YouSaid · the spoken record

Barbara Tversky

lines on the record: 106
first: 2020-01-24
most recent: 2020-01-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Meritocracy has come to be a bad word. In some cases. But I thought all that would matter was the ideas, but which ideas get picked up on and who they get attributed to it? Here being a woman was a bit of a disadvantage. And again, I was oblivious, and I'm glad I was oblivious, but those political things are really social dynamics, and they're about human beings. And in the end, Even if its intellectual and ideas about science, it's still human beings that are making the market.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, I thought I was going into a field that wasn't that was just intellectual and aberrant that way of really enjoying ideas and playing with ideas and contributing to them and wanting to be around people who are thinking. And I thought academics was going to be the purest place. When I was studying, there weren't that many opportunities for women and I was self-supporting my last two years in college. I knew there was no, I had nobody to fall back on. I had to make a living. But sure, it's even who you cite in your articles and so forth. I thought this is a level playing field all that matters is good ideas.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In conceptual skills, and you've tried many different things, it took a while before Picasso got his vision. And then he ended up having many visions because he was especially fertile. in that way.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that certainly you do a certain amount of meandering, and that's probably a good thing of exploring and exploring widely before to help you get a vision and also to give you the tools. That you need to do something bigger.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I think some of it was the meandering that I did seemed at first like meandering. This is the research track that I took, but eventually then I saw this isn't meandering, this is deliberate. And then I was able to craft what I was doing along the bigger vision that I had. But it took a while to get that. And if I look at Picasso, an artist, Rothko, if you look at Early, Rothko is very different from late.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if it's experimental psychology, you have to learn brain and data. Right, it's hard now, in much harder in some ways than when I was coming in, it's harder to get grant money and you need grants, and so it's hard. I would tell people to be strategic. I wasn't. I was very lucky.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And solar and wind and sea. And people are moving. The real question is, can we go vast enough? Because the warming is already happened, the glaciers are melting, the coral reefs are dying, and that's our fish population.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and what if you look for optimistic things, and I think we share that looking for it, I don't know that there's going to be a magic single solution. It's more going to be many. But what is impressive is despite the government's policy, which is not pro-green, many companies have discovered that they're better off. It's economically in their interest so that that's happening and you look at younger people. And I once left the water running while I was brushing my teeth in one of my four-year-old grandchildren said, Safta, turn off the water. Stop wasting.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And about the arts, politics, global warming, I'm worried about the same things a reckless leader of a major country doing impulsive things. That”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm up to Vasik in general by the arts and sciences, and they both have young people who are doing really innovative and creative things in my own field. I happen to be past president of the Association of Psychological Sciences. I gave out a lot of prizes last year, including to young investigators And they know math and they know big data and they know the brain and they know behavior and they're doing mind-blowing things and you can't help it be in awe of these young people.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next one on my list is Weitzig, which is a very hard opera. It's human tragedy at its worst, but William Kentridge is doing the production assets, and he, in my mind, is the most inventive and interesting artist alive by a long shot.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm now actually Emma Rita at Stanford, so I'm there for summers and many breaks, but I'm still teaching at Columbia, so I'm more here.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I've learned to love opera just by going. I'm no expert, but you And I think that's the way you point it out. You learn from art. You just look.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that took many years and now it's over the top and the stories are often, you know, the men are bastards and the women are saints and the women die. The end. That's every opera there ever.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they were great. New York is full of fun. I mean, the most fun is good conversation with friends, and I happen to have good friends who are good conversationalists, but I love music. I developed a late passion for opera.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So it's only one sample and you're interpreting it in hindsight. So failure has become popular now. Everybody's talking about failing as good and you learn from failure, but you don't necessarily learn the right thing from failure.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's just one experience, and it's so easy in hindsight to explain why you failed. I mean, you saw that with people in stock picks all the time. Sure.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If something happens that you didn't expect and you might be disappointed in, but for me that's the adventure and the fun. And you learn something from that. Now learning from failure is problematic.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a hard question for me. I don't try things that are really out of reach, but if you think about being an experimental psychologist, which I have been, every experiment is a risk. You build it and you build it on previous work and your previous experience, and many of them fail. I mean, I think the failure rate is lower than the failure rate for startups. So the failure rate is about 25%.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be one of them, and that again is a broad way of thinking that makes sense to me. I loved misbehaving Dick Thaler's book was just a lot of fun. So those are...”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I went from reading fiction voraciously to reading postmodern fiction to reading nonfiction. So a long history and a lot of foreign fiction that I loved and still love because it brings you to other worlds. But I'm reading so sapiens, which I recommend to everybody, Danny's book, Thinking Fast and Slow is wonderful. Anything Jared Diamond or Sapolsky, as you recommended, is good.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now I have people from the arts, people from technology, from many arts, music, drama, painting, who are dance, who are influencing me, and everything goes through the human mind. I mean, you've said that.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it... Like you, I'm a generalist. I mean, I had Amison the House and that whole circle and Danny and other colleagues that Hebrew University when I was early on then moved to Stanford. Stanford's way of hiring people is wallpaper. You want the whole field covered, but you don't want overl And I've seen other departments build little nuclei of everybody's working on speech perception And then there's a nucleus sumplace cells working on other, and you don't communicate. So what was really wonderful to me at Stanford was having wonderful people in developmental and social, in brain, and people in cognitive doing different things for me. And I learned a great deal from that. I loved that.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's interesting. I don't think I had much in the way of human beings. It was more books that were influential. And when I was a teenager, the existentialists, particularly Camus. Were influential. Later philosophers like Russell, Wittgenstein especially, late Wittgenstein were all influential eventually when I got into psychology, the early cognitive people like Chomsky, Miller, Brunner, Broadbent, Kuhn, who talked about scientific revolutions, but they were really intellectual revolutions. They were about the human mind. But more than that, the colleagues, I mean, I always, even as an undergraduate, hung out with a graduate students and learned an enormous amount from them. They were indulgent and that stayed with me. I'm fortunate to have had amazing colleagues who were also friends, including the one that I've”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm pretty much out there. I think you probably don't know that, or maybe I hinted. I have three wonderful children and they have produced eight wonderful grandchildren who are all lively individuals with personalities and who adore each other.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Synonyms. Synonyms as an Israeli film about it because I lived in Israel that especially resonates. But it has universal appeal. It's about a man who was traumatized by being in the army, by what he had to do. and went to Paris and decides he needs a new identity.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking with the objects that I'm creating, with a body that's creating them and with the thing that's perceiving them. And I'm sure something similar goes on in creating music and even imagining your words. If you're thinking about speaking, you're thinking about how the words are going to sound. If you're practicing it. I wanted to call attention to that way of thinking. It's not going through language. It's an important way of thinking. It's the way I find my way in the world. And it contributes to many other kinds of it. It's the way I understand other people when I'm watching their bodies and their faces as they're responding. So I wanted to call attention to those ways of thinking with the body and the world and the things that we create in the world as an important way.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then one of my graduate students started, we studied them drawing and studied that process. And one of my graduate students started studying artists for whom drawing is their major practice. And for them, the drawing is a conversation between the eye and the hand and the page. There are no words. And if they try to talk about it, they can't. It interferes with the whole process. So this is a different way of thinking than language.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have to sit there and commune. And then it becomes spiritual. So and that got me, it wasn't that, but earlier on I started looking at design and looking at architects, how they design. We looked at experienced architects and drawing while they were designing. And there were early sketches are ambiguous. And it allows them to make discoveries in their own sketches. So they drew for one reason, and when they look at their sketch, they see new things, they see patterns, they see implications like this is a building, the traffic will not be right or the light will fall poorly. So they see new things in their sketches, and it's the ambiguity that allows it.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dimensional if you And a depth. And I watch people going, I mean, there are those galleries in the Tate and in the east wing of the National Gallery where there are lots of Rothcalls. And I watch people just going through and looking.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what Roscoe especially does is you get the adapters of the eye to color adapting so colors change in them because of the way you're looking. You can get after images that are very interesting with Rothko. Look at a blank wall. But those adapters in your eye to the different colors keep changing. And that means that what you're seeing changes because it's not what's there. You're in your eye. And Leonardo, by the way, knew that it wasn't in the thing out there. It was in your mind through your eye. So I think to me, that's what's intriguing about Roscoe. You commune with it and different structures appear. It stops being flat and gets into depth.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I think both Rothko and Pollock do, and it took me a while to appreciate them as well, is there's ambiguity built into the paintings. And every time you look, you see something different. And as you're looking at configures and reconfigures,”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. I'm not an art critic. I'm an appreciator of art. Neither am I. They only know what the hell I'm talking about. So it gets back to the learning versus creativity. And when you're learning, you want things very straightforward and structured. When you're being creative, you want to go in many different directions.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And the problem there is the arrows embedded in the letters. So the embedding is going to interfere with the perception anyway. I'm not.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a special area for faces, but most things, it doesn't matter if it's a left-right. Turning it upside down matters, but left-right doesn't matter. There's one area of the brain that is primed to recognize left-right aberrations, so it can tell a small B from a small D and differentiate. So that area is used for reading no matter what language you read. Now what that area would do with arrows, I'd be. Absolutely fascinated to know.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's fascinating and it would be, arrows are fascinating anyway, and they've gotten me fascinated and somebody needs to do that work. The lateral occipital parietal juncture, that area of the brain that is recognizing objects and recognizes fruits and vegetables and so forth, there are many different sub areas. It's like a mosaic. There is only one area in all of those areas that recognizes left-right asymmetries. Otherwise, your face mirror reversed a good example.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it's representing meanings directly the way Chinese does, or whether it's representing the sound of language, of speaking, and that's what the Phoenician alphabet that spread everywhere and got varied, and was apparently only invented once.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So how would I come to naturally? I drew a lot as a kid. My mother's an artist and I have cousins that are, so art is very much in my life. Writing too, for that matter. But I happen to have, I got interested in design. So I first got interested in how do we put the world in our mind? How do we get space in our mind? And then I got more and more interested in the spaces that we create to improve our own cognition. So diagrams would be one, even the alphabet would be one. Developing the alphabet, which was invented apparently only once. Wait, diet?”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what led me to think. I wonder if it's too. I don't know. I sort of doubt it because I think each involves many areas. That makes sense. Yeah, aphasia's brain damage and it's usually not pointed. It's a cluster of neurons probably. And there it is losing certain kinds of words and not others. But it is a general...”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This interview is different from spontaneous conversation because again I'm crafting and thinking ahead and crafting in that way.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a friend like that. And I could do Right. No, it's astounding. And I think it's his practice so much. So if you think about musicians that write music or play music, they can do it very rapidly. They have the schemas. They can generate it very quickly. It's highly practiced. And any sport would be highly practiced. So perhaps your writing, you're thinking at this meta level. How am I going to organize my thoughts? I've got an outline for organizing them. I'm gesturing the outline and you're thinking that through and filling it through.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the writing, you're deliberately thinking about what am I going to, what are the thoughts I want to express and how's the best way to express them? So you sound particularly adept at that. I had a colleague at Stanford named Al Bandora who writes many books and they're all good. And you ask him a question and it comes out in paragraphs and pages.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's probably, I don't think there are separate parts of the brain for speaking and writing. What happens when you write is you put something in a page and you edit.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but one to one correspondences, things that you have in tallies are old. And we have an estimation system as well as an accurate system. There are kind of two math systems in the brain and they're somewhat integrated and somewhat independent. But making estimates, are there 83 things or 90 things? Primates can make those estimates quite well without counting. Right. That's interesting. No, it's fascinating.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, we're getting out of my own research research that I reviewed. But if you look... Primates can't count the way we can count, but then there are many civilizations still around in the world that don't have number words and can't count.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I'm not an expert on this. I went to a symposium on it and quizzed the biologist mercilessly on the mechanisms. And yes, they seem to believe, and this is some of this is animal work where you can check it, that actually it is affecting the genome, the germ cells that are being passed on to the next generation. And so if you starve the grandfather, the grandchild who never knew rat, that never knew the grandfather, has different eating behavior than if the grandfather wasn't starved. So a lot of that is looking at negative things, at maternal deprivation, starvation, and so forth. So I asked Does it work for positive things if you enrich an environment? Does that get passed to the grandchildren? They said it looks like it might. It does. And then I asked, are these big effects? And they said, no, they're small effects.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes a great story, right? And I mean, evolutionary psychology has taken hold a bit in psychology, sometimes in an annoying way, because in some sense all of us were doing it anyway, but there's very little way that you can check those deep psychological hypotheses. You can check other sorts of hypotheses about structure of eye or structure by raising fruit flies for many generations, but it's those deep psychological ones. The connection between any gene and behavior and add to that epigenetics and our bionome in In our stomach, and so forth. Epigenetic.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you could write an evolutionary story for that. I don't know how you'd know if it was correct or not. But it makes a great story.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you wonder why we're built that way, because it does interfere with learning what's happening in the world and how to interpret it, but it does feel very strongly that we're built that way.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like that, or when if I get angry, it's something that you did. It's the situation. It's not my fault, the circumstances made me do it. You provoked me. And if you're behaving that way, it's because you're an aggressive person or an angry person or a shy person. All three.”
2020-01-24 · Masters in Business · Barbara Tversky on How the Mind Works · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source