Mind in Motion

by Barbara Tversky

  Perspective taking

  The empathetic approach won’t work for all design problems, certainly not for some of the natural-world challenges Leonardo faced, like harnessing the power of water and wind. But the core of the empathetic approach is perspective taking, in this case, taking the perspectives of different users. Perspective taking and perspective switching are strategies that are general enough to work for just about everything. The perspectives don’t have to be human ones, even if it’s humans who are doing the thinking and the creating. Mathematicians report one problem-solving strategy they use is to look at an algebraic problem geometrically or a geometric problem algebraically (Leonardo was all geometry, fitting).

  Biomimicry encourages new perspectives. Architects and designers use biomimicry with outcomes that are as delightful as they are efficient. Snails have inspired stairways. The tiny “teeth” of sharkskin inspired a line of racing bathing suits. The beak of a bird the nose of the Japanese bullet train, the shinkansen. The burrs that stick to hikers’ pants in the Swiss Alps famously inspired Velcro.

  Changing medium changes perspective. Bronze, iron, aluminum, Teflon, reinforced concrete, titanium, silicon—all led to innovations. Architects have become amazing pastry chefs, structures so stunning you are reluctant to use your fork. Throughout history, technological advances have changed perspectives, changed ways of thinking, changed ways of living. Fire. Agriculture. The wheel and the arch and the cantilever. Writing. Math notation. The printing press, the compass. Cheap paper. Steam engines. Electricity. The internet. Telescopes, microscopes, X-rays, CAT scans, tunneling microscopes. The last few literally enable new ways of seeing, new perspectives. At first, these new materials and technologies and ways of seeing simply replace traditional uses. But soon they open up new uses. Think of the iPhone, hardly used for talking any more, but for thousands of other uses, some unintended and certainly not recommended, like walking into moving cars and other people.

  The paradigm shifts in science noted by Kuhn are changes in perspective, quite literally. Ptolemy to Copernicus, Aristotle to Newton to Einstein. The idea of process, an initial state followed by a string of events culminating in an outcome, has been fundamental in many sciences, including biology. Processes make good stories, they have beginnings, middles, and ends. That perspective, seeing biology as processes, blocked seeing and understanding homeostasis, also core to biology and other sciences and engineering. Homeostasis is a continuous cyclical set of events that has no beginning and no end. The “outcome” is maintaining a steady state by countering changes with opposing changes. The prototypic case is a thermostat. If the temperature drops below the set point, the heat goes on. When it reaches the set point, the heat goes off. When the temperature goes too high, the AC kicks in. There’s no beginning, no end (unless you turn it off).

  Here’s another example, vividly described by Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker. The dominant metaphor in treating cancer has been one of war. Foreign cells invade the body, they colonize and proliferate and attack other organs. Cancer, the ruthless murdering enemy, must be exterminated. The weapons of extermination are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Sure, there’s collateral damage, but this is war. Only recently have researchers taken a different perspective. There are cancers that implant (note the word) in the body, but do not spread. Many of those colonies are discovered postmortem in people who died for other reasons. Hmm. Why is that cancers colonize, but do not proliferate? Now the new perspective, a new metaphor. Cancer is a seed. It needs the proper soil to survive. If that’s the case, look at the soil. Taking that perspective, the perspective of the soil, has led to new ways of doing research and new treatments: spoil the soil.

  PREDICTION AND PERSPECTIVE TAKING

  We turn now to predicting the future, to superforecasters. Patience; we’ll tell you what they are soon. You have probably guessed it has something to do with perspective taking. Years ago, Phil Tetlock began to study professional forecasters, people who earn a living by predicting what will happen in the next year or ten, primarily economic and political predictions. The future is of great importance to economists, businesspeople, politicians, and, actually, to all of us. Economic and political events are notoriously hard to predict. As are which songs, films, tweets, books will go viral. Even the weather. Tetlock studied many self-proclaimed and well-paid expert forecasters over a ten-year period. They were no better than monkeys throwing darts. (Why are they consulted, much less believed? And paid?) In spite of their own findings, or maybe because of them, he and his collaborators changed perspective. They began to wonder whether there might be people who, in fact, are good at predicting. They ran and are still running prediction contests. In the contests, players, all volunteers, are given specific predictions like: What will the GNP of country X be in 20XX? Or, Will there be a revolution in country Z in 20ZZ? Predictions that can be checked. They found a small group of people, those are the superforecasters, who did succeed better than chance and better than others, not just once, but years in a row.

  Naturally, the researchers—and the rest of us—wanted to find out what made these superforecasters so good. Sure, they were educated and smart, but far from off-scale. Sure, they were news junkies. Sure, they had a refined feel for probabilities, more articulated than the trinary: for sure, maybe, no way. Sure, they loved the challenge, they were curious and open-minded. And they stuck to it. Interestingly, they were humble. They understood how deeply uncertain the world is.

  But to my (biased) eyes, the most important trait they possessed was perspective taking. They would carefully construct an analysis supporting their hunches. First, confirmation bias. Actually, not a bad first step: if there isn’t strong support, then give up right away. Then they would challenge their own analysis: How could it go wrong? What’s missing? An adversarial stance, no more confirmation bias. They would ask: What would X, Y, or Z, other known experts in politics or economics, predict? How would A, B, C, other theories, assess the situation? Superforecasters were open-minded enough to let the very different analyses of others alter their own predictions.

  Others make similar recommendations. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Schwartz advised: “Forever challenge your convictions.” He called this deepening and added widening, take multiple perspectives, and lengthening, consider long-term consequences and implications.

  Perspective taking is central to more than creativity and problem solving, or maybe it’s that so much of life is problem solving and requires creativity. Diplomacy, international and domestic, right inside the home and the office and on the streets. Role-playing is perspective taking. So is cognitive behavior therapy. And empathy. I’m not saying it’s easy. All too often it’s really hard. Confirmation bias can get in the way. Self-protection can get in the way. Emotions can get in the way. Perspective taking doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s a good bet. Maybe it’s hard, but in the end, perspective taking can actually overcome bias, diffuse emotions, and protect the self.

  We’ve already seen many ways to find new perspectives. Reconfigure the parts. Take the point of view of different roles, places, events, categories, creatures, physical processes, materials, research methods, disciplinary viewpoints, nationalities, philosophies, religions, ideologies. Be your own adversary: challenge your own view. The list goes on. Some of this is stuff we know, from living and learning, so thinking from other perspectives often just needs a reminder.

  PERSPECTIVES: INSIDE AND ABOVE

  We can now jump above for a broad overview of perspective and perspectives. That lengthy list of ways to find different perspectives entails exploring the surrounding world, a conceptual world. The exploration follows a path through a space of ideas, with each place providing a different perspective. It’s an inside perspective. Recall that one of the remarkable feats of the mind is to use exploration of the world from within to create a map as if from above. An overview encompasses many viewpoints, far more than can be seen from any viewpoint. Now remem
ber the First Law of Cognition: gains inevitably come with losses. The broad overview necessarily loses some of the details of the embedded perspectives. What it gains is abstraction. An overview retains the core features of each place, each perspective, but loses detail. Individual features disappear and general ones remain. An overview shows the relations among the places, here, the ideas.

  Here’s how to find new perspectives:

  Move around. Take different perspectives, those of someone else or something else.

  Move above. Go abstract—find commonalities across perspectives; find connections among the perspectives. Change the commonalities, the features, the parameters. Change the relations. Regroup and repeat.

  ART AND LIFE

  Now we return from the mind to the page, we return to sketching and to art. Andrea Kantrowitz not only is a fine artist but also has studied the practice of other fine artists. Adapting the methods used in our research on architects, she videotaped nine experienced artists as they drew and talked through their videos with them afterward. She tried getting them to talk as they drew, but talking interfered with a process that wasn’t verbal. The artists were engaged in that wordless conversation between the mind and the hand and the marks on the page. Instead, she looked on from the outside, recording the artists’ hands as they filled the page. The patterns of hands filling space with marks revealed intriguing differences in style. Some artists went back and forth revisiting places that had been drawn; some charged through, rarely returning. All were exploring.

  Going through their videos after the sessions, the artists had a lot to say about their process. They see drawing as a journey. The language artists used to describe what they were doing is one of exploration. Not wandering. At the beginning, artists are feeling their way, their marks are tentative, easy to change or to work into something else. No firm commitment yet. The artists have the confidence earned from experience that something will come of the mark making and exploration even if it isn’t driven by a plan, or, more likely, exactly because it isn’t driven by a plan. They say they can let themselves get lost or make mistakes. Some deliberately get lost, purposely get themselves in trouble, so they can’t take the easy way, so they’ll have to find a new one. Some say they enter an alternative world, one that is safe to explore. And just as for a journey, they sometimes realize they’ve made a wrong turn, go back to where the mistake was, and begin again. Most find mistakes and revise, some by erasing, others preferring to leave the archaeological layers as part of the drawing. Eventually, the drawing begins to take shape. At that point, artists say the drawing talks back to them. They are surprised by what they see, they get excited. They discover ways to join parts into wholes. Forms gradually emerge (note the passive), and spaces that need to be filled are spotted and filled. The drawing pulls itself together.

  A journey of exploration, neither random nor predetermined, but improvised, perhaps a few wrong turns, perhaps a few missed places, a journey of discovery. The same journey of exploration and discovery for designers, to create a new building or product or business. The same journey of exploration and discovery for scientists or detectives or mathematicians or analysts or, for that matter, all of us, to solve a problem. For the artists, drawing is more than a journey, it is a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, full of twists and turns and emotional upswings and downswings and drama, surprises and disappointments and frustrations and uncertainty and discovery and elation and suspense. Like any creative endeavor. Like life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The World Is a Diagram

  In which we see that our actions in space design the world, that the designs create abstract patterns that attract the eye and inform the mind, that the actions get abstracted to gestures that act on thought, and the patterns to diagrams that convey thought. Actions in space create abstractions. A spiral we call spraction.

  A city is a machine with innumerable parts made by the accumulation of human gestures.

  —R. SOLNIT and J. JELLY-SCHAPIRO, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas

  FIGURE 10.1. The mind designs the world.

  DESIGNING THE WORLD

  My path to elementary school took me past an enormous oak tree with two prominent right-angle bends low in its broad trunk. According to legend, it was a trail marker made by the Potawatomi tribe in the late eighteenth century. The tree was in a large park. The rest of the park retained tiny pockets of wildness, but there was another tree bent years earlier as a trail marker and there were paved paths and a baseball diamond and the ice-skating rink where I broke my arm twice in one week. The park was clipped and the sides straightened, bordered by rows of tidy homes, my elementary school, and a few shops.

  FIGURE 10.2. The world designed by nature.

  In Figure 10.2 is the world as nature made it (minus the asphalt).

  Look around at the world as it is now, in Figure 10.3.

  How hard it is to find places in the world that haven’t been designed by human actions. How different is our world from that of our nomadic ancestors. Inside our homes we line books up on shelves. We stack dishes in cabinets, arrange tools in boxes, and organize clothing in drawers and closets. We don’t just toss them on shelves and in drawers, we sort them into kinds and kinds of kinds. Categories and subcategories. The plates go on shelves, with different sizes in separate stacks. Same for the bowls. Categories inside larger categories: embeddings and hierarchies. Sweaters in one drawer, socks and underwear in others. Inside separate drawers inside a chest of drawers. Conceptual containers and boundaries as well as physical ones. Books ordered by topic or date or size. The books in one room, a bigger box, the dishes in another, clothing in a third, each room a different theme, different kinds of things brought together for a common purpose, reading, preparing meals, dressing and undressing. When we get dressed, we take one of each, underwear, something on the top, something on the bottom, something on the feet. When we set the table, we give each person a plate, a napkin, silverware, and a glass. One-to-one correspondences.

  FIGURE 10.3. The world designed by us.

  That’s inside. Now look outside again. (See Figure 10.4.) Cities are patterns of streets, lined with buildings, grouped into residential, commercial, educational, recreational. More categories. Rows of windows or balconies on the facades of buildings: you can instantly spot the symmetries and repetitions and one-to-one correspondences. The patterns are created by actions of our hands. Those arrangements carry information, information that doesn’t need words, that babies and children and foreigners can understand. A spatial language. Ninth Law of Cognition: We organize the stuff in the world the way we organize the stuff in the mind. The world mirrors the mind. And, as we saw early on, the mind mirrors the world. A cycle that is really a spiral.

  FIGURE 10.4. Market, Piazza delle Erbe, Padua, Italy.

  DESIGNING US

  We haven’t just designed and redesigned the world, we have designed and redesigned us. First the body. For as long as anyone can tell, clothing. To protect us from injury and to keep us warm. Adornments of the body, paint, masks, jewelry, go far, far back in archaeological sites. The reasons are anybody’s guess, and many have guessed. As a child I was mesmerized by a row of bronze statues in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, portraying people from all over the globe, some with reshaped heads, chiseled teeth, body markings, necks so elongated by stacks of rings that the rings could not be removed. Foot binding ended in China more than a century ago but is still practiced by ballet dancers and aspiring ballet dancers. Young girls can’t wait to pierce their ears, a rite of adulthood. What’s yucky to one generation is cool to the next. Tattoos are old and new, now, like clothing and hairstyles, a burgeoning art form.

  Moving farther and easier

  Far more significant than designs for beauty—or cultural images of beauty—are the designs that enhance moving in the world, perceiving the world, and acting in the world. Enhancements of feet, senses, and hands. Shoes early on. Since ancient times,
shepherds use walking sticks, mothers carry babes in arms or slings, people put baskets on their heads or on their backs or in their arms or carefully balance them on sticks slung across the shoulders. Palanquins transported nobility; commoners were transported on the shoulders or arms of family or in wheelbarrows or sleds. Horses, camels, donkeys, dogs, and reindeer took our premotorized ancestors farther distances than their feet could. Now strollers and wheelchairs and scooters and skates and planes and rockets do those jobs.

  Recall Hans Rosling’s work: the key to jumping up an economic level is moving farther in the world. At level one, you only have your feet. To get to level two, you need a bicycle; to get from level two to three, a motor scooter; to reach level four, an automobile. Moving farther in the world brings far more than economic opportunity. Moving farther in the world opens new vistas, new perspectives, new knowledge. Moving farther means collecting more places and people and things. More routes, a larger map. Moving farther expands all opportunities. For so many years, technologies were invented to allow more of us to move farther and farther. Some even to the moon, with the rest of the world watching.