our physical abilities, the telescopes that let us see deep into space, or the group of people who, only by working together, could push a car up a hill. In the same way that tools or groups enhance our physical abilities, so, too, can we extend our cognitive abilities. By moving expensive operations into the world, we adjust the cost structure. By creating a map or sharing ideas, by playing with a data visualization or a deck of flashcards, by simply being allowed to point at something, we can reduce time, complexity, and errors. We increase our capacity for understanding when cognition is seen as something that happens in and through the world.
Once we grok these ideas, we have the context for all that follows.
The Blind Man and the Stick (Redrawing the Boundaries of Cognition)
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was an early advocate for the idea that we can only understand the mind by accounting for the person plus the environment. After decades of research that spanned everything from anthropology and semiotics to cybernetics and schizophrenia, Bateson concluded that boundaries were the essential question for understanding the complexity and messiness of human experience. Broadly speaking, that’s what embodiment does: redraws the boundaries of cognition.
To comprehend the consequences, Bateson proposed a simple thought experiment:
Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions ... If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior ... you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.30
The blind man, in Bateson’s metaphor, uses the stick to navigate the world. It provides spatial understanding. But we can make all kinds of “sticks” for all kinds of people to help them figure out all kinds of problems. Today’s stick is the smartphone, so we can rephrase Bateson as follows:
Suppose I am a person, and I use a smartphone. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the surface of the phone? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway into the glass? But these are nonsense questions ... you need the world, the phone, the person, the world, the phone, and so on, round and round.
If you have ever designed an app, or a website, or anything for a screen, the impulse is to start by arranging menus, images, buttons, and other widgets on a smooth pixelated surface. This decision means that understanding is hugely dependent on one place, the screen, and while not irrevocable, adjusting “where” understanding actually happens—in and through the world, the person, the phone, and so on—requires conscious effort.
This is what we mean when we say that “understanding is about a system of resources distributed across the environment and then dynamically assembled to perform the activity and achieve a goal.” This is also a good, quick example for how these two evolutions, the evolution of technology and the evolution of our understanding of the mind, converge to unlock new possibilities.
PART
2
How We Understand by Associations
Based on sensory input from our body and the environment, we recall prior associations. What we “think” may or may not be what was intended. Whether we’re having a conversation, reading words on a page, making inferences based on someone’s body language, even being affected by something as subtle as the temperature or a faint smell—all of these sensations influence the associations that come to mind, and what we ultimately think. For this reason, we say: “Associations among concepts is thinking.”
To improve understanding at this level requires some basic knowledge about the brain as a perceptual organ and how much of what we call “thought” is really a tangled web of prior associations, associations that are activated by everything from stories to pictures to even the slightest turn of a phrase. The bulk of this section is dedicated to the many ways these associations are activated, followed by a cautionary note on the dangers and limits of associative thinking.
CHAPTER
3
Understanding Is Fundamentally About Associations Between Concepts
Neo: This—This isn’t real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
—THE MATRIX, 1999
I’m in a room, standing in front of five other people. For the last several minutes, I’ve been trying—unsuccessfully—to explain this new idea. It is a bit of a novel idea, but that shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve got a clear explanation. My explanation uses plain language. I even draw a visual model so people can see what I’m describing. Still, no one “gets” it. Then I say: “It’s kind of like ...” Eyes light up. Heads nod. Now, everyone understands.
What just happened?
We’ve all been in this situation, or one like it. Pitching a startup idea. Defending a design. Advocating a particular political position. Sorting out a big-picture concept. Explaining the business model. Drafting technical schemas. Explaining that niche interest we know so much about ...
By calling to mind an already familiar concept, we make it easier for others to understand what we’re talking about. Sometimes it’s explicit: “It’s like Pinterest for Teachers” (a product pitch) or “Think Pocahontas on an alien planet” (the movie Avatar). Other times it’s more subtle, as with the engineering team that talks about bad decisions building up “technical debt.” And other times it’s allegorical, from the parables told by Jesus to an astrophysicist describing “the Goldilocks Zone” necessary for life on other planets.
But this runs deeper than the associations we try to evoke in others. We all—whether we’re consciously aware of it or not—make sense of any new information by likening it to some other familiar concept. To understand, we link the unknown to what is already known.
Douglas Hofstadter, an American professor of cognitive science, writes “The human ability to make analogies lies at the root of all our concepts ... analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking.”1 These analogies are invaluable, not only for communicating with others, but also for our own understanding. Again, whether we’re aware of it or not, we all think in concepts and patterns. Sure, we can point to the consultant who uses a picture of an iceberg to explain what is seen and (more critically) unseen by the business—the concept is familiar. But it’s more than simple, explicit “A is to B as C is to D” analogies. If we look at research from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,2 we see how many concepts are so deeply embedded in our language, culture, and thought processes that the underlying associations go unobserved. Consider the spatial associations embedded in phrases like “Cheer up!” or “You seem down in the dumps.” We use this language without pausing to consider why “up is good” and “down is bad.” And yet, if we look at how the unwatered plant
