Mind in Motion Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Barbara Tversky

  Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

  Cover image © Liu Zishan/Shutterstock.com

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: May 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tversky, Barbara Gans, author.

  Title: Mind in motion: how action shapes thought / Barbara Tversky.

  Description: New York: Basic Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019007927| ISBN 9780465093069 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780465093076 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Thought and thinking. | Intellect. | Space. | Cognition.

  Classification: LCC BF441 .T94 2019 | DDC 153.4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007927

  ISBNs: 978-0-465-09306-9 (hardcover); 978-0-465-09307-6 (ebook)

  E3-20190417-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  Moving in Space: The Foundation of Thought

  PART I: THE WORLD IN THE MIND

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Space of the Body: Space Is for Action

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Bubble Around the Body: People, Places, and Things

  CHAPTER THREE

  Here and Now and There and Then: The Spaces Around Us

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Transforming Thought

  PART II: THE MIND IN THE WORLD

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Body Speaks a Different Language

  CHAPTER SIX

  Points, Lines, and Perspective: Space in Talk and Thought

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Boxes, Lines, and Trees: Talk and Thought About Almost Everything Else

  CHAPTER EIGHT

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

  CHAPTER NINE

  Conversations with a Page: Design, Science, and Art

  CHAPTER TEN

  The World Is a Diagram

  Discover More

  The Nine Laws of Cognition

  About the Author

  Figure Credits

  Bibliographic Notes

  Index

  To Amos, whose mind was always in motion.

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  PROLOGUE

  Moving in Space: The Foundation of Thought

  A creature didn’t think in order to move; it just moved, and by moving it discovered the world that then formed the content of its thoughts.

  —LARISSA MACFARQUHAR, “The mind-expanding ideas of Andy Clark,” The New Yorker

  EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS IN MOTION. PHYSICISTS TELL US THAT IF the quivering molecules in your desk moved in sync, the desk would leap from the floor. Even sedentary plants grow and sway and turn toward the sun and open and close. They have to; they would die if they didn’t move. Space places two fundamental constraints on movement, constraints that are reflected in thought: proximity—near places are easier to get to than far ones; and gravity—going up is more effortful than going down.

  Thought, too, is constantly moving, and sometimes hard to catch. Ideas leapfrog over ideas. But there it is: idea. I’ve frozen it, reified it into something static, the only way to catch it. From the never-ceasing flux around us, we carve entities out of space and out of time: people, places, things, events. We freeze them, turn them into words and concepts. We change those moving things into static things so that we can act on them with our minds.

  Constant motion in space is a given, the background for everything that has happened and that will happen. No wonder it is the foundation of thought. Action in space came long before language, as did thought based on action in space.

  Our actions in space change space, change ourselves, and change others. Our actions create things we put in space that change us and others. They change our thought and the thought of others. The things we create (like these words) stay there, in space, changing the thought of people we will never know and can’t even imagine.

  We don’t just freeze the stuff in space and time. We study its form and look for its structure: in our bodies, in our actions and reactions, in the world, in the events that happen in the world, in the language we speak. We find the parts and how they connect to form a whole. The parts and how they fit together tell us what the things can do and what can be done with them. We look for patterns, lines, circles, shapes, branching. We create structure, too, in actions, in talk, in communities, in science, in art—painting, sculpture, film, dance, poetry, drama, opera, journalism, fiction, music. Structure is what holds the pieces together; without structure, things fall apart. And sometimes we do just that, deconstruct and even destroy, to see what happens, to shake things up, to find new structures. Pick Up Sticks. Rearrange the furniture. Reorganize the company. Select musical notes from a random number table. Read Hopscotch in any order. Revolt. Spew chaos on the world.

  Prose is linear, one word after another. Narratives have a linear structure driven by time, theories have a linear structure directed by logic. In theory, that is. The structure of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is place, an apartment building and a puzzle, not time. The linearity of prose doesn’t harness readers, they can jump back and forth. Speaking is linear, one word after another, but that doesn’t stop speakers from interrupting themselves with tangential thoughts nor does it stop listeners from doing the same. Then there are our own thoughts, frequently articulated in inner speech; they hardly walk a straight line and sometimes fly out in too many directions at once. Music is linear in time but spatial over the instruments, which can come in at different times and play different notes at different paces and places. Painting has composition, not linear, but center and periphery. Until Pollack and Rothko. Structure is complicated. It gets done, undone, and redone.

  Pleas, plays, sermons, campaign speeches. Like music, they zig and zag between the earthly and the lofty, the logical and the emotional, stories that become parables with messages; they zig and zag emotionally, pensive, spirited, ominous, wistful, joyful. They change pace, slow and ponderous, fast and light. Narrative does that, too.

  Formal gardens are arranged in perfectly symmetric patterns, with distinct straight paths among the beds of flowers and pruned trees; everything is clear and certain; don’t dare go off the paths. Chinese gardens are different. The paths curve and twist this way and that, up and down, always new vistas around the bend pulling you onward; little is clear, nothi
ng certain; you get lost, and then found.

  Writing a book makes you, or me, think of structure. There is structure to this book, but you don’t have to stay on the paths, you are free to explore it like a Chinese garden rather than a formal one. The book means to show how we think about space and how we use space to think. These are the two parts of the book. The premise is audacious: spatial thinking, rooted in perception of space and action in it, is the foundation for all thought. The foundation, not the entire edifice. Try describing the faces of friends, places you love, events that were meaningful. The memories and images may be vivid, but words flail and fail to capture them. Think about rearranging the furniture in your living room or how to fold a sweater or how many windows were in your childhood home or where the X key is on the keyboard. You might feel your eyes moving or your body squirming. Words alone won’t do it.

  This focus, on space, action, and thought, means that there are large swaths of excellent work I couldn’t include, to my regret. This book is meant to interest many different communities, the diverse communities that I’ve had the good fortune to work with: psychologists, computer scientists, linguists, neuroscientists, biologists, chemists, designers, engineers, artists, art educators, museum educators, science educators, and others who, for one reason or another, are interested in spatial thinking. As for a stroll in a Chinese garden, some of you may want to walk from end to end, others may go hither and thither, visiting some sights and skipping others. You don’t have to look at every tree and flower.

  Below, a guide for special interests.

  For the fundamentals, how perception and action mold thinking about the spaces we inhabit: Chapters One (space of the body), Two (space around the body), Three (space of navigation).

  For varieties and transformations of spatial thinking and spatial ability, Chapter Four.

  For ways gesture reflects and affects thought, Chapter Five.

  For talk and thought about space and just about everything else: Chapters Five, Six, and Seven.

  For designing and using cognitive tools, maps, diagrams, notation, charts, graphs, visualizations, explanations, comics, sketches, design, and art, Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten.

  An artist I know and admire, Gideon Rubin, says he always leaves his paintings unfinished. That way, the viewers finish them. His art is based in old nostalgic photographs, the kind you might find in your grandparents’ albums, sweet photos of children and youths in happy settings, looking at the camera. He paints over the faces so you find yourself looking at, indeed feeling, the postures of the body and you realize how much you learn from the bodies and the clothing and the background. You look at the background and the clothing and you realize that you usually miss that because you’re looking at the faces. You can fill in the empty faces, with your grandmother’s or your cousin’s, and you realize that you forgot what people looked like when they were young. And many viewers fill in so intently that they are sure they saw a face.

  In science, history, politics, perhaps even more than in art, nothing is ever finished.

  That said, this book is finished. Or rather, I have to let it go.

  Research is nearly impossible to do without funding, and I have been fortunate for support from NSF, ONR, NIMH, AFOSR, and the John Templeton Foundation. I have been blessed by the many students, friends, and colleagues whose thinking I have drawn on, directly or indirectly, over many years. Most of you are unaware of this book and haven’t seen it. I apologize to those I’ve forgotten, to those I’ve misrepresented or failed to represent. There was so much more I wanted to include. I’ve reduced you to an alphabetic list, which pains me; each of you gave me something unique and each of you is insightful, inimitable, and irreplaceable. Maneesh Agrawala, Gemma Anderson, Mireille Betrancourt, Gordon Bower, Jonathan Bresman, Jerry Bruner, David Bryant, Stu Card, Daniel Casasanto, Roberto Casati, Juliet Chou, Eve Clark, Herb Clark, Tony Cohn, Michel Denis, Susan Epstein, Yvonne Eriksson, Steve Feiner, Felice Frankel, Nancy Franklin, Christian Freksa, Randy Gallistel, Rochel Gelman, Dedre Gentner, John Gero, Valeria Giardino, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Pat Hanrahan, Eric Henney, Bridgette Martin Hard, Julie Heiser, Kathy Hemenway, Azadeh Jamalian, Danny Kahneman, Andrea Kantrowitz, T. J. Kelleher, David Kirsh, Stephen Kosslyn, Pim Levelt, Steve Levinson, Elizabeth Marsh, Katinka Matson, Rebecca McGinnis, Julie Morrison, Morris Moscovitch, Lynn Nadel, Jane Nisselson, Steven Pinker, Dan Schacter, Roger Shepard, Ben Shneiderman, Ed Smith, Masaki Suwa, Holly Taylor, Herb Terrace, Anthony Wagner, Mark Wing-Davey, Jeff Zacks.

  For not enough years, there was Amos, and his voice stays with me. The kids, too, my second biggest fans, I can hear all of them echoing him, shouting, “Go, Mom,” the way I shouted at them watching their soccer games.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Space of the Body: Space Is for Action

  In which we show that we have an insider’s view of the body, one shaped by our actions and sensations, unlike our outsider view of other things in our world that is shaped by appearance. Mirror neurons map others’ bodies onto our own, allowing us to understand other bodies through our own and to coordinate our actions with theirs.

  WE BEGIN IN OUR SKIN, THAT THIN, FLEXIBLE MEMBRANE THAT encloses our bodies and separates us from everything else. A highly significant boundary. All our actions take place in the space outside our skin, and our lives depend on those actions. As any mother will happily tell you, that activity begins before birth. Who knows why those curious creatures growing inside us keep “kicking”—perhaps to find a more comfortable position? Or why they seem so active at importune times—one of them kept popping my dress up and down during my PhD orals.

  Mercifully, bodies do far more than kick. They eventually perform an astounding assortment of activities. The harmonious coordination underlying those diverse behaviors depends on the continuous integration of a variable stream of information from many senses with the articulated actions of dozens of muscles (apologies for beginning with such a mouthful!). Although our skin encloses and separates our bodies from the surrounding world, accomplishing those activities entails countless interactions with the world. We cannot truly be separated from the world around us. It is those interactions that underlie our conceptions of our bodies.

  Viewed from the outside, bodies are like other familiar objects: tables, chairs, apples, trees, dogs, or cars. We become adept at rapidly recognizing those common objects, primarily from their outlines, their contours, in their prototypical orientations. The contours of objects are, in turn, shaped by the configuration of their parts, legs and bodies for dogs and tables, trunks and canopies for trees. That skill, recognizing objects, takes up residency in a slew of places in the brain. Faces in one array, bodies in another, scenes in yet another. Those regions are active—light up—when we view those kinds of things and not when we view things from other categories.

  For objects (and faces), some views are better than others. An upside-down table or tree is harder to recognize than a right-side-up version; the backside of a dog or the top view of a bicycle is harder to recognize than side views of either. A good view is one that shows the distinctive features of the object. A prototypical dog has four legs (like a prototypical table), an elongated horizontal tube for a body, and a symmetric head with eyes, snout, and a mouth as well as ears protruding from either side. The best view of a dog would show those features. Exactly those views, the ones that present more of the characteristic features in the proper configuration, are the ones we are fastest to recognize and the ones we judge as better representations of the object. For many objects, like dogs or tables, the best views are of course upright, and three-quarters view or profile. In many cases, the contours or silhouettes of good views are sufficient for rapid recognition.

  BODIES AND THEIR PARTS

  Just as for objects, contours of canonical orientations are especially effective for recognizing bodies—when we view them from the outside. But, singularly, for bodies we also have an insider perspective. That intimate insider perspectiv
e comes with many extras. We know what bodies can do and what bodies feel like from the inside. We can’t have that knowledge for chairs or even bugs (Kafka aside) or dogs or chimpanzees. We know what it feels like to stand tall or sit slumped, to climb stairs and trees, to jump and hop, to fasten buttons and tie shoes, to signal thumbs up or OK, to cry and laugh. We know not only what it feels like to act in those ways but, even more significantly, also what it means to act in those ways, stretching or slumping, crying or laughing. Importantly, we can map other bodies and their actions onto our own, suggesting that we understand other bodies not only by recognizing them but also by internalizing them.

  Before that, we map our bodies onto our brains, onto the homunculus, the “little man,” sprawled ear-to-ear across the top shell, the cortex, of our brains. (See Figure 1.1.) The cortex is a thick, crenellated layer splayed over the parts of the brain that are evolutionarily older. From the outside, the brain looks like a giant walnut. And like a walnut, the brain is divided front to back into two not quite symmetric halves, or hemispheres, right and left. For the most part, the right hemisphere controls and has inputs from the left side of the body. The reverse holds for the left hemisphere. Each hemisphere is divided into plateaus called lobes that are separated by valleys, or sulci (singular, sulcus). It’s hard not to talk about the cortex geographically, and undoubtedly there are analogies in the formation of plateaus and layers and valleys on the earth and in the brain. Those wrinkles create more surface, important for the land and important for the brain. The inputs from the various sensory systems are partly channeled to separate lobes of the cortex, for example, vision to the occipital lobe at back of the head and sound to the temporal lobes above the ears. Yet each lobe is wondrously complex, with many regions, many layers, many connections, many kinds of cells, and many functions. Remarkably, even single neurons can be specialized, for a specific view of a face or for tracking an object that moves behind a screen. And there are billions of them in the human brain. A recent estimate is eighty-six billion.