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Interview With Steven Pinker: Masters in Business (Audio) · Masters in Business

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Speaker 1: Look ahead, imagine more, gain insight for your industry with
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Speaker 1: forward thinking advice from the professionals at Cone Resnick. Is
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Speaker 1: Cone resnick dot com slash Breakthrough. This is Masters in
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Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week. On
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Speaker 1: the podcast, I had an absolutely fascinating and fantastic conversation
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Speaker 1: with a rock star professor of neural linguistics and cognitive
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Speaker 1: psychology and all sorts of other interesting uh fields of
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Speaker 1: study within the world of cognition and psychology, Professor Stephen
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Speaker 1: Pinker at Harvard University. This guy is a rock star.
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Speaker 1: This was really one of those conversations that was just
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Speaker 1: so fascinating and went in so many different directions. Uh.
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Speaker 1: He's a psychologist, but he also has a really fascinating
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Speaker 1: uh quantitative background, and so he's a guy that's actually
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Speaker 1: especially driven by data. When you think of things like
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Speaker 1: neural linguistics or or visual cognition, you don't think in
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Speaker 1: terms of of how's the math behind this? But he
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Speaker 1: has a mind that looks at the world very much
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Speaker 1: through a quantitative filter. Uh. He he wrote a number,
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Speaker 1: by the way, uh one a ton of awards at
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Speaker 1: at Harvard and throughout the sciences, highly highly regarded. His
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Speaker 1: books have are also really really well reviewed, very notable.
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Speaker 1: Uh the book Better Better Nature of Our Angels, why
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Speaker 1: violence has decreased around the world and indeed when you
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Speaker 1: look at it quantitatively, violence and war and crime or
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Speaker 1: at record low levels. I know it doesn't look that
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Speaker 1: way when you when you see the news, but that's
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Speaker 1: a fascinating conversation. It's I love that sort of counterintuitive.
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Speaker 1: Here's what everybody believes, it's all wrong, here's the data
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Speaker 1: and proving it. Uh. And and he brings that approach
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Speaker 1: to everything he touches. His His work on how the
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Speaker 1: mind works is really fascinating. How children acquire language skills
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Speaker 1: and why that is a significant evolutionary development amongst humans
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Speaker 1: is really, you know, groundbreaking, fascinating stuff. Um. You may
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Speaker 1: not think that there's an immediate application to the world
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Speaker 1: of investing, but he's just one of these people who
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Speaker 1: are so interesting and so knowledgeable and has such an
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Speaker 1: interesting model in his mind for how to approach thinking
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Speaker 1: about the world that I can't help but think that
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Speaker 1: there are lessons for investors in this. So a little
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Speaker 1: off the beaten path, but absolutely fascinating. Here is my
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Speaker 1: conversation with Professor Steven Pinker. This is Masters in Business
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Speaker 1: with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today
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Speaker 1: is Professor Steven Pinker. He is a rock star professor
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Speaker 1: of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard, where he holds
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Speaker 1: the title of Johnstone Family Professor in the psych Department.
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Speaker 1: He is a psychologist, linguist, and popular science author, specializing
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Speaker 1: in visual cognition and psycho linguistics. I think you can
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Speaker 1: find a lot of what we talked about today absolutely fascinating.
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Speaker 1: He's won numerous awards from the National Economy of Sciences,
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Speaker 1: the Royal Institute, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He is the
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Speaker 1: author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, the
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Speaker 1: Better Angels of Our Nature, The Stuff of Thought, and
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Speaker 1: most recently The Sense of Style. He is also on
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Speaker 1: the usage panel of the American Heritage dis Dictionary. Professor Pinker,
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Speaker 1: welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you. First question, I have to
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Speaker 1: ask you what is visual cognition and psycholinguistics? Those are
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Speaker 1: two sub topics in the field of cognitive science, which
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Speaker 1: is how do we think? What? What is the nature
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Speaker 1: of intelligence. Visual cognition is how we um interpret what
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Speaker 1: we see, or how we think about what we see.
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Speaker 1: How do you recognize the face of a friend? How
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Speaker 1: do you find an object when you're rummaging through a drawer?
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Speaker 1: How do you imagine things that that are hypothetical, like
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Speaker 1: what would my living room look like if the couch
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Speaker 1: was on the other side, or what would the smalllecule
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Speaker 1: look like if I rotated in three dimensions? How do
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Speaker 1: we allocate attention across the visual field? How how does
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Speaker 1: your airport screener look for the hidden weapon in those
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Speaker 1: false colored X ray images and so on, or not
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Speaker 1: find them? So we have learned indeed, so that is
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Speaker 1: a problem in visual cognition. It's not vision in the
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Speaker 1: sense of seeing color and motion and uh and sharp detail,
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Speaker 1: but it's the next step up in the brain, namely,
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Speaker 1: how do you how does the visual world um interact
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Speaker 1: with what you know, what you see, what you think about.
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Speaker 1: So that raises an interesting question. How much of what
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Speaker 1: the average person perceives as a three hundred and sixty
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Speaker 1: d Greek construct of the universe around them, how much
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Speaker 1: of that is accurate and how much of that is
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Speaker 1: the brain filling in projecting. I don't want to say fabricating,
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Speaker 1: but filling in the blind spots and blank spaces is
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Speaker 1: what we see actually there or maybe not so much. Well,
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Speaker 1: when when we're not hallucinating and we're looking at something,
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Speaker 1: then we can we can see things vertically, and we
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Speaker 1: do it much better than any robot or artificial intelligence system.
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Speaker 1: That's why it's taken Google so long to develop a
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Speaker 1: self driving car. They're trying to bring it to the
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Speaker 1: and exceed the level of a human visual system. On
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Speaker 1: the other hand, there is an illusion that we have
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Speaker 1: a wall to wall tableau of visual detail. Uh. And
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Speaker 1: that is constructed by the brain because even if you
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Speaker 1: if you hold your hand out maybe eight inches from
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Speaker 1: the where you're looking, you can't even count the fingers
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Speaker 1: your vision. The acuity of your vision falls off really dramatically,
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Speaker 1: but your eyes are constantly flitting around UH. And so
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Speaker 1: your brain constructs an illusion of a continuously detailed visual world.
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Speaker 1: But outside the phobia, the spot that you're actually looking at,
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Speaker 1: vision is surprisingly course, and we rely on expectations and memories.
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Speaker 1: I could picture hundreds of listeners holding their arms out
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Speaker 1: and saying, you know, I can't count how many fingers
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Speaker 1: I have, And it doesn't have to be in the
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Speaker 1: in your peripheral vision. It just has to be a
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Speaker 1: few inches away from the direction of your gaze. So,
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Speaker 1: and people talk about tunnel vision or hyper focus. Really
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Speaker 1: that's the normal state of there's a sense in which
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Speaker 1: we all have tunnel vision. We don't realize it because
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Speaker 1: our eyeballs move around so quickly. And then psycho linguistics,
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Speaker 1: that was the second half of your question. That's another
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Speaker 1: topic in cognitive science, and that is the psychology of language.
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Speaker 1: How do we understand speech, how do we produce speech,
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Speaker 1: how do children learn their mother tongue? Where does language
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Speaker 1: come from, who decides what the rules are, how does
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Speaker 1: it change over time? How do we read? All of
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Speaker 1: those are topics in psycho linguistics, the psychology of language. So,
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Speaker 1: I don't remember which book it was. It might have
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Speaker 1: been the Stuff of Thought, or it might have been
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Speaker 1: um How the mind works. You talked about how words
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Speaker 1: sometimes are aunt amount of poetic, and it just made
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Speaker 1: me think of the mel Brooks call Rehner routine the
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Speaker 1: two thousand year Old Man, where they discuss how egg
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Speaker 1: and shower are automoto poetic and I won't spoil it.
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Speaker 1: People should go find it on YouTube. It's hilarious. But
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Speaker 1: how much of actual language is because things sound like
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Speaker 1: the way they are a bit uh, and so it's
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Speaker 1: not a complete coincidence that, say, the word malefluous solus
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Speaker 1: and the word cantankerous reminds you of a person with
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Speaker 1: a lot of sharp edges. On the other hand, that
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Speaker 1: only goes so far, because if you could really predict
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Speaker 1: what a word meant by what it sounded like, then
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Speaker 1: you wouldn't have to go through the laborious process of
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Speaker 1: learning another second language. All the words would would be
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Speaker 1: the meetings would be obvious. So most of the language
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Speaker 1: is arbitrary, but there is a little bit of correlation
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Speaker 1: between sound and meaning. So I just got back from Europe,
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Speaker 1: and I know most of what you've worked on has
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Speaker 1: come out of the English language. But why is it
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Speaker 1: that when a non speaker of let's say, French or
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Speaker 1: Italian listens, it sounds so melodic, or if you listen
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Speaker 1: to German it sounds so harsh and guttural. What is
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Speaker 1: it about those languages that give those things that that sensation. Well,
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Speaker 1: it's a component of language called phonology, the the the
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Speaker 1: sound pattern of the language, and that includes the set
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Speaker 1: of vowels and consonants that you're allowed to use. We
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Speaker 1: don't have in English, but you have it in Hebrew
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Speaker 1: and in uh German. Uh. It also includes the melody
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Speaker 1: and rhythm of speech, what's called prosody. Prosody, yes, so
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Speaker 1: that that's kind of the aspect of language that you
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Speaker 1: can hear behind a closed door, and you can often
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Speaker 1: recognize a language just from its prosody. I'm Barry RIDHLTZ.
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Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My
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Speaker 1: special guest today is Professor Stephen pinker Uh. He teaches
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Speaker 1: at Harvard in the Psychology Department, studying cognition and psycholinguistics.
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Speaker 1: One of your more recent books was called The Bitter
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Speaker 1: Angels of Our Nature, How violence has declines, And when
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Speaker 1: you see the data on this, it's pretty it's pretty astonishing.
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Speaker 1: In the pres reference to Better Angels, you say the
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Speaker 1: present day we are blessed by an unprecedented level of
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Speaker 1: peaceful coexistence, but that seems to be contradicted by the
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Speaker 1: news headlines we see every day. How do you reconcile
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Speaker 1: the two because you can't get an accurate picture of
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Speaker 1: the world by looking at the headlines. The headlines are
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Speaker 1: about things that happen, they're not about things that don't happen.
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Speaker 1: And as long as the rate of violence hasn't fallen
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Speaker 1: to zero, they're always going to be enough violent incidents
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Speaker 1: to fill the news. And we can lose sight of
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Speaker 1: the vast amounts of the world that that are at peace. Currently.
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Speaker 1: The there's a there is a zone of war that
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Speaker 1: stretches pretty much from Nigeria through um Sub Saharan Africa,
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Speaker 1: into the Middle East and then down into Pakistan. But
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Speaker 1: five six of the world is at peace. And areas
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Speaker 1: of the world that had were torn by war for
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Speaker 1: centuries haven't had a war in in decades. Western Europe
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Speaker 1: one of the most historically violent part so the world,
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Speaker 1: hasn't had a war in in seventy years. Southeast Asia,
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Speaker 1: those of us who grew up remembering the war in Vietnam, Yes,
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Speaker 1: and and there has not been a war in Southeast
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Speaker 1: Asia and since a small skirmish between China and Vietnam
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Speaker 1: in the late eighties. Uh then, and it isn't just war,
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Speaker 1: it's also one on one crime, which actually kills more
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Speaker 1: people than wars in most years, other than in world wars.
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Speaker 1: But the rate of crime has gone down. Everyone knows
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Speaker 1: that it's gone down in the United States, but it
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Speaker 1: seems to have gone down globally as well, especially if
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Speaker 1: you look at even earlier periods in the history the
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Speaker 1: Middle Ages, the rate of homicide was about thirty five
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Speaker 1: times what it is today. So there was that wasn't
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Speaker 1: even more dramatic decline, and it's homicides that killed the
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Speaker 1: majority of people. So you mentioned the Middle Ages in
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Speaker 1: the book you described the six major historical clients of violence.
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Speaker 1: Let's skip ahead too. I think it was the third
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Speaker 1: or fourth decline, which was the the invention of the
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Speaker 1: printing press and the spread of literal Why is that
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Speaker 1: someonepactful on reducing violence. Well, it's a conjecture. The the
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Speaker 1: phenomenon we're trying to explain is why there was a
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Speaker 1: cascade of humanitarian reforms around the time of the European
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Speaker 1: Enlightenment the second half of the eighteenth century. Also, of
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Speaker 1: course the time of the American Declaration of Independence and
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Speaker 1: Bill of Rights, which was a kind of product of
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Speaker 1: the Enlightenment. Why why did people wake up in the
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Speaker 1: eighteenth century and say, well, maybe we should stop burning heretics,
12:28
Speaker 1: or maybe we should stop executing people for stealing a cabbage. Uh,
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Speaker 1: maybe slavery isn't such a great idea when you come
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Speaker 1: down and try to justify it. Maybe we should stop
12:38
Speaker 1: watching animals tear each other apart for entertainment. Maybe we
12:41
Speaker 1: should stop throwing debtors in in prison. So all of
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Speaker 1: these reforms concentrated in a in a few decades, and
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Speaker 1: we have to ask why, then, why did it take
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Speaker 1: people millennia to figure out that might be something a
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Speaker 1: wee bit wrong with slavery, and so one the first
12:58
Speaker 1: hypothesis is, well, maybe people got richer, and uh, if
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Speaker 1: your life is more pleasant, then you value life more generally,
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Speaker 1: and so you value the lives of others. But the
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Speaker 1: timing doesn't work because people only started to get rich
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Speaker 1: other than the kings and aristocrats in the nineteenth century,
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Speaker 1: and these reforms were really products of the eighteenth century.
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Speaker 1: So I suggested that maybe it's the rise of literacy
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Speaker 1: and printing in the exchange of ideas, and that was
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Speaker 1: the only technology that showed an increase in productivity prior
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Speaker 1: to the Industrial Revolution. The cost of printing a book
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Speaker 1: plunged in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. There was kind
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Speaker 1: of an early version of Moore's law if you look
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Speaker 1: at the cost of producing a book. More and more
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Speaker 1: people were reading. They were best sellers. There were novels.
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Speaker 1: They're also pamphlets in the first newspapers. So the world
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Speaker 1: got more connected. People could exchange ideas, bad ideas could
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Speaker 1: be criticized. People would get together in also in cities,
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Speaker 1: in uh coffee houses and pubs and saloons to exchange ideas,
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Speaker 1: and it's possible that first of all, that could increase
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Speaker 1: your your circle of empathy. It's harder to dehumanize people
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Speaker 1: when you read their words, when you see what life
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Speaker 1: was like from their point of view. And also when
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Speaker 1: you have ideas being brought together and people debating them
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Speaker 1: and arguing them over them, then bad ideas tend to
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Speaker 1: be filtered out. So the idea that the reason that
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Speaker 1: there was a crop failure is because of witchcraft, for example,
14:30
Speaker 1: the reason that there was an epidemic is because the
14:33
Speaker 1: Jews poisoned the wells. Slavery is a good thing because
14:36
Speaker 1: Africans can't do anything but be slaves. All of these
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Speaker 1: toxic ideas could start to seem ridiculous when you know
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Speaker 1: more about the world, and that was conceivably accelerated by
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Speaker 1: the exchange of printed matter. So education helps reduce violence
14:52
Speaker 1: by making people less likely to believe silliness and nonsense
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Speaker 1: and more likely to understand basic science and the logic
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Speaker 1: of This causes that not witchcraft on average over the
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Speaker 1: long run, not in every case, because there have been
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Speaker 1: toxic ideas that have been advanced by intellectuals. Uh Communism,
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Speaker 1: for example, responsible for massive numbers of deaths, was an
15:18
Speaker 1: intellectual movement, and Nazism there were plenty of Nazi professors.
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Speaker 1: But I think that when you have freedom of speech,
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Speaker 1: freedom of expression, so you don't get thrown in jail
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Speaker 1: by criticizing a bad idea, then it's more likely that
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Speaker 1: the bad ideas will be exposed. And it's not a
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Speaker 1: coincidence that repressive regimes are also repressive in um clapping
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Speaker 1: down on free speech. So we've seen a huge decrease
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Speaker 1: in crime and violence in the United States over the
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Speaker 1: past thirty years. Some people have attributed it to things
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Speaker 1: like the ending of lead paper and apartments. Other people
15:52
Speaker 1: have looked at the removal of various outlives to gasoline
15:57
Speaker 1: taking the lead out of gasoline. UH. The guys from
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Speaker 1: Freakonomics even have gone so far as to suggest Roe v.
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Speaker 1: Wade is a factor. Why the huge fall off just
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Speaker 1: in the most recent few decades. Yes, so, starting there
16:14
Speaker 1: was an eight year decline of violent crime in the
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Speaker 1: United States, which brought it down to almost half of
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Speaker 1: its peak UH. And then surprisingly around O seven oh eight,
16:24
Speaker 1: there was a second decline which no one predicted. Everyone said, well,
16:27
Speaker 1: we have great recession, unemployment, crime is going to go up,
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Speaker 1: in equality UH and and crime went down instead of
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Speaker 1: going up. H. The honest answer is, no one really
16:35
Speaker 1: knows what all the causes were. Probably the cute theories
16:39
Speaker 1: like lead in the gasoline abortion are are wrong um
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Speaker 1: the AUH. And it may be that a number of
16:47
Speaker 1: things went right around the same time. Among them were
16:51
Speaker 1: an increase in the number of police in a change
16:53
Speaker 1: in police tactics of policing got smarter nationwide, The homicide
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Speaker 1: rate absolutely plunged. In rates of other types of crime
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Speaker 1: like rape and assault and UH and robbery also went down.
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Speaker 1: And then there are also changes that no one really
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Speaker 1: can completely explain in the culture because there you also
17:09
Speaker 1: had a decline in teenage pregnancy, decline in insurance fraud,
17:14
Speaker 1: a decline in drug use. So somehow people got a
17:18
Speaker 1: little bit more civilized starting in the nineties on top
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Speaker 1: of these other changes. So last question. You've noted that
17:25
Speaker 1: the economic benefits of affluence, really a post nineteenth century phenomena,
17:31
Speaker 1: did not have a big impact on on violent crime. Well,
17:35
Speaker 1: what why do you imagine that is? Well, it didn't
17:37
Speaker 1: have an impact on institutionalized violence, on slavery, on grizzly
17:43
Speaker 1: torture as a form of criminal punishment like breaking on
17:47
Speaker 1: the wheel and burning on this, on the stake um,
17:51
Speaker 1: on hundreds of capital crimes on the lawbooks, so it's
17:55
Speaker 1: really meaning crimes that there was a death penalty for
17:58
Speaker 1: but did not involve homicide exactly. That's right, criticizing the
18:02
Speaker 1: Royal garden being in the company. Listen, I understand some
18:08
Speaker 1: of these other things, but if you're going to criticize
18:09
Speaker 1: the royal that's it. That's amazing that a capital It
18:17
Speaker 1: is amazing. England had four capital crimes on the books
18:20
Speaker 1: and the prior to the nineteenth century, So the affluence
18:25
Speaker 1: didn't didn't institution I think affluence does affect certain kinds
18:29
Speaker 1: of violence. So, for example, countries that are at the
18:33
Speaker 1: rock bottom end of the poverty scale and make less
18:35
Speaker 1: than less than fift dollars GDP per capita are much
18:40
Speaker 1: more likely to have civil wars, although once you climb
18:44
Speaker 1: above that level then there isn't a clear relationship between
18:47
Speaker 1: civil war and affluence. But certainly rock bottom poverty is
18:50
Speaker 1: a contributor to civil war um in general, but not
18:55
Speaker 1: not always. It's the poorer sectors of psycho of society
18:58
Speaker 1: that are more crime prone. So there is there is
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Speaker 1: some relationship, but it's not a not a perfect relationship.
19:03
Speaker 1: I'm Barry rit Halt. You're listening to Masters in Business
19:07
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Professor Stephen Pinker.
19:11
Speaker 1: He is professor of cognitive science and psychology at Harvard,
19:16
Speaker 1: author of numerous books, winner of numerous awards. His most
19:20
Speaker 1: recent book is Sense of Style. And let's talk a
19:24
Speaker 1: little bit about the way people communicate today with the
19:28
Speaker 1: written word. What's the impact of the digital realm on writing?
19:34
Speaker 1: I don't think there's a simple answer to that, because
19:36
Speaker 1: there isn't one thing called writing. And when people it's
19:40
Speaker 1: a question, I get a lot. Well, now that people
19:42
Speaker 1: are writing a hundred forty characters for Twitter and instant
19:44
Speaker 1: messages and emails, isn't the language going to deteriorate? And
19:49
Speaker 1: the answer is no, because we don't just write in
19:53
Speaker 1: tweets or in instant messages. We all command of variety
19:58
Speaker 1: of styles for different formats. We don't speak the same
20:01
Speaker 1: way when giving a lecture as we do um speaking
20:05
Speaker 1: to our family across the dinner table. Uh. Text message
20:09
Speaker 1: is going to be different from a funeral ooration. And
20:11
Speaker 1: so just looking at one kind of writing and saying well,
20:14
Speaker 1: that's what's going to happen to the language in general
20:17
Speaker 1: just isn't valid because we tailor our our language to
20:21
Speaker 1: the medium. What about technologies like power point and the
20:25
Speaker 1: tendency for people to try and communicate by numbered bullet points.
20:31
Speaker 1: There there's good power point, there's bad power point. Uh.
20:35
Speaker 1: In science of scientific presentations are done in power point. Um.
20:40
Speaker 1: Science has not shut down or or even slow down. It's,
20:45
Speaker 1: if anything, accelerating, and power Point by mixing text and
20:49
Speaker 1: images can be and video and audio can be remarkably powerful.
20:54
Speaker 1: We've all sat through horrific power point presentations where just
20:58
Speaker 1: binalities are are broken up into bullets. Uh so, but
21:01
Speaker 1: it's like it's like writing and saying, like, what does
21:04
Speaker 1: what does print do to the language? Well, there's there's
21:06
Speaker 1: a lot of drivell that people write down, and there's
21:08
Speaker 1: a lot of brilliance that people write down, but they
21:10
Speaker 1: met PowerPoint medium opens up huge possibilities. Sturgeon's law applies
21:15
Speaker 1: to everything. In other words, exactly. Um So, so let's
21:19
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about how vocabulary and grammar of
21:22
Speaker 1: English have changed, what drives these changes, and how much
21:27
Speaker 1: has the English language changed just over the past century. Uh,
21:32
Speaker 1: it hasn't changed so much that you can't understand uh
21:36
Speaker 1: writing that was set down a hundred years ago. You know,
21:39
Speaker 1: if you have a look at a copy of the
21:41
Speaker 1: New York Times from and we can understand pretty much
21:44
Speaker 1: all of it. But it feels different. The style was
21:47
Speaker 1: more formal. There's been an informalization of style that might
21:51
Speaker 1: parallel the informalization of everything else. The fact that gentlemen
21:55
Speaker 1: don't wear ties everywhere, and that women don't wear white gloves, us,
22:00
Speaker 1: the fact that we refer to each other on a
22:03
Speaker 1: first name basis instead of Mr. And Mrs So and
22:06
Speaker 1: so all the time, and writing has gotten more casual
22:08
Speaker 1: as society has gotten more democratic, or at least the
22:13
Speaker 1: look and feel is more democratized. Uh, And vocabulary definitely
22:18
Speaker 1: turns over. If you look at an episode of contemporary
22:23
Speaker 1: show that was set in the past, like Downton Abbey,
22:26
Speaker 1: linguists of often had a field day at flagging all
22:28
Speaker 1: of the idioms and figures of speech that just didn't
22:31
Speaker 1: exist in the nineteen teens that the writers, UH kind
22:34
Speaker 1: of anachronistically put in. There's all there's a lot of turnover.
22:37
Speaker 1: A lot of it is. It is kind of random.
22:40
Speaker 1: There's drift in and out. People an old saying will
22:44
Speaker 1: will just sound fusty and old fashioned, and younger people
22:48
Speaker 1: stop using it, and they'll introduce new figures of speech.
22:51
Speaker 1: And so there's a constant turnover, which is why if
22:53
Speaker 1: you go back more than a hundred years, so you
22:55
Speaker 1: go back to Shakespeare, it's not often not that easy
22:59
Speaker 1: to understand what the references were because the vocabulary is obsolete.
23:05
Speaker 1: One of the things you you wrote in the book
23:07
Speaker 1: that I thought was quite interesting, many of the alleged
23:11
Speaker 1: rules of writing are actually superstitions. Explain what that means.
23:15
Speaker 1: So many of us have been under the impression that
23:18
Speaker 1: you wouldn't ought not to split an infinitive. So instead
23:21
Speaker 1: of saying um, as Captain Cricket did, too boldly go
23:24
Speaker 1: where no man has gone before, you should say to
23:27
Speaker 1: go boldly where no man has gone before. That's a
23:30
Speaker 1: perfect example of a superstition. There's absolutely no reason to
23:35
Speaker 1: avoid a split infinitive. The whole rule came from a
23:39
Speaker 1: kind of thick witted analogy to Latin, where you can't
23:42
Speaker 1: split an infinitive. But there's abolutely no reason to avoid
23:45
Speaker 1: spending with the proposition. Exactly so Shakespeare wrote, we are
23:51
Speaker 1: such stuff as dreams are made on. You're gonna go
23:53
Speaker 1: tell Shakespeare that he made a grammatical error. Absolutely not.
23:57
Speaker 1: I'm Barry rid Helts. You're listening to Man Sessters in
24:00
Speaker 1: Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Professor Stephen
24:04
Speaker 1: pinker Uh, professor of psychology and linguistics at Harvard University.
24:09
Speaker 1: Let's jump into some of the really fascinating things that
24:12
Speaker 1: you have written about. There's there's one that really struck me.
24:18
Speaker 1: Let's go start right off on the wonky linguistical things.
24:22
Speaker 1: What's the difference between common knowledge and shared knowledge? Because
24:27
Speaker 1: they seem so similar. Yeah. Shared knowledge is when you
24:31
Speaker 1: know something and I know something. Common knowledge is a
24:34
Speaker 1: term from game theory and logic is when I know something,
24:39
Speaker 1: you know something. I know that you know it, you
24:41
Speaker 1: know that I know it, I know that you know
24:42
Speaker 1: that I know that you know that I know it,
24:44
Speaker 1: at infinitum, and that makes a difference. It makes a
24:47
Speaker 1: difference in um logically, there's certain things that you can
24:52
Speaker 1: deduce if something is commonly known that as you know
24:56
Speaker 1: that I know that you know it, and it makes
24:58
Speaker 1: a difference. I think in our everyday lives when we
24:59
Speaker 1: have an expression like the emperor's new clothes, what are
25:03
Speaker 1: we referring to? And the little boy said, the emperor
25:05
Speaker 1: is naked. He wasn't telling anyone anything that they didn't
25:07
Speaker 1: already know. They could see the emperor was naked. So
25:09
Speaker 1: why did it? Why was it such a big deal? Well,
25:12
Speaker 1: at that moment, everyone knew that everyone else knew that
25:15
Speaker 1: everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the emperor
25:17
Speaker 1: was naked, and that allowed them to challenge the emperor's
25:20
Speaker 1: authority by breaking out into laughter. But before the little
25:23
Speaker 1: boy said that, people didn't realize that they had a
25:26
Speaker 1: shared knowledge of his there was could there could be
25:28
Speaker 1: a you know, a little scintilla of doubt. You know,
25:30
Speaker 1: I can see it, but how do I know that
25:32
Speaker 1: everyone else can see it? And how do I know
25:34
Speaker 1: that they know that that I know? And that makes
25:36
Speaker 1: it by it makes a difference in technology, especially for
25:40
Speaker 1: uh what they call network externalities, That is when the
25:43
Speaker 1: advantage of a technology depends on everyone else using it,
25:47
Speaker 1: and so to generate a next network externality, you need
25:51
Speaker 1: to generate common knowledge. And the best example is from
25:54
Speaker 1: Michael Choa is when Apple introduced the Macintosh back I
25:59
Speaker 1: think it was the most expensive commercial ever made. They
26:01
Speaker 1: introduced it and the Super Bowl played once directed by
26:05
Speaker 1: Ridley Scott, exactly the famous commercial. Now, the thing is,
26:10
Speaker 1: no matter how good a computer Macintosh is, no one
26:13
Speaker 1: is going to buy it if they think that they're
26:15
Speaker 1: the only one buying it, because there won't be enough software,
26:17
Speaker 1: there won't be enough peripherals. You have to know two things.
26:20
Speaker 1: You have to know. Number one, it's a good computer.
26:22
Speaker 1: Number two, everyone knows that. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows
26:26
Speaker 1: that it's a good computer. And that's why you had
26:28
Speaker 1: to introduce it with a um with something that made
26:32
Speaker 1: a splash that you knew when you were watching the
26:34
Speaker 1: super Bowl that the whole country is watching the super Bowl,
26:37
Speaker 1: and so you knew that this product was going to
26:39
Speaker 1: be its advantages were going to be common knowledge as
26:42
Speaker 1: opposed to share knowledge. So so it's more than just
26:44
Speaker 1: the network effects like a fax machine or what have you.
26:48
Speaker 1: It's the network effect plus everybody recognizing that this is now. Well,
26:53
Speaker 1: that's how you create the network effects. You have to
26:55
Speaker 1: generate common knowledge. And the easiest way to generate common
26:58
Speaker 1: knowledge is if there's an event that everyone can witness
27:01
Speaker 1: while knowing that everyone else's witnessing the super bowls. That's
27:06
Speaker 1: why the ads in the super Bowl get almost as
27:07
Speaker 1: much coverage of the super Bowl itself, because that's where
27:10
Speaker 1: companies that introduce a product that depends on a network
27:13
Speaker 1: effect will introduce the company. Monster dot com is another example.
27:17
Speaker 1: Might be a great employment site, but who's going to
27:19
Speaker 1: go there unless they think that employers are advertising jobs
27:23
Speaker 1: and vice versa. Who's going to advertise there unless you
27:25
Speaker 1: know that people are going to be looking for jobs,
27:27
Speaker 1: And so you make a big splash on a super
27:29
Speaker 1: Bowl at Let let me continue along u surprisingly interesting things.
27:35
Speaker 1: Why do we have facial expressions and what functions do
27:38
Speaker 1: they serve. Yeah, it's not just too you might say
27:42
Speaker 1: it wouldn't it be best to keep a poker face
27:44
Speaker 1: and not to know, not to show your cards. Uh.
27:47
Speaker 1: Facial expressions can um can signal the credibility of a
27:54
Speaker 1: threat or a promise, and in a study that I
27:57
Speaker 1: did with Ian Reid and Peter de Sholey, we found
27:59
Speaker 1: that threats are more credible when they're delivered with an
28:03
Speaker 1: angry expression and tone of voice, because they are involuntary
28:09
Speaker 1: unless you're a really really good actor, unless they're perceived
28:11
Speaker 1: as real as sincere, because they are sincere in most cases.
28:15
Speaker 1: So people aren't that good at controlling their facial expressions.
28:17
Speaker 1: So we've seen I've read about other studies where they
28:20
Speaker 1: look at people smiling and apparently an actual smile involves
28:24
Speaker 1: the eyes, and a fake smile just involves the mouth,
28:27
Speaker 1: and on a subconscious level, people can see and and
28:31
Speaker 1: tell the difference. Is am I telling that right? Or
28:35
Speaker 1: absolutely sure? When the you know, when the flight attendant
28:37
Speaker 1: says bye bye, bye bye with the grin pasted on
28:40
Speaker 1: her face, you know that she's not actually experiencing joy.
28:43
Speaker 1: And it's usually because the sincere smile as along with
28:46
Speaker 1: a crinkling of the eyes, not just the mouth in
28:49
Speaker 1: a U shape. So this combines both the visual cognition
28:53
Speaker 1: and the uh the language aspect of this as well,
28:56
Speaker 1: doesn't it. Indeed, And talking to speaking of common knowledge,
29:00
Speaker 1: which we discussed earlier in the program, why do people blush?
29:02
Speaker 1: That's a puzzle that I've thought about, and I think
29:06
Speaker 1: that which is unlike other facial expressions, which are conveyed
29:09
Speaker 1: by contracting muscles, with blushing, You've got this rush of
29:13
Speaker 1: blood to the face. And I think it's because it's um.
29:16
Speaker 1: It generates common knowledge. That is when the thing about
29:19
Speaker 1: blushing is you uh. When you blush, you feel it
29:22
Speaker 1: from the inside and you display it from the on
29:25
Speaker 1: the outside, and you know that everyone knows that you're blushing.
29:28
Speaker 1: And in fact, when someone says you're a blushing that
29:31
Speaker 1: makes it all the worst. You blush all the more
29:33
Speaker 1: beat red. So with the genuine and sincere and both
29:36
Speaker 1: parties understand what it means exactly, it's I I messed up,
29:40
Speaker 1: and I know that I messed up. And I'm not
29:41
Speaker 1: trying to pull anything over on you. I'm not not
29:44
Speaker 1: a psychopath. I'm not a cheater. I have the same
29:47
Speaker 1: standards that you did, and I know that I messed up,
29:50
Speaker 1: which is a way of knowing that the person is
29:52
Speaker 1: less likely to mess up in the future if at
29:54
Speaker 1: least he recognizes that he messed up. So blushing embarrassment
29:59
Speaker 1: isn't acknowledgement of common ethical standards? Is that? Is that
30:04
Speaker 1: how common morality? Am I mistating that? That's right, common norms,
30:08
Speaker 1: that's right, But in particular the common knowledge, in that
30:11
Speaker 1: technical sense of if I'm blushing, then not, I know
30:15
Speaker 1: that you know that I know that I've messed up,
30:17
Speaker 1: and that means that I, by blushing, I'm acknowledging that
30:21
Speaker 1: I'm playing by the same rules. So I mentioned morality
30:24
Speaker 1: and ethics. One of the columns you had written, I
30:27
Speaker 1: think it was for The Times talked about three people,
30:31
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, and Norman Borlog And if you
30:36
Speaker 1: were to ask various people, who's the most admirable of
30:40
Speaker 1: these three people, who is the most um has had
30:46
Speaker 1: the greatest impact on on humans? Most most people get
30:49
Speaker 1: the answers to that wrong. Yes, I mean the common
30:52
Speaker 1: answer as well. You know Mother Teresa, she said, you
30:54
Speaker 1: know a saint. She is the most. In fact, if
30:56
Speaker 1: you ask someone who is the most moral person of
30:59
Speaker 1: the entry, they would say, oh, I guess Mother Teresa.
31:02
Speaker 1: And I think, what exactly did she do? I mean,
31:05
Speaker 1: you know, she washed the feet of some you know,
31:07
Speaker 1: lepers and brought them well help them. I mean, how
31:12
Speaker 1: did she actually make them less poor? Temporarily for a
31:17
Speaker 1: meal or two? But for a meal or two. But
31:19
Speaker 1: then you look at um Bill Gates, and I used
31:23
Speaker 1: the example at a time before he became famous as
31:25
Speaker 1: a philanthropist and was just starting the Bill and Melinda
31:28
Speaker 1: Gates Foundation. Um, he's trying to conquer infectious disease in
31:32
Speaker 1: the developing world with a the chance of improving the
31:38
Speaker 1: lives of tens of millions of people, of saving tens
31:41
Speaker 1: of millions of lives. Then Norman borlog I threw in,
31:44
Speaker 1: because that's a fascinating so I never heard of him.
31:48
Speaker 1: He won the Nobel Peace Price for uh inventing the
31:52
Speaker 1: Green Revolution in the nineteen sixties, developing crops and methods
31:57
Speaker 1: of farming that multiplied the amount of food that an
32:01
Speaker 1: acre of land would deliver. He's credited with saving a
32:04
Speaker 1: billion lives, more than anyone in history, and no one's
32:07
Speaker 1: heard of him he wins, and yet is totally unknown.
32:10
Speaker 1: So what it shows is that our sense that our
32:14
Speaker 1: own ascription of morality, who we revere, who we don't
32:18
Speaker 1: care about, who we even maybe even revile. By the way,
32:21
Speaker 1: the other reason I chose Bill Gates was at the
32:23
Speaker 1: time that he was associated with ms DOS and windows
32:28
Speaker 1: everyone hated and so everyone hated him. He got up
32:30
Speaker 1: someone through a pianist face. There were I Hate Gates
32:33
Speaker 1: websites at the time. Uh. It so our our description
32:37
Speaker 1: of morality, who we give brownie points to is very
32:41
Speaker 1: loosely related to how much good they do in the world.
32:44
Speaker 1: And uh, it's actually a quirk of our own nature
32:47
Speaker 1: of who we admire. I think it relates to who
32:49
Speaker 1: we would like to have on our side and our
32:52
Speaker 1: foxhole part of our community, and it isn't really closely
32:55
Speaker 1: related to how much good they do in the world. So,
32:59
Speaker 1: if people want to find line more of your writings
33:01
Speaker 1: online in addition to all your various books, where's the
33:04
Speaker 1: best place to send them? Stephen Pinker dot com is
33:07
Speaker 1: my website that has links to all of my articles,
33:11
Speaker 1: as well as two pages for each one of my books.
33:14
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation. Be sure and stick around
33:17
Speaker 1: and listen to our podcast extras, where we keep the
33:20
Speaker 1: tape rolling and continue to chat about all things cognitive
33:24
Speaker 1: and linguistic. Be sure and check out my daily column
33:27
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter
33:31
Speaker 1: at rit Halts. I'm Barry rit Halts. You're listening to
33:35
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Are you looking to
33:39
Speaker 1: take your business to the next level? The accounting, tax
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Speaker 1: imagine more. Is your business ready to break through? Learn
34:01
Speaker 1: more at cone Resnick dot com slash Breakthrough, cone Reisneck
34:05
Speaker 1: Accounting Text Advisory. Welcome to the podcast, Steve, I don't
34:10
Speaker 1: want to call you Professor Panker. Steve, what Steve? Thank
34:14
Speaker 1: you so much for doing this. This is really I
34:16
Speaker 1: love this stuff. I find it endlessly fascinating and anytime
34:20
Speaker 1: I can weave cognition into what investors should be looking at,
34:25
Speaker 1: thinking about, and just stimulating their thought process to develop
34:30
Speaker 1: better mental models and better processes to approach this stuff.
34:35
Speaker 1: I think it's just fascinating, and it's your work is
34:39
Speaker 1: so diverse that you're obviously fascinated by so much of this.
34:43
Speaker 1: It's apparent and everything I read of yours absolutely and
34:47
Speaker 1: thank you for having me on. Well, it's been it's
34:49
Speaker 1: been my pleasure. There are some questions we didn't get
34:52
Speaker 1: to before I do my standard questions, but some of
34:56
Speaker 1: these I just have to come back to. So in
34:59
Speaker 1: the ninet fifties, comic books were going to turn juveniles
35:03
Speaker 1: into delinquents. And what happened subsequent to that, Yeah, the
35:08
Speaker 1: nineties were was a decade of very low crime, and
35:11
Speaker 1: then the nines same thing. Video games We're going to
35:15
Speaker 1: cause people to become ultra violent, especially the first person
35:18
Speaker 1: shooter games. It's easy to imagine how that might happen,
35:21
Speaker 1: but it didn't happen. That was the era in which
35:23
Speaker 1: crime plummeted, and then in general, television, transistor radio's rock
35:29
Speaker 1: and roll music videos were decades where people were supposed
35:33
Speaker 1: to get stupid. That's right, and actually i Q scores
35:36
Speaker 1: have been increasing for decades, the so called Flynn effect. Well,
35:40
Speaker 1: crime did go up in the nineteen sixties and it
35:42
Speaker 1: stayed high from the sixties through the early nineties, so
35:47
Speaker 1: not all of so. So the people who said that
35:51
Speaker 1: when rock and roll was coming in that they would
35:53
Speaker 1: lead to a breakdown of order and safety weren't completely wrong,
35:57
Speaker 1: and that there was a crime shot up by a
36:01
Speaker 1: factor of more than two. So it was rock and roll.
36:04
Speaker 1: It wasn't an ill considered war in Southeast Asia. It
36:07
Speaker 1: was music. Well it wasn't rock and roll. But but
36:11
Speaker 1: although it wasn't, the war in Asia probably didn't lead
36:15
Speaker 1: to a rise in street crime in uh in the
36:17
Speaker 1: United States either, but it did lead to So what
36:22
Speaker 1: what I remember New York City in the seventies was
36:25
Speaker 1: a disaster. What led to a breakdown in those basic
36:30
Speaker 1: societal norms of not robbing and killing and raping? How
36:36
Speaker 1: does that go off the rails? Again, the the honest
36:38
Speaker 1: answers that we don't know for sure, but a number
36:41
Speaker 1: of things happened. The baby boomer generation reached its crime
36:45
Speaker 1: prone years in the sixties. That wasn't enough to explain it,
36:48
Speaker 1: that would explain why violent crime would increase by violent
36:52
Speaker 1: crime in fact increase, But it may be that having
36:56
Speaker 1: a whole generation coming of age at the same time
37:00
Speaker 1: overwhelmed societies defenses, and it was a time in which
37:05
Speaker 1: there was a civil unrest, change in rights. There was
37:09
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of a whole bunch of things, and
37:11
Speaker 1: a general you know, we we grew up uh in it.
37:15
Speaker 1: There was a decline respect for authority. The police backed off.
37:21
Speaker 1: There is some truth to the the explanation that the
37:25
Speaker 1: criminal justice system was less likely to put people behind bars?
37:28
Speaker 1: What about the broken window thesis? To any of that,
37:33
Speaker 1: there there is evidence that that that the broken windows
37:35
Speaker 1: effect is real. That is, if a neighborhood shows signs
37:38
Speaker 1: of disrepair, the famous broken windows, graffiti, turnstile jumping, and
37:43
Speaker 1: so on, then that conveys the message that that this
37:47
Speaker 1: is a place where the rules are not enforced. And
37:49
Speaker 1: there's some experiments that show that increasing the general appearance
37:53
Speaker 1: of order leads to a decrease in in the rate
37:56
Speaker 1: of crime. It doesn't deserve all the credit, but it
37:59
Speaker 1: may be deserved part of it. I find that I
38:02
Speaker 1: find that fascinating. Let me see what else I skipped through. Oh,
38:06
Speaker 1: let's talk about the long piece. When we were talking
38:08
Speaker 1: about from Better Angels, the various six phases of um
38:13
Speaker 1: decrease in violence. What what exactly is the long piece
38:18
Speaker 1: and what was the cause of it? Long piece refers
38:21
Speaker 1: to the fact that war between great powers that the
38:24
Speaker 1: eight pound guerrillas of the world um has kind of stopped.
38:29
Speaker 1: The last one that we had was in nineteen fifty
38:31
Speaker 1: three with the end of the Korean War, with the
38:33
Speaker 1: United States on one side in China on the other.
38:36
Speaker 1: Was that really a US versus China though, I mean,
38:38
Speaker 1: I know there were a lot of proxies, but it
38:40
Speaker 1: wasn't like World War Two where Germany and Russia and
38:44
Speaker 1: US and Japan were literally doing battles with each other. Well,
38:48
Speaker 1: there was a coalition that the United Nations authorized, with
38:53
Speaker 1: of course the United States contributing the most troops and weaponry,
38:57
Speaker 1: and of course the North Korea had its own army,
39:00
Speaker 1: but supported by overtly by China and with the USS
39:04
Speaker 1: are definitely helping, although not sending troops. But through most
39:10
Speaker 1: of history the great powers were always at each other's throats,
39:14
Speaker 1: and then after World War Two that that kind of
39:17
Speaker 1: um went out of style, as did wars between developed states,
39:22
Speaker 1: that is, rich countries. We we think of war is
39:25
Speaker 1: something that takes place in the poor, backward parts of
39:27
Speaker 1: the world. But it used to be that it was
39:29
Speaker 1: the rich countries that were constantly at war, and that
39:32
Speaker 1: has gone out of style, and wars between countries in general.
39:36
Speaker 1: Most wars now are civil wars, wars between interstate war
39:41
Speaker 1: as opposed to interstate war, and UM. A number of things.
39:45
Speaker 1: One is that the world has become more globalized. When
39:48
Speaker 1: you when there's more trade, there is less of an
39:52
Speaker 1: incentive to go to war. You don't. You don't kill
39:54
Speaker 1: your customers because your supply chain or your supply chain exactly,
39:59
Speaker 1: you don't. It's cheaper to buy things than to steal
40:01
Speaker 1: them than you don't. Uh, You're you're less likely to
40:04
Speaker 1: plunder and invade. There's been with the United Nations, there
40:08
Speaker 1: has been a norm that borders are pretty much grandfathered in,
40:12
Speaker 1: So you don't push borders around by force. You don't
40:15
Speaker 1: swallow states that states are are now considered to be immortal.
40:20
Speaker 1: They can break apart, but they can't be swallowed by
40:23
Speaker 1: their neighbors. Uh. There is more democracy, and on average,
40:27
Speaker 1: democracies are a little bit less likely to wage war,
40:30
Speaker 1: at least on each other. And I think there's more
40:33
Speaker 1: of a respect for human life. The idea that you
40:35
Speaker 1: should die for your country, that it's glorious and sweet
40:38
Speaker 1: and the best thing that you could do. And conversely,
40:41
Speaker 1: that leaders can sacrifice millions of their own young men
40:46
Speaker 1: for the glory of the empire is uh less an
40:50
Speaker 1: operation now than it used to be. So before I
40:52
Speaker 1: get to my favorite questions, I would be remiss if
40:55
Speaker 1: I didn't ask about the debate over gene editing. If
41:00
Speaker 1: people not familiar with Crisper. There's been a huge number
41:04
Speaker 1: of articles, most recently in Wired magazine, describing how this
41:08
Speaker 1: has made what was once time consuming, complex and expensive,
41:14
Speaker 1: very inexpensive and relatively easy to do. What is the
41:19
Speaker 1: advances in biotech say about current morality and why are
41:24
Speaker 1: some people on one side or the other of that debate?
41:28
Speaker 1: There's there's a widespread fear that first popped up when
41:32
Speaker 1: Dolly the Sheep was cloned in and it's been revived
41:35
Speaker 1: now with the development of Crisper Cassinine making it easy
41:38
Speaker 1: to edit genes that will be designing our own children
41:41
Speaker 1: very soon. We'll we'll put in the gene for musical ability,
41:44
Speaker 1: or athletic ability or high i Q. I think that's
41:48
Speaker 1: very likely, unlikely. I think it is possible. That you
41:52
Speaker 1: could edit out disease genes. But having looked at the
41:57
Speaker 1: genetic basis of personality and intelligence, I can tell you
42:00
Speaker 1: that there ain't no i Q gene. There are. There
42:03
Speaker 1: may be a thousand genes, each one of which raises
42:06
Speaker 1: or lowers your i Q by a tenth of a point,
42:09
Speaker 1: but the single gene that's going to give you musical
42:11
Speaker 1: talent or athletic ability just doesn't exist. That's just not
42:15
Speaker 1: the way genes work. There is a genetic basis to
42:17
Speaker 1: talent and personality, but seems to be distributed across hundreds
42:22
Speaker 1: or thousands of genes, each with a tiny effect, many
42:25
Speaker 1: of which may have side effects. That is, there may
42:28
Speaker 1: be a gene that increases your um likelihood of being smart,
42:32
Speaker 1: but also slightly increases your rate of having bipolar disorder
42:36
Speaker 1: or of some kind of degenerative disease. So I don't
42:41
Speaker 1: see parents taking the chance with their children at any
42:45
Speaker 1: time soon of mucking around with the with the embryo
42:48
Speaker 1: by putting in a few genes, each of which might
42:51
Speaker 1: increase the i Q by a tiny fraction of a point,
42:55
Speaker 1: but might also introduce some some risks. So I'm glad
42:59
Speaker 1: I brought that up because us. I've read some of
43:02
Speaker 1: the pieces you've written on that and thought it was interesting.
43:04
Speaker 1: Let me get to my I know I only have
43:07
Speaker 1: you for another ten minutes or so, so let me
43:09
Speaker 1: get to some of my favorite questions I asked all
43:12
Speaker 1: my guests. So your background is really kind of interesting.
43:17
Speaker 1: Did you know you always wanted to be a professor?
43:20
Speaker 1: Did you always want to go into teaching? I certainly
43:23
Speaker 1: enjoyed teaching from the time I was in uh in college.
43:26
Speaker 1: I put myself through college by tutoring high school students
43:29
Speaker 1: in math and science. Uh For a while, I thought, you,
43:33
Speaker 1: maybe I'd would be fun to be a high school
43:34
Speaker 1: math teacher, but I UH my mother, among others, convinced
43:41
Speaker 1: me that university was really a place for me. That
43:46
Speaker 1: adding to knowledge as well as transmitting knowledge was seemed
43:50
Speaker 1: to be what I enjoyed doing. Nicely done, rose Um.
43:54
Speaker 1: Next question, early mentors. Who were some of the people
43:57
Speaker 1: who uh um entered you and gave you intellectual direction
44:04
Speaker 1: As an undergraduate, I was a student at McGill University
44:08
Speaker 1: and was in the psychology department there, and I worked
44:10
Speaker 1: in a lab of a cognitive psychologist named Albert Bregman.
44:13
Speaker 1: Who studied auditory pattern perception, how we the brain makes
44:17
Speaker 1: sense of the world of sound. In university, one of
44:21
Speaker 1: my advisors was Roger Brown, the great social psychologist and
44:25
Speaker 1: founder of the study of child language acquisition in children
44:28
Speaker 1: and a gifted writer, and I think I took lessons
44:31
Speaker 1: from him on writing how to try to write stylishly.
44:35
Speaker 1: Stephen Kostlin was my mentor in visual cognition. He's now
44:39
Speaker 1: the academic dean of Minerva University, a startup university based
44:44
Speaker 1: in San Francisco. Interesting is interesting group, and it seems, um,
44:50
Speaker 1: you took something from each of those folks and took
44:55
Speaker 1: one more is a Joan Bresnan, who is a linguist
44:57
Speaker 1: at m I T. At the time she was a
44:59
Speaker 1: student of Noam Chomskys. She was my post doctoral advisor. Ah,
45:03
Speaker 1: there you go. That that's quite a quite a list.
45:06
Speaker 1: You referenced Chomsky quite frequently in many of the books, obviously, Um,
45:13
Speaker 1: he is a leader in this field. Uh. My next
45:18
Speaker 1: question is what are some of your favorite books, whether
45:21
Speaker 1: it relates to UH language and and linguistics or or
45:25
Speaker 1: anything else. Noam Chomsky was my colleague a M I
45:28
Speaker 1: T for twenty one years. And he was in a
45:30
Speaker 1: different department, but he was certainly an influence from the
45:33
Speaker 1: time that I was an undergraduate, particularly his books in
45:36
Speaker 1: in linguistics. Language in Mind was a book that I
45:40
Speaker 1: read as an undergraduate. I don't certainly don't share his politics,
45:43
Speaker 1: but uh and I nor do I subscribe to his
45:46
Speaker 1: particular theory of how language works. But he broke open
45:50
Speaker 1: the field of language and really deserves credit for the
45:54
Speaker 1: modern understanding of language. Any other books stand out as
45:57
Speaker 1: whether it's fiction non fixed in related Uh, Well, I'm
46:03
Speaker 1: married to a novelist, Rebecca Goldstein, and her book The
46:06
Speaker 1: Mind Body Problem I read many years before I met her.
46:09
Speaker 1: They really remember that old ad? The guy Victor Kayam
46:13
Speaker 1: and got a Shavery said, I liked it, so what
46:15
Speaker 1: the company bought the company? Well, I liked the novelists
46:18
Speaker 1: so much that I married her. That that's very very funny. Um, So,
46:22
Speaker 1: since you really started in psycholinguistics and and visual cognition,
46:28
Speaker 1: what are some of the major changes that have taken
46:30
Speaker 1: place in that industry or that field of study? I
46:34
Speaker 1: should really call it, certainly the rise of neuroimaging. Functional
46:37
Speaker 1: magnetic resonance imaging was revolutionized the field, being able to
46:43
Speaker 1: see what part of the brain lights up in response
46:45
Speaker 1: to different stimulus, different processes. Is that is that specifically
46:53
Speaker 1: what you're referring to exactly, yeah, and that that has
46:55
Speaker 1: been the single biggest change, And how does that manifest
46:59
Speaker 1: this often in the study of language, well, you can
47:02
Speaker 1: see how words are processed in the brain. UM. You
47:07
Speaker 1: can see how um grammatical processing is implemented. That is,
47:12
Speaker 1: by and again by grammatical processing, I don't mean rules
47:15
Speaker 1: like avoiding dangling participles. I mean just ordering words in
47:18
Speaker 1: a way that makes sense what we do every time
47:20
Speaker 1: we open our mouths and produce a sentence. And you
47:23
Speaker 1: can see also the pattern of information flow from one
47:28
Speaker 1: part of the brain to another, because it's not as
47:30
Speaker 1: if one blob of the brain is responsible for all
47:33
Speaker 1: the language there is. You have to coordinate your understanding
47:38
Speaker 1: of what words mean, your knowledge of in English syntax,
47:41
Speaker 1: the control of the muscles of your tongue. UH. In conversation,
47:45
Speaker 1: you go back and forth between speaking and listening, So
47:47
Speaker 1: it also involves hooking up uh speech information coming in
47:51
Speaker 1: from the ear. UH. You have to hold things in
47:54
Speaker 1: memory as you start a sentence. You have to know
47:57
Speaker 1: where you're going. So, a lot of different part of
48:00
Speaker 1: the brain are involved in language, forming a kind of network,
48:03
Speaker 1: and narrow imaging helps you see the different parts of the
48:06
Speaker 1: the network and how they interact. I recall reading about
48:09
Speaker 1: aphasiacs and other damages to physical damages to the brain.
48:14
Speaker 1: How important is looking at damage, physical trauma and disease
48:19
Speaker 1: too learning about language. Is that something that we did
48:24
Speaker 1: decades ago and figured out, oh, this injury causes this result.
48:29
Speaker 1: Have we moved beyond that or is that still a
48:31
Speaker 1: key part of recognizing how these brain components developed. It
48:37
Speaker 1: still is a key part. It used to be the
48:39
Speaker 1: only way that you could understand language in the brain.
48:41
Speaker 1: Um Now it's still important even in the era of
48:44
Speaker 1: neuro imaging, because your imaging tells you what is active
48:47
Speaker 1: when you are engaged in a task, but it doesn't
48:50
Speaker 1: tell you what's necessary for all you know, it could
48:53
Speaker 1: be like the lights that flash on a on a computer,
48:56
Speaker 1: that you turn off the lights, the computer still does
48:58
Speaker 1: its thing. It's kind of a spell low for effect,
49:00
Speaker 1: and you never know just from the fact that blood
49:03
Speaker 1: is going to a particular area of the brain whether
49:06
Speaker 1: actually at part of the brain is necessary for the
49:09
Speaker 1: person to do what they're doing. With brain damage, you're
49:12
Speaker 1: removing a component and or nature is removing a component,
49:15
Speaker 1: and you're seeing what they can no longer do. So
49:17
Speaker 1: it's still a supplementary form of information and an important one.
49:21
Speaker 1: So you work with a lot of college kids, people
49:24
Speaker 1: who are just starting out their career. When a millennial
49:27
Speaker 1: or recent graduate comes to you and says, I'm thinking
49:31
Speaker 1: about a career in linguistics and visual cognition and in
49:35
Speaker 1: any of the subsectors of psychology that you focus on,
49:39
Speaker 1: what sort of advice do you give them? If you're
49:42
Speaker 1: if you're passionate about something, and if you're if you
49:46
Speaker 1: can see yourself throwing yourself into it, doing a lot
49:49
Speaker 1: of work, then you should pursue it as a career,
49:53
Speaker 1: even if the academic jug market is discouraging, which of
49:57
Speaker 1: course it is um it has been at various times,
50:00
Speaker 1: such as when I was a student, and I remember,
50:02
Speaker 1: I remember the advice that I got from Ronald Melzack,
50:05
Speaker 1: a professor of psychology at McGill, pioneer in the study
50:08
Speaker 1: of pain. He said, look at the bright side. People die, people,
50:13
Speaker 1: people retire, people get higher paying jobs. In industry. There's
50:16
Speaker 1: always turnover, even if the market is contracting, if you
50:20
Speaker 1: think you're good at it, if you're willing to to
50:23
Speaker 1: dedicate yourself to it, if it excites you enough that
50:25
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel like work but it feels like play,
50:28
Speaker 1: there will always be openings. And so I tell students,
50:30
Speaker 1: if they're really passionate about some intellectual topic, not to
50:34
Speaker 1: just automatically go into law or finance or consulting because
50:38
Speaker 1: that's the easy path, but that it really is still
50:40
Speaker 1: possible to make a career in what you what you love.
50:44
Speaker 1: And our our last question is what is it that
50:47
Speaker 1: you know about cognition and linguistics today that you wish
50:51
Speaker 1: you knew when you started thirty years ago? Oh? Well
50:56
Speaker 1: that UM, I think that any cognitive or psychological trait
51:02
Speaker 1: both has a heritable basis but is distributed over hundreds
51:06
Speaker 1: or thousands of genes. That there is not going to
51:08
Speaker 1: be a gene for x UM, That that there's a
51:13
Speaker 1: lot of information that can come out of looking at
51:16
Speaker 1: large data sets. That you're understanding of a subject is
51:21
Speaker 1: only as good as the data that you can examine,
51:24
Speaker 1: and that to understand something you've got to um look
51:28
Speaker 1: at as large a set of data as you can
51:30
Speaker 1: find Professor Panker, thank you so much for being so
51:35
Speaker 1: generous with your time that this has been just absolutely fascinating.
51:39
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation UH, and others like this,
51:43
Speaker 1: be sure and look up an inch or down an
51:45
Speaker 1: inch at any of the other ninety two or so
51:48
Speaker 1: such conversations we've had over the past two years. Be
51:52
Speaker 1: sure to check out my daily column. It used to
51:55
Speaker 1: be Bloomberg View dot com, but I am now seeing
51:58
Speaker 1: that it is Bloomberg dot com. You can follow me
52:01
Speaker 1: on Twitter at rid Halts Um. I would be remiss
52:05
Speaker 1: if I did not think Uh, Taylor Riggs for being
52:09
Speaker 1: our booker, Charlie Volmer for being our producer engineer, and
52:13
Speaker 1: Michael Batnick, head of research. I'm Barry Ri Halts. You're
52:18
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