but also the many ways we might transform information to create understanding.
Who takes the time or effort to facilitate understanding? When should we delegate this work to other people, or algorithms, and when should we do it for ourselves? If we do take this on, how might we create our own understanding? What role does technology play in how we understand? These are central themes of this book. We hope that after reading this, you will be fully aware of when something is an understanding problem and what can be done about it, whether that means fixing things yourself, or being able to articulate what needs to change so that understanding can take place.
A Distributed System of Resources
Whether we are making sense of something for ourselves, or others, the questions are the same: How does understanding happen? And—more fundamentally—where does understanding take place?
Think of cognition as a distributed system of resources, resources that include mental perceptions but also much more. Where understanding takes place depends upon what resources we use.
Here is a brief explanation:
In some cases, what you think is in your head, based on prior associations. If you multiply 32 by 11 in your head, the cognitive work happens—in that moment—in your brain.
But where does the cognitive work happen when you use pencil and paper? Not in your brain and not in the pencil either. It happens everywhere, spread across brain, hand, pencil, and graphite symbols etched on the page. In this case, we introduce interactions with external representations.
When we introduce more resources into the mix, things get more interesting. Now, what we think of as cognition is spread through a collection of people, resources, tools, interactions, and so on.
To say that cognition is distributed across people and things doesn’t mean we’re talking about a new kind of cognition. It’s about seeing how all forms of cognitive activity—remembering, planning, reasoning, deciding, analyzing—depend on the ways people use their available resources. Moreover, these cognitive resources can include everything from neurons and whiteboards to laptops and airspeed indicators. Figuring it out is the art of bringing all this to bear.
This shift in perspective, away from just objects and representations and interactions and toward distributed cognitive systems, is vital for taking on complex understanding problems. This also requires coordination, whether this is simply coordinating the cognitive resources at your desk or the resources at play within a globally distributed team of people.
So where understanding takes place really depends upon the complexity of the topic you’re trying to understand. A relatively simple problem—with sufficient prior associations—might actually be solved “in your head,” as the expression goes. But it’s more likely the case that you will need to employ or engage with other cognitive resources in the environment, be these other people, tools, time, and so on.
In sum, where understanding happens depends upon the nature of the problem, while how depends upon:
• Prior associations
• External representations
• Interactions
• Coordination
This is how we’ve come to understand understanding, and how we’ve chosen to structure this book.
Human Understanding
You’ll notice in all this, our focus is not so much on the tools and technologies, as much as the human at the center of things. For example, we could talk about interaction in terms of interface controls—sliders and checkboxes and such, but these things change. What hasn’t changed in thousands of years are the fundamental ways in which humans interact with information. Sorting, chunking, annotating, and so on, these are not new concepts. Whether it’s saving an Instagram photo with a heart, or leaving a mark on a cave wall, the fundamental interaction pattern—annotation—is the same.
Accordingly, this is not a “how to” book, but rather a “how to think about it” book. Bridging theory from cognitive sciences with plenty of practical examples, you’ll learn how to think about the ways humans can play with and explore difficult concepts. This will apply both in the here and now and into the future. While technologies and modalities change, the humans at the center change very slowly, over millennia not milliseconds. By knowing how we—as human creatures—get a sense of information, you’ll be prepared for most problems of understanding.
CHAPTER
2
Understanding as a Function of the Brain, Body, and Environment
I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.
—CONFUCIUS
In the waning years of the nineteenth century, George Stratton, a graduate student who became one of his generation’s pre-eminent psychologists, conducted a simple yet curious experiment on his eyes. What would happen, he wondered, if the world appeared upside down? Glasses aim to correct vision. Stratton crafted glasses to distort his vision by inverting the world so that up became down, left became right. In one of his experiments, he wore the glasses for eight consecutive days. When he took them off, which was rarely, and mostly to sleep, he immediately put on a blindfold. In total, Stratton spent almost 90 hours peering at the world through his distorting lenses. The rest of the time he lived in darkness, as though blind.
Stratton’s experience began exactly as you would expect. He was clumsy and bumbled around. He experienced dizziness, headaches, and what he called a “nervous depression.” Ordinary tasks, such as pouring a glass of milk, had to be “cautiously worked out,” and he found “all but the simplest movements extremely fatiguing.”1 He was less disoriented by the second day. His vision slowly adjusted and after the eight days, when the experiment concluded, the world appeared to him as normal.
This is known as the Stratton effect, and it’s a marvelous example of the brain’s adaptability. Stratton became so well adjusted to his topsy-turvy lenses that when he finally took them off, he faced the same problem: the world appeared to be flipped. Once again, he stumbled, grew dizzy, and used his left hand to reach for items to his right. And once again, his visual system adapted. A few days after removing the glasses, his vision was just as before.
Stratton’s curious experiment has been repeated many times with lenses that distort the world in different ways and with similar results. People experience nausea and clumsiness, slowly adapt, and if they wear the glasses long enough, the world stops looking weird. Hubert Dolezal, for example, attached inverted lenses to a football helmet during a five-week visit to a small village in Greece. Once he overcame the initial awkwardness, Dolezal adapted so well that he was able to bike, swim, and read.2 Hundreds of similar experiments have been conducted over the years, including dozens of long-term experiments in Japan, where people have worn the glasses for as long as 21 days.3
