy, piles, regular, uneven, symmetric/asymmetric, balanced, repetitive

  Now that you are aware of how ubiquitous the language describing space and action in space is, you will hear it constantly. There’s hardly any other way to talk.

  LANGUAGE AND SPACE

  Long ago, when I began to study cognitive psychology and for many years thereafter, the dominant view of thought was that it was language-like. Even images. Introspection agrees: when we think about thinking, we think we are thinking in words. The formal view claimed that units of thoughts were like propositions, minimal assertions that could in principle be verified as true or false, an idea taken from symbolic logic. Any actual sentence could have multiple propositions. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” would decompose into: the fox is quick; the fox is brown; the fox jumps; the jumping is over the dog; the dog is lazy. All that packed into a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet! />
  That view ran into trouble when it collided with images and other mental representations that couldn’t be neatly decomposed into propositions. How on earth could you reduce the Mona Lisa’s, or anyone’s face, to propositions? Like many fiery disputes, it consumed itself. At the same time, views of the nature of language changed. Many now regard the spatial world as primary and language as rooted in the spatial world. A minimal unit of thought is a link between two ideas. But that’s a path linking two places. In evolution, understanding the spatial world and action in it certainly preceded the development of language. Language is used to describe situations that exist in the world or existed in the world or might exist in the world. Language is meant to create mental models of those situations to evoke the past or describe the present or to plan the future. Naturally, the ways we think about the space of the world and the entities and events in it affects the ways we talk about the world. But it goes far deeper: it’s not just that language is used to talk about the world, it’s that the space of the world and the entities and events we perceive in the world structure language. It’s not just that language structures space, as Talmy noted; it’s that space structures language. Space came first.

  THINKING AND THOUGHT

  The two Fundamental Facts about space, proximity and gravity, and the myriad actions of the body in space quickly take on abstract meanings. Things that are close to us are more likely to be seen, reached, and interacted with. Things that are close to each other are more likely to be related to each other. On any dimension. Because of gravity, it’s more effortful to go up than down. Going up takes resources: strength, health, and wealth. Spatial metaphors pervade our cognitive lives, our emotional lives, our social lives, and our scientific lives. We grow close to some people and apart from others. Someone’s at the top of the heap; someone else has fallen into a depression. Ions attract or repel. New fields open up, uncharted territory. Others implode. Actions on thoughts are like actions on objects. We scan, focus, and scrutinize ideas; we turn them upside-down, we pull them together, we tear them up, we toss them aside. We move meetings forward or back, up or down. Some meander through life and others twist and turn; we put the past behind us, events rush toward us. Sales, popularity, and the economy go up or down, electrons spin around orbits, viruses invade and the immune system attacks. We spend our lives perceiving and acting in space. It is perceiving and acting in space that keeps us and kept our predecessors alive. The language and reasoning of space, perception, and action become the language and reasoning of all thought, spatial, social, emotional, scientific, philosophical, and spiritual.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Spaces We Create: Maps, Diagrams, Sketches, Explanations, Comics

  In which we show how thought has been put in the world by arranging marks in space to create meanings that transcend the here and now. We zig and zag between the historical and the contemporary to draw lessons for designing and using thinking tools for thought about space, time, number, events, causality, and stories, highlighting comics, an explosively creative zany mix of storytelling

  Art proves that life is not enough.

  —Paraphrasing Fernando Pessoa

  FIGURE 8.1. Petroglyph in Nine-Mile Canyon near Price, Utah, showing a hunting scene. Probably made by the Fremont tribe between 950 and 1250 CE.

  PUTTING THOUGHT IN THE WORLD

  It is hard to overestimate the significance of putting thought in the world. In the here and now, in the form of language, gesture, or graphics, it allows us to share thoughts with others, critical for learning, teaching, coordinating, and collaborating. But putting thought in the world can do something far more consequential: it allows us to transcend the here and now. Putting thought in the world gives us ways to refer to the past and to plan the future. My guess for the first instance of putting thought in the world: telling someone else what to do or explaining how to do something. Putting thought in the world enables not just doing and wayfinding but also, and more far-reaching, the creation of society and culture. Thought put in the world allows disseminating knowledge and accumulating knowledge, all the more so if on the page.

  We are unlikely to ever know what creature first developed language to represent what is not in the here and now or when in evolution that happened. But we do have an abundance of ancient evidence for the emergence of the ability to represent what is not present, paintings on the walls of caves, images inscribed in stone, tallies carved in bone, each found all over the world. They are a testament to the remarkable ability of humanity to represent ideas not in the here and now. Thrilling evidence for symbolic thought. And for the deep human need for art. Surprise: we, Homo sapiens sapiens, were apparently not the first.

  Now to the quotidian. When the shopping list gets long, we write it down. When computing a discount, we pull out a calculator. When we’re trying to work out how to arrange furniture or how to phrase an explanation or who to invite for a large party and where to seat them, we reach for pencil and paper. When we want to make sure we remember an appointment, we put it on a calendar. We don’t rely on the mind for all that thinking; we use the world.

  The mind is too small; the world has far more space. The Eighth Law of Cognition: When thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it into the world. We put thought in the world in many ways: in talk, in gesture, in actions. But these are ephemeral, they hold thought only for a moment. There are more lasting ways to put thought into the world. We make to-do lists, we place the things we need to take to work by the door, we sketch out ideas we need to work with, we add numbers with a pencil or a calculator. We put Post-it notes in strategic places (an aside on Post-its: they are a legendary example of design serendipity—how to make use of glue that doesn’t stick). Putting thought in the world enlarges the mind, though not without limit because attention has limits: we still need to work with what we’ve put out there to make sense of it. Thoughts put in the world become thinking tools. A spiral: we put thought in the world, use it, revise it, use it again.

  We put thought in the world for so many reasons. To remember, remind, and record. To inform, to influence, to boast. To contemplate, compute, organize, rearrange, design, and create. To plan the future. To reminisce about the past, or to use it to think about the present or to plan the future. To show others and collaborate, then we’re literally on the same page and we can point to, gesture on, and move around ideas, more efficient and precise than using words. We create a joint idea, not yours or mine, so we are both committed. Thought can be expressed in arrangements of pebbles or lines in sand or scribbles on napkins or actions of the body or objects like sundials and abacuses and models. Canonically, thought is arranged on a flat surface like the wall of a cave or the face of a stone or a sheet of paper or the screen of a computer. Of course, thought has been put into the world in three dimensions as well: abacuses and water clocks and sundials and quipu and pebbles and slide rules and models of molecules and buildings. For simplicity, I will refer to all those ways of putting thought in the world as a “page.” Putting it on a page or a stone or strings allows us to carry it with us or send it to others. Now much of it is in the cloud, accessible everywhere. Modulo connectivity.

  Thought can be expressed in words, but spoken words hang in the air, and even those on the page express thought only indirectly, through arbitrary symbols. Marks in space and place in space on a page (and in the air) can express meanings more directly. Worldly expressions of thought allow molding and carving and construction of ideas much like the tools that mold, carve, and construct artifacts. Worldly expressions of thought are meant to be used, to be worked with.

  Putting thought into the world changes our thinking and our lives in profound ways. Writing enabled masses to be educated and informed. Writing changed our understanding of language and, in turn, changed language. Math notation, which took hundreds of years to develop, enabled efficient calculating, which in turn enabled the formation of governments and the development of science and engineering. Maps chang
ed our understanding of the world. It is hard to exaggerate the impact on our lives and on history of putting thought into the world. Maps, books, calculators, clocks, paper, artifacts, and the world itself: stop lights, bike lanes, store signs. And that’s not all.

  Putting thought into the world isn’t new, and we have much to learn from ancient thinking tools. They were invented and reinvented in different places at different times. They were refined over generations through cycles of trial and error. No one has yet spotted a chimpanzee or bonobo sketching another chimp or bonobo or making a map or a tally. Maybe making thinking tools is the elusive difference between us and the other living primates. So much follows from the making of tools for thought.

  Most of those early creations must have gotten lost. Maps in the sand and counting with pebbles don’t last. Because they withstood wind and water, caves and stones and bones are the repositories of many remaining ancient expressions of thought. Impressions of hands, ladder-like forms, and faint animals were found in a cave in Spain and dated back 64,800 years. Because Homo sapiens arrived only twenty to twenty-four thousand years later, these intriguing forms must have been created by the extant denizens, the mistakenly maligned Neanderthals. Why hands? Handprints remain in caves all over the world. Perhaps, in the absence of writing, they were signatures, testimonials: That hand represents me. I was here.