Things That Make Us Smart

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The good news is that technology can make us smart. In fact, it already has. The human mind is limited in capability. There is only so much we can remember, only so much we can learn. But among our abilities is that of devising artificial devices—artifacts—that expand our capabilities. We invent things that make us smart. Through technology, we can think better and more clearly. We have access to accurate information. We can work effectively with others, whether together in the same place or separated in space or time. Three cheers for the invention of writing, reading, art, and music. Three cheers for the development of logic, the invention of encyclopedias and textbooks. Three cheers for science and engineering.

We humans have invented a wide variety of things to aid our cognition, some physical, some mental. Thus tools such as paper, pencils, calculators, and computers are physical artifacts that aid cognition. Reading, arithmetic, logic, and language are mental artifacts, for their power lies in the rules and structures that they propose, in information structures rather than physical properties. Mental artifacts also include procedures and routines, such as mnemonics for remembering or methods for performing tasks. But whether physical or mental, both types of artifact are equally artificial: They would not exist without human invention. Indeed, anything invented by humans for the purpose of improving thought or action counts as an artifact, whether it has a physical presence and is constructed or manufactured, or whether it is mental and is taught.

Each new advance of technology added to the powers and abilities of human society; each new advance also added to the amount of knowledge that newer generations would have to learn.

Each new discovery changed society to some extent. The background knowledge required more and more learning, thereby leading to more specialization. Cultural groups who had the most technology enjoyed some benefits over those who had less, so over the thousands of generations that human society has existed, power naturally drifted toward those with the most advanced technologies. Each technology added to the human ability to produce yet more technology; each required more and more skills to master, more and more schooling, more and more specialization.

Some aspects of technology enhance life even as others diminish it. If we learn the reasons for and the properties of these various technologies, then maybe we can control the impact. So, yes, I am delivering a message of warning, but one accompanied by hope, not despair.

We Mischaracterize Features as Flaws (Attention, Emotion, Speech)

we might rejoice in the fact that people are attentive to their surrounds and to new events. In other words, the same behavior that is a liability from the machine-centered point of view is a virtue when seen from a human-centered perspective.

What is wrong is the design of the technology that requires people to behave in machine-centered ways, ways for which people are not well suited.

Human Centric Design Design Technology with Human's in mind.

When technology is not designed from a human-centered point of view, it doesn’t reduce the incidence of human error nor minimize the impact when errors do occur. Yes, people do indeed err. Therefore the technology should be designed to take this well-known fact into account. Instead, the tendency is to blame the person who errs, even though the fault might lie with the technology, even though to err is indeed very human.

Technology should be our friend in the creation of a better life; it should complement human abilities, aid those activities for which we are poorly suited, and enhance and help develop those for which we are ideally suited.

We humans are thinking, interpreting creatures. The mind tends to seek explanations, to interpret, to make suggestions. We are active, creative, social beings. We seek interaction with others. Unlike machines, we change our behavior as we attempt to understand what others expect of us. All of these natural tendencies are thwarted by the efforts of the engineering approach to efficiency. The machine-centered view is concerned primarily with operations per second. This approach emphasizes short-term productivity and treats workers in isolation from the social structure in which they participate. The result is a deterioration of long-term goals such as quality of product, satisfaction of the worker, and the need for a nurturing social environment.

The measurement tools of science try to strip away the complexities, studying a single variable at a time. But much of what is of value to human life results from the interaction of the parts: when we measure simple, single variables, we miss the point.

Two Kinds of Cognition

There are many modes of cognition, many different ways by which thinking takes place. The two modes particularly relevant to my analyses are called experiential cognition and reflective cognition. The experiential mode leads to a state in which we perceive and react to the events around us, efficiently and effortlessly. This is the mode of expert behavior, and it is a key component of efficient performance. The reflective mode is that of comparison and contrast, of thought, of decision making. This is the mode that leads to new ideas, novel responses. Both modes are essential for human performance, although each mode requires very different technological support. Without a good understanding of the differences between these modes coupled with an understanding of human perception and cognition, it is not possible to harness technology, to make its products appropriate for people.

Reflective thought requires the ability to store temporary results, to make inferences from stored knowledge, and to follow chains of reasoning backward and forward, sometimes backtracking when a promising line of thought proves to be unfruitful. This process takes time. Deep, substantive reflection therefore requires periods of quiet, of minimal distraction. Moreover, the use of external aids facilitates the reflective process by acting as external memory storage, allowing deeper chains of reasoning over longer periods of time than possible without the aids.

Norman, Don. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (p. 25). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

The reflective mode is that of concepts, of planning and reconsideration. It is slow and laborious. Reflective cognition tends to require both the aid of external support—writing, books, computational tools—and the aid of other people. The external representations have to be tuned to the task at hand if they are to be maximally supportive of cognition. Reflection is best done in a quiet environment, devoid of material save that relevant to the task. Rich, dynamic, continually present environments can interfere with reflection: These environments lead one toward the experiential mode, driving the cognition by the perceptions of event-driven processing, thereby not leaving sufficient mental resources for the concentration required for reflection. In the terms of cognitive science, reflective cognition is conceptually driven, top-down processing.

Tools for experiential cognition should make available a wide range of sensory stimulation, with enough information provided to minimize the need for logical deduction. Similarly, tools for reflection must support the exploration of ideas. They must make it easy to compare and evaluate, to explore alternatives. They should not restrict behavior to the experiential mode. In both cases, reflective and experiential, the tools must be invisible: They must not get in the way. If tools are designed inappropriately, or for that matter, if appropriate tools are used in inappropriate ways and places, various dangers may arise:

Tools for experiential mode behavior that require reflection: These tools turn simple tasks into problem-solving exercises, causing needless mental effort, taking needless time. When taking pictures with a camera or driving an automobile, it is essential to be able to react quickly and effortlessly. If the camera or automobile controls require reflection, performance suffers: Consider the lapses of attention from driving when attempting to change the station with the typical automobile radio.

Tools for reflection that do not support comparisons, exploration, and problem solving: In many cases, we need to be able to look over the situation and compare alternative courses of action or perhaps just ponder and reflect upon the variables involved. The most common tools for this purpose are writing and drawing. Many electronic decision aids tend to restrict the availability of information to small segments visible on the relatively limited display. This makes it difficult to integrate disparate sources of information, difficult to explore and to make comparisons. -

Experiencing when one should be reflecting: The experiential mode leads to responses without thought, without contemplation. This is essential when events move rapidly, but if the situation changes, experiential cognition may not be flexible enough to change appropriately.

Reflecting when one should be experiencing: Too much reflection and the world will pass one by. See every point of view, consider every possible alternative. See the merits and perils of each alternative. Flutter in the breeze of public opinion, get caught in the trap of thought, never to decide and act.

Of all these dangers, the one I think poses the greatest peril today is that of experiencing when one should be reflecting. Here is where entertainment takes precedence over thought. Worse, one can believe that the experiential mode has substituted for independent, constructive thought, for reason and reflection.

Even informative news programs—documentary and discussion shows—are framed in the experiential mode, never allowing time for reflection, never allowing time for viewers to have their own thoughts. Unfilled time on the broadcast stations is thought to be nonproductive time. Why, the viewers might have their own ideas! Horrid thought. Worse, the viewers might get bored and do something else. All work and no play makes for a nonrewarding life. All play and no work does not promise well for human survival and advancement. In the mental world, the correlates of entertainment and work are the two forms of cognition: experiential and reflective. Just as both entertainment and work are essential for a full physical life, both experiential and reflective thought are essential for a full mental life. The difficult intellectual challenge for modern society is to strike the correct balance.

Norman, Don. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (p. 28). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

there were at least three different kinds of learning: accretion, tuning, and restructuring.

Accretion

Accretion is the accumulation of facts. This is how we add to our knowledge, learn new vocabulary or perhaps the spelling of an already known word. Suppose you chat with a friend or a neighbor and learn about current events and trade gossip: This is learning by accretion, adding to the stockpile of knowledge. When you already have the proper conceptual framework, accretion is easy, painless, efficient. Little or no conscious effort is required under these circumstances. However, when there isn’t a good conceptual background, then accretion is slow and arduous. In this case, it can be difficult to learn the material. It requires repeating the material over and over again (rehearsing), using mnemonic strategies, or writing down the information.

Tuning

What does practice do? It tunes the skill, shaping the knowledge structures in thousands of little ways so that the skill that in the early stages required conscious, reflective thought can now be carried out automatically, in a subconscious, experiential mode. Experiential thought is tuned thought.

Moreover, expert behavior must constantly be retuned. If the expert does not practice or otherwise use a skill, performance deteriorates. This is true of both motor and intellectual skills. Tuning is necessary to reach expert levels of performance, and then essential to maintain them.

We forget the years of tuning, of learning and practice it takes to be skilled at even the most fundamental of human activities: eating, walking, talking, reading, and writing. It is tempting to want instant gratification—immediate expert performance and experiential pleasure—but the truth is that this primarily occurs only after considerable amounts of accretion and tuning.

Restructuring

The difficult part of learning is forming the right conceptual structure. Accretion and tuning are primarily experiential modes. Restructuring is reflective. Restructuring is the hard part of learning, where new conceptual skills are acquired.

Reflective mode is essential for restructuring. The problem is to make the students want to do the hard work that is necessary for reflection.

Flow States

“Studies of flow,” says Csikszentmihalyi, “have demonstrated repeatedly that more than anything else, the quality of life depends upon two factors: how we experience work and our relation with other people.”

Creating Flow States

Third Person (As a viewer)
It is much easier to have this experience when there are no distractions to interrupt.
Another way to reduce distractions and increase concentration is to wear a headset. In any environment the event best captures the attention when the sensory experience is maximized and distractions are minimized.

1st Person (As a do-er)
All attention should be concentrated upon the task itself, not upon the tool.
When the tool calls attention to itself, that creates a breakdown in the work flow.
Tools should stay in the background, becoming a natural part of the task.

The Power of Representation

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained.

But human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits.

The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.

How have we increased memory, thought, and reasoning? By the invention of external aids: It is things that make us smart.

The powers of cognition come from abstraction and representation: the ability to represent perceptions, experiences, and thoughts in some medium other than that in which they have occurred, abstracted away from irrelevant details. This is the essence of intelligence, for if the representation and the processes are just right, then new experiences, insights, and creations can emerge.

The important point is that we can make marks or symbols that represent something else and then do our reasoning by using those marks.

A representational system has two essential ingredients,
The represented world: that which is to be represented; (terrrritory)
The representing world: a set of symbols, each standing for something—representing something—in the represented world. (map)

The ideal, of course, is to develop representations that 
Capture the important, critical features of the represented world while ignoring the irrelevant 
Are appropriate for the person, enhancing the process of interpretation 
Are appropriate for the task, enhancing the ability to make judgments, to discover relevant regularities and structures

the form of representation makes a dramatic difference in the ease of the task,

Second, the proper choice of representation depends upon the knowledge, system, and method being applied to the problem.

The power of a representation that fits the task shows up over and over again. Bad representations turn problems into reflective challenges. Good representations can often transform the same problems into easy experiential tasks.

There are two major tasks for the user of an information display: 
1. Finding the relevant information; 
2. Computing the desired conclusion;

Norman, Don. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (p. 60). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

Approaches to reasoning and planning that rely heavily upon thought, and therefore internal information, run into fundamental problems: 
Lack of completeness: In most real tasks, it simply isn’t possible to know everything that is relevant. 
Lack of precision: There is no way that we can have precise, accurate information about every single relevant variable. 
Inability to keep up with change: What holds at one moment may not apply at another. The real world is dynamic, and even if precise, complete information were available at one point in time, by the time the action is required, things will have changed. 
A heavy memory load: To know all that is relevant in a complex situation requires large amounts of information. Even if you could imagine learning everything, imagine the difficulty you’d have finding the relevant stuff just when it is needed. Timely access to the information becomes the bottleneck. 
A heavy computational load: Even if all the relevant variables were known with adequate precision, the computational burden required to take them all properly into account would be onerous.

The negative side of this is that these world-based decisions must be made and actions must be taken quickly, which can cause oversimplification and incomplete analysis. We all know that actions taken in haste are often wrong actions. With time pressures, there is limited opportunity to consider alternatives or to reflect upon all of the consequences. Clearly, we need to plan ahead, but not to follow those plans rigidly. We need to respond to the situation, to be flexible in the face of unexpected occurrences, to change our activities as the world dictates.*

Human memory is well tuned to remember the substance and meaning of events, not the details. Humans can essentially attend to only one conscious task at a time. We cannot maintain attention on a task for extended periods. Basically, we are sensitive to changes in the environment: We attend to changing events, not continual, ongoing ones. The same is true for memory: We tend to remember novel and unexpected events better than regular, recurring ones. Humans are pattern-recognition animals, matching things that appear similar to past events.

functional fixedness, cognitive narrowing, tunnel vision. Whatever the name, they all describe pretty much the same phenomenon: People tend to focus upon the active hypothesis and, once focused, find it very difficult to change, even in the face of contradictory evidence.

Norman, Don. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of t he Machine (p. 134). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

What we need is a machine that could maintain a rich, interactive database of past statistics and incidents that would be automatically available when making decisions. This would remind us of alternative possibilities and also let us determine the likelihood that those other interpretations might apply.

Norman, Don. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (p. 137). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

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Things That Make Us Smart

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