November 20, 2012 • 28 mins
While it might not feel like it, humans were born to crunch numbers, engineer solutions and scientifically evaluate the world. Join Robert and Julie as they discuss the research on our inborn abilities and how science is ultimately a part of who we are.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Trulie Douglas.
We just finished recording an episode titled how to Think
Like a Child, and now we're breaking into this idea
that we are all scientists. And you're probably wondering, why
(00:24):
aren't you guys hitting this information right now? Um, And
certainly we've touched on some of these topics before in
the past, and it's because we're hitting the road with
this act. Uh. One week from now the time we're
recording it, we're gonna be at the E four conference
Excellence in Elementary Engineering in the Twin Cities, and we're
gonna give a keynote when we're gonna talk about this
idea that we are all scientists, because we're gonna be
(00:46):
talking to elementary school teachers who are who want to
engage with children and and get them excited about science
and engineering, and there's often this false idea that it's
something alien to them, where it's kind of like, let's
let's give some children into a room and let's teach
them to love sardines and broccoli. You know, let's let's
get them excited about asparagus. But no, it's it's it's
(01:08):
something that they already have in them, and it's it's
it's ultimately more about about connecting with the inner scientists
that is in all of us. Right, we're gonna make
the case today that science is not a part of us,
it is actually intrinsic to our nature. And I will
say that having worked on this podcast, I feel like, uh,
it's very interesting to look at science as something that
(01:30):
is innate rather than, as I've mentioned before, looking through
the windows of science, because I feel like this podcast
has really informed my worldview on how it's not apart
from us, how every gesture, word, thought can be pinned
back to what you know. We've often talked about the
magic of reality, and when I say the magic of reality,
(01:51):
it's this idea that a single celled organism created an
unbroken lineage extending fourth and time four billion years until
we are sitting here before you guys, recording our voices.
To me. That is amazing and it all points back
to the fact that science has helped frame our understanding
(02:11):
of how we came to be in this world. Um,
as well as why things are the way that they are. So,
as we discussed in the previous podcast about being like
a child, one of the big things here is that
as as we get older and as we become adults,
we take on all these different world views. We take
on all these preconceived notions of how what the world
is and how it works, about who we are, how
do we fit into the world, What is our group,
(02:32):
what is our society? Who are the others? What laws
are in place that we're obeying, What laws are in
place that we are neglecting, What laws are in place
that the other guys and gals out there should be obeying,
but are not. All these complex, illusory ideas. We end
up building this this fortress of ideas through which we
try to understand the world around us. And we use
(02:53):
a lot of labels, right like you begin to understand
yourself as you're growing up, right and you people say
that you're good at X, Y or z, and then
it's a liberal, you're a conservative, You're you're in the model,
You're you're creative or number minded, you're you're very sensible.
You know. We end up taking on all these labels,
pinning them to our jacket and and that's who we
(03:14):
are and that's what the world is now. But I
would argue that in addition to what other label or
the many labels that we can put on ourselves, we
are all inherently engineers. Right. Okay, Now, think you're probably
like kind of know what you're talking about. I don't
use blueprints, or maybe I do use blueprints, but I
don't build things times. Yeah, but now think about your
(03:38):
childhood and think about treehouses or building something. You don't
have to build a treehouse, It could be at all
the things that if you're a lego person like I was,
and I am not an engineer, I have to check
things two or three times when I do simple calculations
with a Google calculator. You know, I'm that type of person.
I'm more of a liberal arts person. But as a child,
(03:59):
I had the out of legos and had build everything
under the sun. You know, I'd see a helicopter, I'd
have to build that helicopter. Then I have to crash
the helicopter because we shut down by another one. That
was the evil helicopter. But then I would build another one,
and then it would be maybe I'd build build a
building or a tank. I mean so even as as
a child playing with blocks, or even if we're not
playing with actual physical blocks, we're building things. We're building stories,
(04:20):
we're building ideas, we're engineering something. When we're engaging in play, well,
you're also learning how the world works, how gravity works, right,
and if you don't stack those blocks in a way
that can support weight, then whatever you're creating is going
to fall or just not work out. So every kid
wants to build a giant tower, but you quickly learned
that you've got to You've got to figure out how
(04:42):
the base is gonna work. You gotta build a broader
base to make the tower go up all the way.
Otherwise it's just gonna be blocks falling over and making
a loud no. Yeah, I see that. I've seen this
so many times with kids, and kids can, by the way,
with legos, and I know everybody knows this, but really
they can create some of the most uh some of
the coolest, most innovative buildings I've ever seen, because they
will take these risks and put things where they're not
(05:04):
really supposed to go. But then again they figure out
how things are weighted. So again we don't think about it,
but this is really the mind of an engineer at play.
And by the way, kids are also born Euclideans. So
when I say kids are this, that also means that
we are Euclideans. And when I say Euclideans, I mean
that we use geometric clues to navigate the world. Because
(05:25):
you have bottom line, we are born into a world
of numerous fixed and movable objects. We live in a
in a world of space and time. As a creature,
you know, if you're a human and you're listening to this,
this applies to you. If you're if you're a cat
and you're listening to this, or a dog, this applies
to you though in kudos for understanding the English language podcast.
(05:46):
But you have to engage in this world that is physical,
that has space, that has time, that has physical laws
governing what goes on. So part of our our evolutionary
advantage is our ability to understand in that world to
interact with and to do that we have to have
a certain amount of numbers, since a certain understanding of
how physics work more or less inborn. We've discussed in
(06:09):
the past their concepts such as say teleportation, you try
and you try and sell a kid on the idea
that teleportation exists. They're not gonna believe it because they
already have it in them in their selves. They're inborn
this disbelief in the in the idea that could even
be possible, because it doesn't conform to reality. To believe
in something like that, you have to painstakingly build this
(06:31):
fortress of ideas and beliefs as an adult, and then
you can make the impossible seem plausible. Right, Because even
little babies know about object permanence, meaning that I could
have two cups. In one cup, I could deposit two
cookies in another cup, I could pretend to be depositing cookies,
same motions and everything. They will always want them one
with the actual cookies in it. They understand that that
(06:54):
is mimicking, that that is not object permanence. Uh. In addition,
kids using geometric clues, they're more likely to use the
length of walls in a room to remember where toys hidden.
And this is true of kids even at ages three
and four, when they can name the color of the
wall um to orient themselves, they still navigate rooms by
(07:16):
length references. I also see this with my daughter at
play with puzzles. You know. She she will be four
in January, and she loves to put together puzzles using
solely the shape. Now she can read and she can
use the colors to try to piece together the clues
of how they fit together. But always in this drives
(07:36):
me crazy because to me, I'm oriented in the other
way where I'm like, hey, that says that that's part
of the North Carolina for the for the map um
she will always try to see how it fits together.
And this is really interesting. Kids that play with puzzles
between the ages of two inform perform significantly better and
spatial tests by ages five and six. And again this
(07:59):
is this idea that they can mentally transform shapes, and
this turns out to be a really big predictor of
abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. What we call stem.
Another inborn ability that kids have that adults forget and
then have to relearn is Bayesian logic. Beaesian logic is
(08:19):
a branch of probability theory that allows one to model
uncertainty about the world and outcomes of interest in that
world related to common sense knowledge and observational evidence. So
this is a concept that plays heavily into statistical evaluation
of things such as ongoing elections, etcetera, any kind of
situation where there's a there's a certain a group of
chaos or unpredictability. It's also something that is key to
(08:42):
our creation of aiyes of artificial intelligence, because we want
to create something that thinks intelligently and can analyze the
world and create believable recommendations on what's going to happen.
So we're using Baisian logic to create the machines will
solve the problems of the future. But Baisian logic is
already present in children. Experiments have shown that when a
(09:03):
child looks at the world, they're able to weigh the
observational data in the statistical data that they have observed
in a way that is free of the conflicting judgments
that adult humans bring to the table. Yeah, I mean
much like looking at a puzzle and seeing what fits
and what doesn't. Bayesian logic necessitates that children use a
pattern of co variation. Co variation meaning correlated variation of
(09:25):
two or more variables. And we talked about this blicket
machine in the last podcast How to Think Like a Child,
and this blicket machine is something that is lit up
when you place an object on it. This object can
be vary shape, sizes, colors, and kids will again use
this co variation correlated variation of two or more variables
(09:45):
to realize that if they do this, then this happens.
If you do that, then that happens. Now, by the way,
these objects aren't static, meaning that you know, it's not
just the red squares that make the machine go. You know,
it could be the orange squares that have blue dots
on them, or the triangle and so on and so forth.
(10:07):
So they are taking in a lot of data and
trying to figure out, you know, like the three types
of shapes that are this color and this configuration stacked
on top will make this machine go. That's actually pretty sophisticated.
And as we mentioned last time in our podcast and
how to Think Like a Child, kids are actually better
in this exercise and figure out how certain toys work
(10:30):
on the blicket machine. Then adults are, which brings us
to mathematics. And this is a big one. As adults,
so many of us, myself included, throw any kind of
thing mathematical at us being and figuring out how to
split a bill at a dinner party or trying to
figure out I've got it down now, but for a
while there, I didn't even understand how to properly figured
tip before I figured out just generally that bad at math,
(10:53):
and so we often fall into this idea that that
we're born bad at math and then we just simply
fail to learn it. And certainly there's a whole case
to be made about what needs to be done to
to engage children and the age students so more thoroughly
in mathematics. I do want to mention too, that there
is no gender difference in abilities in science and math.
(11:13):
And this has been something of subject that comes up
again and again. But if you want more information on it,
check out Elizabeth Spelky spe l k E and her
debate with Stephen Pinker on this point and the thirty
odd years of research into child development in which she
makes the case that this does not exist. This is
some cultural garbage that we tend to heap on kids,
(11:36):
because again, we all have to interact with the same world.
We're all organisms that have all the equipment to interact
with that world, and part of that is a number sense. Okay,
so our brains naturally extract numbers from the surrounding environment
in the same way that we identify colors. All right,
we call it number cents, and our brains come fully
equipped with it from birth. In fact, studies even show
that while infants have no graphs of human number system,
(11:59):
you know, and it doesn't know what five is, doesn't
know what ten is, but they can tell the difference
between five and ten on a on a non numerical
level because they can tell identify change in quantity. Show
a kid five cookies and a kid ten cookies, and
they will know the difference they have. There is an
inborn math that governs that that kind of quantity differential. Yeah,
(12:20):
they are essentially born accountants. And you will see this
with babies who can estimate quantities and distinguish between more
and less. For instance, and an experiment in which babies
were shown an a ray of four dots and then
an a ray of twelve dots, it turns out that
they will pay attention to the four dots sequence when
four sounds are played, okay, correlating that, and they will
(12:43):
gaze at the twelve dots when the twelve sounds are played,
even when the sounds are manipulated in terms of the
note length. Kids still no babies still know that twelve
noted song has to do with the twelve dots and
that four noted song has to do with the four dot. Yeah,
we can even drag in your own imaging research into it,
and we found that when you when you look at
(13:04):
an infant's brain, when they're say, looking at the five
cookie tin cookie difference, they're actually engaging in logarithmic counting, alright,
counting based on integral increases in physical quantity. And this
is so apparently this is something that we move away
from as we get older, this logarithmic thinking, because we
think in different modes of mathematics. But again, route to
(13:27):
the baby, route to children is this logarithmic thinking. So
we end up taking on human number systems. But the
thing is, again, the human number systems are even this
is not something that's coming from the outside. It's it's
something that's coming from within. At some point in our
ancient past, prehistoric humans begin to develop a means of
augmenting their natural number sense, all right, they started counting
(13:48):
on their fingers and toes, and that's why so many
numerical systems depend on groups of five, ten, or twenty,
So based ten or decimal system stem from the use
of both hands, while base twenty or vegicial systems are
based on the use of fingers and toes. Yeah, these
vegicimal systems, I think are really interesting. Larger numbers are
(14:08):
simply multiples of ten, right, because that would be a
base of ten system. For example, ten tens make and
we're so used to our base ten system that it
may seem like the only possibility. But the green Landic
number system has a base of twenty and others have
a base of five, and of all the number systems
ever invented, five, ten, and twenty are the most common.
(14:29):
So again, if you doubt that mathematics is something that
is inherent to you, all you have to do is
split down at your fingers. In fact, in Greenland, the
word for seven, which is pronounced our punick marluk translate
or something like that, translates as second hand to okay,
So you put one hand up and then two fingers
(14:50):
from from the next hand, and then thirteen is translated
as first foot three, meaning both of your hands plus
your first foot three toes. So again our digits are fingers.
Just even think about the terminology have been the gold
standard for how we itemize the world around us. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break on that note, and
(15:12):
when we come back, we're gonna shift a little outside
of the mathematical understanding the world and we're gonna get
into a little something called storytelling, because, believe it or not,
storytelling is science before we move on to storyteller. So
that's just reminded as you were talking in that sponsortive
message about mathematics and certain truths that they hold, and
(15:33):
I was thinking about the Fibonacci numbers, which is that
sequence of numbers, the golden ratio that we see again
and again in nature. Yeah, it's like in a snail shell,
it's in some cauliflower. You see this mathematical truth making
it self evident just throughout the world and then in
the cosmos and on your body, right, because even the
ratio between your hand, the length of your hand and
(15:54):
the length of your arm, and the length of your
arms to the height of your body, or even the
space between your eyes and your nose in your mouth,
these are all predicated on the golden ratio. So again,
inherent within the blueprint our numbers. Yeah, we haven't. A
past episode we did about mathematics, we asked a question,
is mathematics a human discovery or human invention? Where we
(16:17):
really go into the philosophical deep end about this, because
it's really fascinating question. Again, mathematics, as we've discussed, is
something that comes from within. But is it something that
is purely a human creation based on what is inside us?
Or is it something that really permeates every aspect of
the universe? Right? Is it the tail wagging the dog? Yeah,
(16:38):
it's really really mind blowing stuff. But we're moving a
little beyond mathematics at this point and we're getting into
something called storytelling. Storytelling is of course, is old as
human language. The idea that we can set down and
we can tell a narrative, that we can talk about
this character and what they did. Are these people and
what they did, what challenge they overcame, how they came
from point A to point B, And we naturally engage
(17:02):
in it because the stories are linear. They have beginnings,
they have metals, and they have ends, much like our lives,
much exactly like our lives and exactly like our our
experience of the world around us, so we naturally engage
with stories well, and within this, I think about the
neo cortex as part of our brains that was locked
on is pretty much an upgrade, uh to the human brain.
(17:25):
Scream ice cream style, swirled up high. It changed everything
because no longer did we have just our reptilian brain,
which was really concerned or is concerned with basic survival
instincts like fear. But with the neo cortex, you have
something that can manage so many different sophisticated, complex elements
(17:45):
of life of modern life, from parenting to higher cognitive
functions like number systems and the prietal loop which which
governs these number systems, and abstraction. So when I think
about number systems, I think about abstractions because really that's
what they are. And uh, these obstractions are stories, and
(18:06):
these stories really are data. We're taking data, we're organizing it,
and we're making it into a pattern that makes sense
to us that can help explain our world. So when
you think about storytelling, you don't normally think about it
is involving science, but really you're you're talking about some
of the same basic principles at play. So again, storytelling
(18:26):
us how we see the world. I mean, on a
very basic level. I've talked about this before, and this
is where especially adults get in get into trouble. And no,
I mean even in an early age, you're you're engaging
in your ego. You're creating a story about the world
in which you are the central character. And uh, you know,
so everyone's life unless you can you can force yourself
to think beyond it. After a while, it becomes this
(18:49):
this very limited novel with this one character engaging with
other people with their surroundings, with various successes and disasters
that that line the road to death and elegant and
then an uplifting way of putting it. But I mean,
that's what kind of what comes when you when you
end up viewing the world that way. But we end
up viewing the world that way. So telling other stories
(19:12):
ends up being this interesting way of tweaking that worldview
um in a way that can be both good and bad.
There's a book called Tell the Wind, Connect, Persuade, and
Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story by a film executive,
Peter Goober, and he makes this argument that the stories
function as trojan horses. All Right, we all know the
idea of the trojan horse, right, So you have you
(19:33):
have the city of Troy. The opposing army wants to
get inside that besieged city. So how do you do it.
You give him a gift, a fabulous wooden horse hitting away,
and that horse's belly happens to be a small group
of soldiers, and after after the lights go off, after
the sun goes down, they're going to creep out of
the belly of that horse, unlock the gates, and let
(19:54):
the rest of the army in. So the idea here
is that. And we've discussed this about the power of
storytelling before. You know, when when you have a story
that contains a different idea, a different way of seeing
the world, it can kind of virally infect our worldview
and we end up trusting an idea more if it's
presented to us in the form of a story, which
(20:15):
is why you see we've we've talked about the importance
of sitcom's You're Just in popular history, um or or
or novels as well. When you engage a new cultural
idea in the form of a narrative, we're more likely
to take it in to eat it than we are
if someone says, hey, here's the way you should maybe
view the world. Why don't you do this? And then
people are gonna double down. They're gonna say, no, no,
that's not the way I view the world at all.
(20:35):
Presenting a story, however, that's the spoonful of sugar on
the medicine. Yeah, but I would I would actually argue
that every single scientific paper that's ever been published has
a trojan horse of sorts in the narrative. In other words,
something that happens that's a surprise that turns our assumptions
on its head, right, because because you've got to have
conflict and story for to be good. Nobody wants to
(20:57):
read a story about, hey, there's this person they marry
and everything happened the way it needed to happen. It was.
You know, you need some sort of conflict where suddenly
something doesn't happen, there's a fall from grace, or there's
a conflict that had or some sort of of enemy
that has to be overcome. I mean, that's the stuff
of great narrative. No one wants to read three long
books about Bilbo setting at home, drinking tea and crumpets.
(21:17):
This is true. This is true. Something has to happen,
change has to occur in order for the reader to
better understand him or herself in the greater world around them. Right,
And this I think if you look at it, pretty
much every publication of a paper, there's going to be
something within it, even if it's something like in a
(21:37):
paper that ended up in Ignoble, right, which we did
a couple of podcasts. There's always a story. Like there's
the story of the guy that said, hey, there's a
dead duck outside my window, and then another duck came
and started copulating with that dead duck and he had
to make sense of it. So there's the study. There's
the story there's a man and getting in encountering a
mystery in the world, well something to overcome and have
(22:00):
to solve it, having to an analyze it and learning
something from it. Right. So that's what the basis of
storytelling is about. You don't want learn. You generally, when
you engage with a story, you want a character that's
going to learn and grow, or on the optic, you
want a character maybe that doesn't learn and grow, but
that's that's still part and partial to who that person
is and getting even know that. So I'm actually thinking
(22:20):
about the paper that was published by the kids. We
talked about this on how to Think like a Child
and uh blato, who did the ted talk about it?
And those kids were trying to find out whether or
not humans and insects had things in common in terms
of the way that they think, the way that they forage,
that they organized. Is it possible that insects could have
(22:43):
as complex thought processes as humans? And this was the
story they were after, and they got their trojan horse
because they found out that these bees were forging in
ways that we had never known before, that that were
really nuanced. You changed the conditions and they could adapt,
and again you have a story about how a we're
(23:05):
not that far from from the rest of the natural world.
In other words, a lot of the blueprint of who
we are comes from everything around us. Right that there's
there's something intrinsic to bees that is intrinsic to us,
and so you get this idea of how the natural
world orders itself. But also that kids can think critically.
(23:27):
That's the other part of this story that has to
do with us published paper that kids can see through
the mind of a scientist and in fact do so
every day it is again something that is not apart
from them. It is underscoring this idea that we are
all inherently scientists. Robert Cowitch Coast of Radio Lab a
great science podcast that we listen to it and I
(23:49):
think a number of our listeners listened to as well.
He gave a great keynote a few years back on
the importance of storytelling to the scientific community, which is
really really great talk, really inspiring tall whether you stand
on the inside or outside of a scientific institution, because
he was he was very much going with this idea
of storytelling is a trojan horse. His whole thing was,
if you're a scientist and you're engaging with with people
(24:11):
and someone asks you what you do, which, what are
you studying? What are you what's your research consisting of?
Don't blow them off, Don't just say I you wouldn't
understand it. Try and explain it to and trying to
explain it as a story, because narrative is powerful. And
if you if the scientists are not telling a story
that makes sense, if they're not telling a story about
how the world works, then there are gonna be other
competing stories out there, stories that stem from myth stories
(24:34):
that stem from religious or spiritual views of the world,
stories that stem from just complete Internet generated quackery. We've
all received emails like that about how Mars is going
to be as big as the moon and the night sky,
and other such nonsense, about how Satanist in your area
are going to kidnap your cat on haw Halloween. The
list goes on and on. But all the quack ideas
(24:56):
out there, they already have narratives, and some of these
these idea as are old. We've been telling some of
these stories since the beginning of human history, and so
science has to compete with those. So we need science
that tells stories. We need to engage with students and
with adults, people of all ages with a science that
is wrapped inherentive. Yeah, and because you know, we we've
(25:17):
talked about how in the past, the human storytelling has
really revolved around mysticism, and we've defined ourselves in these
in these ways. We think about mysticism more as the
creative expression now, but there's still a bit of that,
But that cannot be said for everyone in the world. Yeah,
I mean, it's still in the cultural fabrics. So um,
(25:39):
I think if we can begin to understand ourselves in
these different terms as these Euclidean space explorers, and looking
down at our fingers and realizing that we have ordered
an entire world around digits numbers. Again, we can begin
to understand that this is not something in a separate
(26:00):
from us. Yeah, we're born scientists, and that's something we
need to cultivate, we need to nurture, and we don't
need to learn to be something other than a scientist
as we grow. All right, Well, on that note, let's
call over the robit and get a little bit of
listener mail. All right, this one comes to us from Pedro.
Pedro writes and says, Hey, Julian Robert, I'm a truck driver.
We have a number of those, so always nice to
(26:21):
hear from the truckers out there. I'm a truck driver
and recently started to listen to your awesome podcast. I
literally have listened to most of your podcast to date
in about a week. Wow. Anyhow, I finally got home
and wanted to write to you guys and share a
little story that popped into mind when I heard the
Gigantism episode Julie mentioned on the topic of hissing cockroaches
that she thought there might be flying cock roaches. Yes,
(26:43):
I grew up in Puerto Rico and in my native town,
Vega Baja. As a team, I moved to a more
isolated part of town, near a farm close to the
tree line of a jungle like part of the island. Uh.
It was in the twilight hours and my father and
I were standing on our porch when something hit me
in the face, more like slapped me. My father kidded
that it was a bat, which freaked freaked me out enough,
(27:05):
But when we turned on a few lights, I was
surprised by a whole bunch of huge, disgusting flying cockroaches.
Not one of the selling points of my wonderful island anyway.
I love the podcast, and I'm only disappointed in the
fact that I'm almost up to date on him. All Right,
so it's saying that these cockroaches are hitting cockroaches with wings. Yeah,
that's that's what he's saying, Okay, because I know about palmettos,
(27:27):
and those suckers can get big even here in Georgia. Yeah.
Put the hissing cockroach three or more inches with wings
hissing at you as it comes in the lands in
your ear cannut unless there was a kid out there
in the shadows with a slingshot just pelting the porch
with these things, but I doubt it. Alright, Alright, something
to add to uh to the nightmares? Well, um, you
(27:51):
can certainly add to our nightmares and you can add
to the listeners nightmares by by connecting with us, sharing
your stories about your scientific understanding of the world and
how you engage in science and if you're a teacher,
would love to hear your thoughts on engaging students in science.
You can find us on Facebook and you can find
us on tumbler. We are stuff to Blow your Mind
on both of those and you can also seek us
out on Twitter, where our handle is blow the Mind
(28:12):
and you can drop us a line at blow the
Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot
com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Trulie Douglas.
We just finished recording an episode titled how to Think
Like a Child, and now we're breaking into this idea
that we are all scientists. And you're probably wondering, why
(00:24):
aren't you guys hitting this information right now? Um, And
certainly we've touched on some of these topics before in
the past, and it's because we're hitting the road with
this act. Uh. One week from now the time we're
recording it, we're gonna be at the E four conference
Excellence in Elementary Engineering in the Twin Cities, and we're
gonna give a keynote when we're gonna talk about this
idea that we are all scientists, because we're gonna be
(00:46):
talking to elementary school teachers who are who want to
engage with children and and get them excited about science
and engineering, and there's often this false idea that it's
something alien to them, where it's kind of like, let's
let's give some children into a room and let's teach
them to love sardines and broccoli. You know, let's let's
get them excited about asparagus. But no, it's it's it's
(01:08):
something that they already have in them, and it's it's
it's ultimately more about about connecting with the inner scientists
that is in all of us. Right, we're gonna make
the case today that science is not a part of us,
it is actually intrinsic to our nature. And I will
say that having worked on this podcast, I feel like, uh,
it's very interesting to look at science as something that
(01:30):
is innate rather than, as I've mentioned before, looking through
the windows of science, because I feel like this podcast
has really informed my worldview on how it's not apart
from us, how every gesture, word, thought can be pinned
back to what you know. We've often talked about the
magic of reality, and when I say the magic of reality,
(01:51):
it's this idea that a single celled organism created an
unbroken lineage extending fourth and time four billion years until
we are sitting here before you guys, recording our voices.
To me. That is amazing and it all points back
to the fact that science has helped frame our understanding
(02:11):
of how we came to be in this world. Um,
as well as why things are the way that they are. So,
as we discussed in the previous podcast about being like
a child, one of the big things here is that
as as we get older and as we become adults,
we take on all these different world views. We take
on all these preconceived notions of how what the world
is and how it works, about who we are, how
do we fit into the world, What is our group,
(02:32):
what is our society? Who are the others? What laws
are in place that we're obeying, What laws are in
place that we are neglecting, What laws are in place
that the other guys and gals out there should be obeying,
but are not. All these complex, illusory ideas. We end
up building this this fortress of ideas through which we
try to understand the world around us. And we use
(02:53):
a lot of labels, right like you begin to understand
yourself as you're growing up, right and you people say
that you're good at X, Y or z, and then
it's a liberal, you're a conservative, You're you're in the model,
You're you're creative or number minded, you're you're very sensible.
You know. We end up taking on all these labels,
pinning them to our jacket and and that's who we
(03:14):
are and that's what the world is now. But I
would argue that in addition to what other label or
the many labels that we can put on ourselves, we
are all inherently engineers. Right. Okay, Now, think you're probably
like kind of know what you're talking about. I don't
use blueprints, or maybe I do use blueprints, but I
don't build things times. Yeah, but now think about your
(03:38):
childhood and think about treehouses or building something. You don't
have to build a treehouse, It could be at all
the things that if you're a lego person like I was,
and I am not an engineer, I have to check
things two or three times when I do simple calculations
with a Google calculator. You know, I'm that type of person.
I'm more of a liberal arts person. But as a child,
(03:59):
I had the out of legos and had build everything
under the sun. You know, I'd see a helicopter, I'd
have to build that helicopter. Then I have to crash
the helicopter because we shut down by another one. That
was the evil helicopter. But then I would build another one,
and then it would be maybe I'd build build a
building or a tank. I mean so even as as
a child playing with blocks, or even if we're not
playing with actual physical blocks, we're building things. We're building stories,
(04:20):
we're building ideas, we're engineering something. When we're engaging in play, well,
you're also learning how the world works, how gravity works, right,
and if you don't stack those blocks in a way
that can support weight, then whatever you're creating is going
to fall or just not work out. So every kid
wants to build a giant tower, but you quickly learned
that you've got to You've got to figure out how
(04:42):
the base is gonna work. You gotta build a broader
base to make the tower go up all the way.
Otherwise it's just gonna be blocks falling over and making
a loud no. Yeah, I see that. I've seen this
so many times with kids, and kids can, by the way,
with legos, and I know everybody knows this, but really
they can create some of the most uh some of
the coolest, most innovative buildings I've ever seen, because they
will take these risks and put things where they're not
(05:04):
really supposed to go. But then again they figure out
how things are weighted. So again we don't think about it,
but this is really the mind of an engineer at play.
And by the way, kids are also born Euclideans. So
when I say kids are this, that also means that
we are Euclideans. And when I say Euclideans, I mean
that we use geometric clues to navigate the world. Because
(05:25):
you have bottom line, we are born into a world
of numerous fixed and movable objects. We live in a
in a world of space and time. As a creature,
you know, if you're a human and you're listening to this,
this applies to you. If you're if you're a cat
and you're listening to this, or a dog, this applies
to you though in kudos for understanding the English language podcast.
(05:46):
But you have to engage in this world that is physical,
that has space, that has time, that has physical laws
governing what goes on. So part of our our evolutionary
advantage is our ability to understand in that world to
interact with and to do that we have to have
a certain amount of numbers, since a certain understanding of
how physics work more or less inborn. We've discussed in
(06:09):
the past their concepts such as say teleportation, you try
and you try and sell a kid on the idea
that teleportation exists. They're not gonna believe it because they
already have it in them in their selves. They're inborn
this disbelief in the in the idea that could even
be possible, because it doesn't conform to reality. To believe
in something like that, you have to painstakingly build this
(06:31):
fortress of ideas and beliefs as an adult, and then
you can make the impossible seem plausible. Right, Because even
little babies know about object permanence, meaning that I could
have two cups. In one cup, I could deposit two
cookies in another cup, I could pretend to be depositing cookies,
same motions and everything. They will always want them one
with the actual cookies in it. They understand that that
(06:54):
is mimicking, that that is not object permanence. Uh. In addition,
kids using geometric clues, they're more likely to use the
length of walls in a room to remember where toys hidden.
And this is true of kids even at ages three
and four, when they can name the color of the
wall um to orient themselves, they still navigate rooms by
(07:16):
length references. I also see this with my daughter at
play with puzzles. You know. She she will be four
in January, and she loves to put together puzzles using
solely the shape. Now she can read and she can
use the colors to try to piece together the clues
of how they fit together. But always in this drives
(07:36):
me crazy because to me, I'm oriented in the other
way where I'm like, hey, that says that that's part
of the North Carolina for the for the map um
she will always try to see how it fits together.
And this is really interesting. Kids that play with puzzles
between the ages of two inform perform significantly better and
spatial tests by ages five and six. And again this
(07:59):
is this idea that they can mentally transform shapes, and
this turns out to be a really big predictor of
abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. What we call stem.
Another inborn ability that kids have that adults forget and
then have to relearn is Bayesian logic. Beaesian logic is
(08:19):
a branch of probability theory that allows one to model
uncertainty about the world and outcomes of interest in that
world related to common sense knowledge and observational evidence. So
this is a concept that plays heavily into statistical evaluation
of things such as ongoing elections, etcetera, any kind of
situation where there's a there's a certain a group of
chaos or unpredictability. It's also something that is key to
(08:42):
our creation of aiyes of artificial intelligence, because we want
to create something that thinks intelligently and can analyze the
world and create believable recommendations on what's going to happen.
So we're using Baisian logic to create the machines will
solve the problems of the future. But Baisian logic is
already present in children. Experiments have shown that when a
(09:03):
child looks at the world, they're able to weigh the
observational data in the statistical data that they have observed
in a way that is free of the conflicting judgments
that adult humans bring to the table. Yeah, I mean
much like looking at a puzzle and seeing what fits
and what doesn't. Bayesian logic necessitates that children use a
pattern of co variation. Co variation meaning correlated variation of
(09:25):
two or more variables. And we talked about this blicket
machine in the last podcast How to Think Like a Child,
and this blicket machine is something that is lit up
when you place an object on it. This object can
be vary shape, sizes, colors, and kids will again use
this co variation correlated variation of two or more variables
(09:45):
to realize that if they do this, then this happens.
If you do that, then that happens. Now, by the way,
these objects aren't static, meaning that you know, it's not
just the red squares that make the machine go. You know,
it could be the orange squares that have blue dots
on them, or the triangle and so on and so forth.
(10:07):
So they are taking in a lot of data and
trying to figure out, you know, like the three types
of shapes that are this color and this configuration stacked
on top will make this machine go. That's actually pretty sophisticated.
And as we mentioned last time in our podcast and
how to Think Like a Child, kids are actually better
in this exercise and figure out how certain toys work
(10:30):
on the blicket machine. Then adults are, which brings us
to mathematics. And this is a big one. As adults,
so many of us, myself included, throw any kind of
thing mathematical at us being and figuring out how to
split a bill at a dinner party or trying to
figure out I've got it down now, but for a
while there, I didn't even understand how to properly figured
tip before I figured out just generally that bad at math,
(10:53):
and so we often fall into this idea that that
we're born bad at math and then we just simply
fail to learn it. And certainly there's a whole case
to be made about what needs to be done to
to engage children and the age students so more thoroughly
in mathematics. I do want to mention too, that there
is no gender difference in abilities in science and math.
(11:13):
And this has been something of subject that comes up
again and again. But if you want more information on it,
check out Elizabeth Spelky spe l k E and her
debate with Stephen Pinker on this point and the thirty
odd years of research into child development in which she
makes the case that this does not exist. This is
some cultural garbage that we tend to heap on kids,
(11:36):
because again, we all have to interact with the same world.
We're all organisms that have all the equipment to interact
with that world, and part of that is a number sense. Okay,
so our brains naturally extract numbers from the surrounding environment
in the same way that we identify colors. All right,
we call it number cents, and our brains come fully
equipped with it from birth. In fact, studies even show
that while infants have no graphs of human number system,
(11:59):
you know, and it doesn't know what five is, doesn't
know what ten is, but they can tell the difference
between five and ten on a on a non numerical
level because they can tell identify change in quantity. Show
a kid five cookies and a kid ten cookies, and
they will know the difference they have. There is an
inborn math that governs that that kind of quantity differential. Yeah,
(12:20):
they are essentially born accountants. And you will see this
with babies who can estimate quantities and distinguish between more
and less. For instance, and an experiment in which babies
were shown an a ray of four dots and then
an a ray of twelve dots, it turns out that
they will pay attention to the four dots sequence when
four sounds are played, okay, correlating that, and they will
(12:43):
gaze at the twelve dots when the twelve sounds are played,
even when the sounds are manipulated in terms of the
note length. Kids still no babies still know that twelve
noted song has to do with the twelve dots and
that four noted song has to do with the four dot. Yeah,
we can even drag in your own imaging research into it,
and we found that when you when you look at
(13:04):
an infant's brain, when they're say, looking at the five
cookie tin cookie difference, they're actually engaging in logarithmic counting, alright,
counting based on integral increases in physical quantity. And this
is so apparently this is something that we move away
from as we get older, this logarithmic thinking, because we
think in different modes of mathematics. But again, route to
(13:27):
the baby, route to children is this logarithmic thinking. So
we end up taking on human number systems. But the
thing is, again, the human number systems are even this
is not something that's coming from the outside. It's it's
something that's coming from within. At some point in our
ancient past, prehistoric humans begin to develop a means of
augmenting their natural number sense, all right, they started counting
(13:48):
on their fingers and toes, and that's why so many
numerical systems depend on groups of five, ten, or twenty,
So based ten or decimal system stem from the use
of both hands, while base twenty or vegicial systems are
based on the use of fingers and toes. Yeah, these
vegicimal systems, I think are really interesting. Larger numbers are
(14:08):
simply multiples of ten, right, because that would be a
base of ten system. For example, ten tens make and
we're so used to our base ten system that it
may seem like the only possibility. But the green Landic
number system has a base of twenty and others have
a base of five, and of all the number systems
ever invented, five, ten, and twenty are the most common.
(14:29):
So again, if you doubt that mathematics is something that
is inherent to you, all you have to do is
split down at your fingers. In fact, in Greenland, the
word for seven, which is pronounced our punick marluk translate
or something like that, translates as second hand to okay,
So you put one hand up and then two fingers
(14:50):
from from the next hand, and then thirteen is translated
as first foot three, meaning both of your hands plus
your first foot three toes. So again our digits are fingers.
Just even think about the terminology have been the gold
standard for how we itemize the world around us. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break on that note, and
(15:12):
when we come back, we're gonna shift a little outside
of the mathematical understanding the world and we're gonna get
into a little something called storytelling, because, believe it or not,
storytelling is science before we move on to storyteller. So
that's just reminded as you were talking in that sponsortive
message about mathematics and certain truths that they hold, and
(15:33):
I was thinking about the Fibonacci numbers, which is that
sequence of numbers, the golden ratio that we see again
and again in nature. Yeah, it's like in a snail shell,
it's in some cauliflower. You see this mathematical truth making
it self evident just throughout the world and then in
the cosmos and on your body, right, because even the
ratio between your hand, the length of your hand and
(15:54):
the length of your arm, and the length of your
arms to the height of your body, or even the
space between your eyes and your nose in your mouth,
these are all predicated on the golden ratio. So again,
inherent within the blueprint our numbers. Yeah, we haven't. A
past episode we did about mathematics, we asked a question,
is mathematics a human discovery or human invention? Where we
(16:17):
really go into the philosophical deep end about this, because
it's really fascinating question. Again, mathematics, as we've discussed, is
something that comes from within. But is it something that
is purely a human creation based on what is inside us?
Or is it something that really permeates every aspect of
the universe? Right? Is it the tail wagging the dog? Yeah,
(16:38):
it's really really mind blowing stuff. But we're moving a
little beyond mathematics at this point and we're getting into
something called storytelling. Storytelling is of course, is old as
human language. The idea that we can set down and
we can tell a narrative, that we can talk about
this character and what they did. Are these people and
what they did, what challenge they overcame, how they came
from point A to point B, And we naturally engage
(17:02):
in it because the stories are linear. They have beginnings,
they have metals, and they have ends, much like our lives,
much exactly like our lives and exactly like our our
experience of the world around us, so we naturally engage
with stories well, and within this, I think about the
neo cortex as part of our brains that was locked
on is pretty much an upgrade, uh to the human brain.
(17:25):
Scream ice cream style, swirled up high. It changed everything
because no longer did we have just our reptilian brain,
which was really concerned or is concerned with basic survival
instincts like fear. But with the neo cortex, you have
something that can manage so many different sophisticated, complex elements
(17:45):
of life of modern life, from parenting to higher cognitive
functions like number systems and the prietal loop which which
governs these number systems, and abstraction. So when I think
about number systems, I think about abstractions because really that's
what they are. And uh, these obstractions are stories, and
(18:06):
these stories really are data. We're taking data, we're organizing it,
and we're making it into a pattern that makes sense
to us that can help explain our world. So when
you think about storytelling, you don't normally think about it
is involving science, but really you're you're talking about some
of the same basic principles at play. So again, storytelling
(18:26):
us how we see the world. I mean, on a
very basic level. I've talked about this before, and this
is where especially adults get in get into trouble. And no,
I mean even in an early age, you're you're engaging
in your ego. You're creating a story about the world
in which you are the central character. And uh, you know,
so everyone's life unless you can you can force yourself
to think beyond it. After a while, it becomes this
(18:49):
this very limited novel with this one character engaging with
other people with their surroundings, with various successes and disasters
that that line the road to death and elegant and
then an uplifting way of putting it. But I mean,
that's what kind of what comes when you when you
end up viewing the world that way. But we end
up viewing the world that way. So telling other stories
(19:12):
ends up being this interesting way of tweaking that worldview
um in a way that can be both good and bad.
There's a book called Tell the Wind, Connect, Persuade, and
Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story by a film executive,
Peter Goober, and he makes this argument that the stories
function as trojan horses. All Right, we all know the
idea of the trojan horse, right, So you have you
(19:33):
have the city of Troy. The opposing army wants to
get inside that besieged city. So how do you do it.
You give him a gift, a fabulous wooden horse hitting away,
and that horse's belly happens to be a small group
of soldiers, and after after the lights go off, after
the sun goes down, they're going to creep out of
the belly of that horse, unlock the gates, and let
(19:54):
the rest of the army in. So the idea here
is that. And we've discussed this about the power of
storytelling before. You know, when when you have a story
that contains a different idea, a different way of seeing
the world, it can kind of virally infect our worldview
and we end up trusting an idea more if it's
presented to us in the form of a story, which
(20:15):
is why you see we've we've talked about the importance
of sitcom's You're Just in popular history, um or or
or novels as well. When you engage a new cultural
idea in the form of a narrative, we're more likely
to take it in to eat it than we are
if someone says, hey, here's the way you should maybe
view the world. Why don't you do this? And then
people are gonna double down. They're gonna say, no, no,
that's not the way I view the world at all.
(20:35):
Presenting a story, however, that's the spoonful of sugar on
the medicine. Yeah, but I would I would actually argue
that every single scientific paper that's ever been published has
a trojan horse of sorts in the narrative. In other words,
something that happens that's a surprise that turns our assumptions
on its head, right, because because you've got to have
conflict and story for to be good. Nobody wants to
(20:57):
read a story about, hey, there's this person they marry
and everything happened the way it needed to happen. It was.
You know, you need some sort of conflict where suddenly
something doesn't happen, there's a fall from grace, or there's
a conflict that had or some sort of of enemy
that has to be overcome. I mean, that's the stuff
of great narrative. No one wants to read three long
books about Bilbo setting at home, drinking tea and crumpets.
(21:17):
This is true. This is true. Something has to happen,
change has to occur in order for the reader to
better understand him or herself in the greater world around them. Right,
And this I think if you look at it, pretty
much every publication of a paper, there's going to be
something within it, even if it's something like in a
(21:37):
paper that ended up in Ignoble, right, which we did
a couple of podcasts. There's always a story. Like there's
the story of the guy that said, hey, there's a
dead duck outside my window, and then another duck came
and started copulating with that dead duck and he had
to make sense of it. So there's the study. There's
the story there's a man and getting in encountering a
mystery in the world, well something to overcome and have
(22:00):
to solve it, having to an analyze it and learning
something from it. Right. So that's what the basis of
storytelling is about. You don't want learn. You generally, when
you engage with a story, you want a character that's
going to learn and grow, or on the optic, you
want a character maybe that doesn't learn and grow, but
that's that's still part and partial to who that person
is and getting even know that. So I'm actually thinking
(22:20):
about the paper that was published by the kids. We
talked about this on how to Think like a Child
and uh blato, who did the ted talk about it?
And those kids were trying to find out whether or
not humans and insects had things in common in terms
of the way that they think, the way that they forage,
that they organized. Is it possible that insects could have
(22:43):
as complex thought processes as humans? And this was the
story they were after, and they got their trojan horse
because they found out that these bees were forging in
ways that we had never known before, that that were
really nuanced. You changed the conditions and they could adapt,
and again you have a story about how a we're
(23:05):
not that far from from the rest of the natural world.
In other words, a lot of the blueprint of who
we are comes from everything around us. Right that there's
there's something intrinsic to bees that is intrinsic to us,
and so you get this idea of how the natural
world orders itself. But also that kids can think critically.
(23:27):
That's the other part of this story that has to
do with us published paper that kids can see through
the mind of a scientist and in fact do so
every day it is again something that is not apart
from them. It is underscoring this idea that we are
all inherently scientists. Robert Cowitch Coast of Radio Lab a
great science podcast that we listen to it and I
(23:49):
think a number of our listeners listened to as well.
He gave a great keynote a few years back on
the importance of storytelling to the scientific community, which is
really really great talk, really inspiring tall whether you stand
on the inside or outside of a scientific institution, because
he was he was very much going with this idea
of storytelling is a trojan horse. His whole thing was,
if you're a scientist and you're engaging with with people
(24:11):
and someone asks you what you do, which, what are
you studying? What are you what's your research consisting of?
Don't blow them off, Don't just say I you wouldn't
understand it. Try and explain it to and trying to
explain it as a story, because narrative is powerful. And
if you if the scientists are not telling a story
that makes sense, if they're not telling a story about
how the world works, then there are gonna be other
competing stories out there, stories that stem from myth stories
(24:34):
that stem from religious or spiritual views of the world,
stories that stem from just complete Internet generated quackery. We've
all received emails like that about how Mars is going
to be as big as the moon and the night sky,
and other such nonsense, about how Satanist in your area
are going to kidnap your cat on haw Halloween. The
list goes on and on. But all the quack ideas
(24:56):
out there, they already have narratives, and some of these
these idea as are old. We've been telling some of
these stories since the beginning of human history, and so
science has to compete with those. So we need science
that tells stories. We need to engage with students and
with adults, people of all ages with a science that
is wrapped inherentive. Yeah, and because you know, we we've
(25:17):
talked about how in the past, the human storytelling has
really revolved around mysticism, and we've defined ourselves in these
in these ways. We think about mysticism more as the
creative expression now, but there's still a bit of that,
But that cannot be said for everyone in the world. Yeah,
I mean, it's still in the cultural fabrics. So um,
(25:39):
I think if we can begin to understand ourselves in
these different terms as these Euclidean space explorers, and looking
down at our fingers and realizing that we have ordered
an entire world around digits numbers. Again, we can begin
to understand that this is not something in a separate
(26:00):
from us. Yeah, we're born scientists, and that's something we
need to cultivate, we need to nurture, and we don't
need to learn to be something other than a scientist
as we grow. All right, Well, on that note, let's
call over the robit and get a little bit of
listener mail. All right, this one comes to us from Pedro.
Pedro writes and says, Hey, Julian Robert, I'm a truck driver.
We have a number of those, so always nice to
(26:21):
hear from the truckers out there. I'm a truck driver
and recently started to listen to your awesome podcast. I
literally have listened to most of your podcast to date
in about a week. Wow. Anyhow, I finally got home
and wanted to write to you guys and share a
little story that popped into mind when I heard the
Gigantism episode Julie mentioned on the topic of hissing cockroaches
that she thought there might be flying cock roaches. Yes,
(26:43):
I grew up in Puerto Rico and in my native town,
Vega Baja. As a team, I moved to a more
isolated part of town, near a farm close to the
tree line of a jungle like part of the island. Uh.
It was in the twilight hours and my father and
I were standing on our porch when something hit me
in the face, more like slapped me. My father kidded
that it was a bat, which freaked freaked me out enough,
(27:05):
But when we turned on a few lights, I was
surprised by a whole bunch of huge, disgusting flying cockroaches.
Not one of the selling points of my wonderful island anyway.
I love the podcast, and I'm only disappointed in the
fact that I'm almost up to date on him. All Right,
so it's saying that these cockroaches are hitting cockroaches with wings. Yeah,
that's that's what he's saying, Okay, because I know about palmettos,
(27:27):
and those suckers can get big even here in Georgia. Yeah.
Put the hissing cockroach three or more inches with wings
hissing at you as it comes in the lands in
your ear cannut unless there was a kid out there
in the shadows with a slingshot just pelting the porch
with these things, but I doubt it. Alright, Alright, something
to add to uh to the nightmares? Well, um, you
(27:51):
can certainly add to our nightmares and you can add
to the listeners nightmares by by connecting with us, sharing
your stories about your scientific understanding of the world and
how you engage in science and if you're a teacher,
would love to hear your thoughts on engaging students in science.
You can find us on Facebook and you can find
us on tumbler. We are stuff to Blow your Mind
on both of those and you can also seek us
out on Twitter, where our handle is blow the Mind
(28:12):
and you can drop us a line at blow the
Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot
com
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