How We Think
Week of September 27, 2004

In this hour, we explore How We Think. We ponder life and death; we write love poems and compose symphonies. What makes human beings so special? Guests include Dr. Mark Turner, who teaches both English and cognitive science at the University of Maryland and is the co-author of The Way We Think;. Dr. Kevin Dunbar of Dartmouth, who studies how people think, reason, and solve problems; and writer and poet Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory. We also examine how we make decisions and visit a small school in Wisconsin where students are being challenged to think like scientists. WIth commentary by John Hockenberry.

Host Dr. Fred Goodwin begins with an essay in which he says the topic "how we think," triggered a déjà vu experience for him. He was carried back to a time before medical school, when he was doing graduate work in philosophy. Four decades later, he's again confronting questions that have fascinated humans since the beginning of recorded history. But now, brain science has come so far that he can address these questions not just to philosophers but to neuroscientists. Questions like: do the mind and body represent separate spheres or are they facets of a unified whole? How do we form abstract conclusions from many, concrete observations of the world around us? How can two equally intelligent people come to opposite conclusions based on the same information? And will we be able, ultimately, to understand the human mind by understanding the brain? Our guests today offer answers to some, but not all, of these questions. Rest assured, he says, there is still room for philosophers.

How We Think. It's a broad topic. To begin to shed some light on it, we turn to someone who's exploring what makes human thought special. Dr. Goodwin interviews Dr. Mark Turner, who has degrees in both English literature and Mathematics and teaches both English and cognitive science at the University of Maryland. He is the author of The Literary Mind and co-author of The Way We Think.

Dr. Turner begins by saying that he believes that humans think by putting together things that do not belong together. He gives the example of a two-year old who turns her toy dog into a talking animal - blending humans and dogs into a "talking dog." Our ability to do this kind of "conceptual blending," as he calls it, is truly imaginative, truly innovative. We can also take the perspective of another person -- "If I were Bill, I'd go to the store," or "If I were rich..." and people will understand us. We do this very naturally, but other species do not. Chimps do not have Pluto or Goofy or Donald Duck, and they do not seem to think in counterfactuals, i.e. a chimp does not wonder what life would have been like if it had been born a jaguar.

He then discusses the evolutionary benefit of this kind of blending of ourselves and others. Our ability to imagine what a predator or rival might do, and to figure out what's going on in his or her mind and act accordingly, gives us a tremendous strategic advantage. Plus, blending also gives us the ability to create symbolic representations, from cave paintings to language.

Our ability to put together what is with what is not also means that we can "see" absences. For example, one can look in the refrigerator and see "no milk." He adds that this also influences our outlook on the world. We are much less enslaved by the present than other species, but this is both good and bad. For example, we can become paralyzed by a mistake made ten years ago, or we can become obsessed with things we don't have. We spend a tremendous amount of time suffering and wondering what might have been.

He concludes by talking about how we make decisions. We cannot run experiments in our lives -- for example, if a person can't decide if he wants to marry person A or person B, he can't marry A and then marry B and then decide which one to marry for the first time. But we can imagine ourselves in each situation, and, in that way, make a decision by simulating life.

To contact Dr. Turner, please write to Dr. Mark Turner, Distinguished University Professor, Department of English, University of Maryland, 3101 Susquehanna Hall, College Park, Maryland 20742. Or visit: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/.

To order The Literary Mind, click here. To order The Way We Think, click here.

For a closer look at decision-making, we turn to The Infinite Mind's Devorah Klahr. She talks to someone making a big decision -- should she quit her job? -- and people making smaller decisions -- which shoes should they buy? Baruch Fischoff, a professor of decision science at Carnegie Mellon University, says decision-making is usually a gradual process, not an epiphany. He says, "You might find it works better for you to think of life as having a series of gambles where you don't really know and you're trying to learn from these experiences." Fischoff says people need to trust that they're resilient enough to deal with the results of any decision, good or bad, and not worry about choosing the perfect option every time. He offers other advice: do make lists of pros and cons; try to remember how you've responded to similar situations; and think about the most likely outcomes of any given decision. Sound like common sense? Maybe, but Fischoff says most people don't do these things.

After a short break, Dr. Goodwin interviews Dr. Kevin Dunbar of Dartmouth, who studies how people think, reason, and solve problems. Dr. Dunbar has been investigating how scientists' minds work and what actually happens when they make discoveries. He says we have an image of the lone, white, male scientist working under a lightbulb, shouting out, "Eureka! I've found it!" Scientists tend to reinforce this image, often crediting their discoveries to chance. In reality, as Dr. Dunbar learned by studying actual lab meetings for a year, discoveries are made through collaborative thinking and reasoning. The professor who heads the lab tends to provide the framework for understanding results and to ask important questions to lead the researcher in the right direction. In addition, many members of the lab contribute by offering their own hypotheses for unexplained findings. Still, when Dr. Dunbar went back six months later to ask a scientist how he made his discovery, he said the professor had no role in it, and it was as simple as 2+2=4. In other words, he forgot or was unaware of the great extent to which other people had contributed to his work. This is not uncommon.

Dr. Dunbar also found a small gender difference in how the scientists thought. Observing a lab with 10 male post-docs and 10 female post-docs, he found the women were much more likely than the men to follow up on unexpected findings. The men tended to dismiss the unexpected finding as getting in the way of their goal, while the women were more likely to try to figure why they got the finding and try to replicate it. He said there could be an advantage, at times, to going on in spite of an unexpected finding, but, in the cases he saw, the women sometimes got major publications in the journals Science and Nature based on what they found by following up on their unexpected results.

To contact Dr. Dunbar, please write to: Dr. Kevin Dunbar, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Department of Education, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755. Or visit: www.dartmouth.edu

Then, reporter Gil Halsted visits St. Ann's school in southern Wisconsin, where elementary school students are being challenged to think like scientists. It's a teaching method that uses hands-on experiments to encourage abstract thinking about the nature of science.

Rather than using textbooks or lab manuals, Victoria Rosin, the science teacher at the school, has the students create experiments and physical models. She constantly questions their thinking and challenges them to explain their reasoning. This approach was developed by Sister Gertrude Hennessey, who taught science a St. Ann's for more than twenty years. She says the key is to begin NOT with the scientific facts and formulas but with a question about why things are the way they are.

Harvard researcher Susan Carey says its only recently that research has shown that young children can handle complex abstract reasoning. She 's found more strong evidence of this among the sixth graders she interviewed at St. Ann's: "They had an epistemology of science, they had an understanding of scientific understanding and conceptual change equal, in many ways, to that of the Harvard undergraduates I had studied . So this was very exciting ... proof that you could really teach science at that young age in a very meaningful way."

To find out more about the St. Ann's school, please visit www.stanns-school.org/index.htm.

We can learn a lot about "how we think" by studying people with brain injuries. Next, The Infinite Mind's Marit Haahr speaks with writer and poet Floyd Skloot, who has unique perspective on this. He has suffered brain damage, caused by an undetermined virus that targeted his brain, but he clearly remembers his old way of thinking. He has written a book called In the Shadow of Memory, about the damage done to his brain and the process of rebuilding his life.

Skloot reads from In The Shadow of Memory: "I used to be able to think," the book begins. Now, his memory and abstract reasoning abilities are extremely diminished. He finds himself doing things like saying "blood tower" when he means "rush hour" or putting coffee beans in the carafe instead of the filter basket. He continues reading, "Sometimes I see my brain as a scalded pudding, with fluky dark spots here and there through its dense layers, and small scoops missing. Sometimes I see it as an eviscerated old TV console, wires all disconnected and misconnected, tubes blown, dust in the crevices."

To make any sense at all, Skloot says he needs to avoid all distractions. During the interview, he has his eyes closed so he doesn't see the studio engineer, his wife, or his open book. This need to limit outside stimuli is one of the reasons he moved from downtown Portland to the country -- he needed to be in a place where things are slow. Skloot says his neurological condition is not all bad. It has given him a crash course in the essentials of life -- because he has no choice, he has learned to live in the moment and seek harmony, rather than mastery. His writing process, too, has completely changed -- it took him over eight years to write the book -- but he finds he has become looser and more open to discovery, and, in many ways, he appreciates the slower pace of his life.

To contact Floyd Skloot, please visit http://www.home.earthlink.net/~skloot/.

To order In The Shadow of Memory, click here.

Finally, commentator John Hockenberry offers his thoughts on thinking. He says, "I'm thinking. Two words, magical words, and one can escape into a place where no one can get you. No one can bother you. Thinking..."

- Marit Haahr

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