- Good evening, and thank you for
joining us this evening for another of
Penn College's Doyle Colloquia Presentations.
I'm Dr. Mark Noe.
I'm from the communications department.
My introduction to the work of tonight's speaker,
Dr. Bob McCauley, was through his recent book
Why Religion is Natural, and Science is Not.
Reducing his argument to a terribly basic level,
we're culturally immersed in ideas
that are based on faith, and we thus
have difficulty even questioning them.
In contrast, ideas based on science
require us to consider evidence, often a chain of evidence,
something our brains must learn how to do.
To some extent, we come out of the womb
primed to accept religion, but we have to be
educated in the techniques required to accept science.
That explanation is far too reductive
to make it as a blurb on a book jacket,
but I believe tonight's presentation
will involve that thought with
a special focus on visual elements.
Now, more than a couple of the presentations
in the four years of this colloquia series
have involved interpretation at some level
of the visual world that we inhabit.
I was taught during Army basic training
nearly half a century ago that I should
never believe anything I hear, and only half of what I see.
Those were the days when our visual world,
beyond the purely experiential one
directly surrounding our physical bodies
was limited to print periodicals and books,
we had to chase down, and usually pay for,
and three television networks piping through the ether
on to often fuzzy screens.
Presuming you've been awake for the past few months,
you're likely aware of the explosion of media,
largely digital and visual, has had varying impacts on,
to be a bit selfish or narrow here, American culture.
The way we consider today what it takes
to be a literate human being, to judge between
a fact, say, and an alternative fact
is different from way back when I received
that rather pragmatic advice from
a drill sergeant all those decades ago.
This evening then, we have the opportunity to explore
this cognitive territory with an expert.
Dr. Robert N. McCauley is the William Rand Kenan Junior
University Professor at Emory University and founding
Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture there.
Author of many books, including a new one due out soon,
papers, academic papers, and a blog we'll add
that I won't attempt to enumerate here.
I'll just suggest to you that his
bibliography shows him to be a
widely recognized authority on the subject matter,
and he's gonna give us a chance to cogitate on it
over the next hour and a quarter or so.
His prepared remarks will be followed by
a short question and answer period
here in the auditorium, after which we'll adjourn
to the Rapture Food Court downstairs.
Make of that title what you would like, Bob,
where you'll be able to buy the book
I mentioned earlier, get him to autograph it,
and talk with him individually,
as well as partake in the light refreshments
provided college's culinary staff.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Bob McCauley.
(audience applauding)
(plastic clanking)
- Auspicious beginning.
My mic is on?
Yeah, okay.
Well, first of all thanks very much
for that kind introduction, for the gracious
hospitality I've enjoyed today as I've been around campus,
and actually for this invitation, also.
It's given me an opportunity to put together some ideas
that I've been wrestling with for
frankly a couple of decades by now,
and I'd been wrestling with them, in part,
because of the influence of a fella
who was at NYU for many years, most of his career,
Neil Postman, and I'm going to be arguing for
at least a few of the theses that Postman himself defended,
though what I'm gonna be most interested in is,
in some ways their psychological foundations,
and that was at least a topic that Postman
did not have much to say about.
The talk is gonna have three sections to it.
In the first, what I'll so is sort of lay out
some psychological preliminaries, as I've said,
and I want to, crucially to distinguish
two types of sort of intuition,
intuitive or what I'll call, indeed it is an appeal
to the book that Mark mentioned, natural cognition,
and that'll enable me to articulate two theses
that in show I want to defend, and I'll defend those
in the second and third parts of the talk.
What I'm interested in are developments in
information technologies, and the second part
of the talk we'll look at sort of
historical and intellectual dimensions,
and it inspires the title of the talk,
and then the third section we'll look at
social implications of the displacement
of what I call these technologies of literacy
in our own time, or at least partial displacement,
I suppose we should say, over the last 60 years or so,
and that really inspires the title of the third section.
Okay, that said, let me charge ahead,
and talk a little bit about some cognition.
I think it's fair to say that over
the last 40 years or so in the world of
cognitive science and psychology,
sort of a hot view has been the notion
that are sort of two types of ways
that human minds work.
They work reflectively, and they work intuitively.
The notion is that this stuff over here is explicit.
It's conscious.
It typically is in language.
It's slow and deliberate.
I mean in some ways you might think about it
as sort of talking to yourself,
and an awful lot of our mental life
seems to be like that.
By contrast, and I should add that, in fact,
there are sort of two contrasting constellations
of features, and sort of over here by contrast,
this stuff tends to be unconscious,
not terribly articulate.
We're not very good, for example, at saying exactly
how it is that we recognize emotions in other people,
but we do recognize emotions in other people.
I mean, we know we kinda look at their faces,
and we hear their tone of voice,
or we look at their bodily comportment,
but to say exactly how, and what it is
that we focus on, such as we draw various
conclusions about that, and we typically
draw them with great confidence,
is not something that we're,
at least instantaneously, ready to do.
These systems, crucially, are automatic and fast,
and that's gonna be important.
Okay, by contrast, and I gather that there
are a fair number of students in this audience.
So, I mean by contrast, what I mean over here
by reflective activity, there's a great illustration, right?
Getting ready to write a paper for a class.
That's something that you ruminate about,
and think about quite consciously,
and needless to say write.
What I'm gonna be interested in is,
among other things, the acquisition of these,
the very ability to read and write.
Okay, what I want to do now, though,
is draw further distinction, and that is
between two types of intuition,
and those are what I call maturationally
natural intuition, or cognition,
and cognition that enjoys practiced naturalness.
In some ways, talking about practiced naturalness
is the easier, because we have an idiom in English
that's very familiar, and that is we say that
some things become second nature.
After you've had a lot of experience with something,
it tends to move from sort of this side
over to this side.
Think about something, I mean what I'm talking about is
sort of expertise, but I don't mean anything
necessarily fancy by that concept.
I mean people, 10's of thousands of people
who live in major cities that have big fancy
mass transportation systems become experts
in that mass transportation system,
whereas if you're a newcomer to that city,
it's not at all obvious how you do that.
People who play chess for years become expert at chess,
and I'll talk about chess, and again,
in another second or so, but the crucial point
I want to make is, and what I'm gonna be focused on,
is this ability of things to sort of move
from over here to there, where they take on
these kinds of properties, okay,
and in particular, what I'm gonna be interested in
is precisely reading and writing,
learning how to read and how to write.
Among the other things that this does,
and this will be a crucial concept as I go along,
is it establishes what I call cognitive distance.
Okay, that said, there we go, okay.
Again, there are other contrasting features
we can make about these two types of natural cognition.
The problems, sorry, the origins tend to be
earlier in the case of maturationally natural capacities,
these abilities to, I mean, think about when
you learn to talk, or when you learn to walk,
in contrast to when you learned to read and write,
or when your learned to ride a bicycle.
The first are maturationally natural,
and the second, reading and writing, are things that
we gather, we get practiced naturalness with.
These things are up and running before
people even realize that they have them.
You don't remember when you learned to talk,
but you do remember when you learned to read and write.
In addition, the kinds of problems that are addressed.
These are pretty basic problems,
things having to do with human survival.
These over here are rather specialized problems,
as I said, I mean, either at the perceptual level,
at the cognitive level, or even at the level of action.
For example, human beings think that they have,
as it were, a kind of, well we have an idiom in English
that says I never forget a face.
That is to say that somehow we remember faces
a little bit better than we remember other
kinds of things that we deal with,
and there actually is some evidence to support that claim.
That would be in contrast, for example,
to recognizing over here that, you know,
you're looking at a text that's in a different alphabet,
or something like that.
A cognitive discrimination, say,
between syntactic distinctions and, well,
say something like chess patterns.
Chess masters can look at a chess board
and in a matter of a second or two
have the whole board memorized,
even if it's mid-game, and if you have
a computer that just puts things
on a chess board randomly, then they can't do it, okay,
because that's not part of a set of configurations
with which they've acquired practiced naturalness.
Action responses in terms of what you do
if there's a contaminant near you in your environment.
This may strike you as a funny sort of example
to employ, but when I was a little kid growing up,
it was called cooties, and my guess is
you've probably heard that, as well,
I gather from a few other chuckles in the audience.
This is a principled system that looks like
it cuts across cultures.
Everybody knows what the principles are.
One touches enough to contaminate you.
One touches, if I get touched here,
it's enough to contaminate me completely.
The contaminant can be invisible.
Nobody teaches little kids this stuff.
Nobody's ever articulated those principles to kids,
but kids know them.
Think about that in contrast to what you would do
if you, you know, ran into an automobile accident,
or something like that, and how you'd respond to that.
Okay, a crucial distinction is whether or not
these things depend on cultural support,
and these mostly do not.
That is to say you don't sit and, you know,
give tutelage to a child about how to talk.
Basically, you just talk around kids,
and they start talking themselves.
You don't, for the most part, sort of try to
help kids walk, and in fact if you're interested,
the research is sometimes you'll see parents
sort of walking with the kid where the kid
is like this, you know, like that
and helping, allegedly helping them to walk.
In fact, that does not help kids
to learn to walk, and it tends to delay
the ability of them to in fact learn to walk on their own.
This is in contrast to all these other
kinds of examples that I've been giving you,
where in fact, in short, for most of these things
I've been talking about, you go to school.
There's a reason for that, okay.
And last, at least, well not last,
but another prominent feature is
is that all these systems, whether maturational
or practiced naturalness, become very, very fast,
and it turns out they're very fast
because they turn out to be able to operate
on very, very few cues.
I'm talking with some faculty today at lunch.
I said, I mean, what these systems are
are sort of stupid in a certain way,
that is to say you can get, (snapping fingers)
they fire on the basis of just a few cues
that set them off.
What that does is it means that they're
susceptible to illusions, in every case,
and the crucial difference, though, is
is that the ones over here, as opposed to these,
are susceptible to persisting illusions.
That is to say, you can't shake the illusions.
Now, let me show you what I mean.
This is practiced naturalness.
You all have had loads of practice
learning how to read English in your life.
You, this is a sentence, it's unproblematic.
My guess is, you know, everybody can just
read right through it, but what I'm gonna try
to show you, and unfortunately I can't really
quite do this fully here, because I can't give you
that much time so that you'll feel
I'm being fair with you, but take my word for it.
Even if I gave you five minutes,
the findings are generally most of you will get it wrong,
okay, which is to say I'm gonna show you
that there's something, as it were,
that's almost invisible about this.
How many F's are there in this sentence?
Oh, that's an easy task.
Oh, that's easy, okay, well most folks don't get it.
But, note I can manipulate the stimulus
in a way that makes things that
were invisible to you, sorry.
What happened there?
There they are, okay.
I can manipulate the stimulus in a way
that it makes things visible to you
that were invisible before.
How many of you actually spotted all six?
Okay, about maybe 5% of the crowd, okay.
That's about standard, okay.
Note, once you know, you see differently, okay.
That is to say now that I've underlined them
you see, oh yeah, yes, six F's, I see them, alright.
By contrast, here's a famous illusion
that I think is based on maturationally natural
features of perception.
It's known as the Muller-Lyer illusion.
We've probably all seen it before.
You'll also probably all know the gimmick, right?
That is to say B looks longer than A,
but it turns out it's not.
We take the arrowheads off.
We run it up there, and son of a gun,
they're the same length, okay?
But, now note what happens.
You now know this, but I restore
the arrow heads, and the illusion is still there.
This is unlike the F's, okay?
So, the suggestion is there's a difference
in the character of the illusions involved.
Alright, that said, what I wanna do
is I want to focus on two mature, well, sorry,
two domains, that is to say visual perception and language.
There are lots and lots of maturationally natural
systems that human beings have from
the basic physics of solid objects,
to, indeed, hazard precautions that I've already mentioned,
but I'm gonna focus on these two.
Again, think about the contrast
between your perception of human faces,
in contrast to, say, looking at things
like sophisticated technologies.
I had a tour of campus today, and I was in lots and lots
of facilities that were filled with machinery,
that unless you're an expert, and you've gone through
a tremendous amount of discipline
in terms of what I would call reflective perception,
that is to say you've learned how to see,
and I take it that many students in this room right now
are learning how to see certain things
about certain kinds of technologies,
and that's not something that comes naturally.
That's something that requires a
tremendous amount of practice, okay.
There are whole disciplines sort of dedicated to this.
I mean, from technical illustrators,
right through to, and not just technology,
I mean, but say art historians
who are looking at different kinds of things,
but learning how to see them, okay.
The other that I'm gonna be interested in is language,
and here what I want to do is just contrast
learning, as I already have, learning how to speak,
or sign with the deaf, in contrast to learning
how to read and write, okay,
and what I'm interested in is this
process of developing practiced naturalness
with the technologies of literacy.
Okay, now I've given you all of this preliminary,
and that's the end of the first part of the talk,
except to say that it was all in service of defending,
or laying out for you, the two theses
I'm gonna argue in the second and third
parts of the talk, okay?
I'll read them to you, no problem.
Acquiring practiced naturalness with
technologies of literacy enables us to
obtain cognitive distance from the world,
from the spoken word, from individual minds,
and from linguistic symbols themselves,
and then I've added parenthetically,
and this has been pivotal in the
progress of human civilizations.
Then, the pervasive delivery, and this what I'll do
in the last part of the talk, the sub-title of the talk.
Okay, the pervasive delivery of information
by means of the electronic transmission
of visual images reduces opportunity
for obtaining such cognitive distance,
with striking social consequences.
Okay, that said, let me charge into part two.
Well, sorry, I should say, yeah, indeed,
charge into part two.
There are two phrases here that probably
jump out at you as a bit of a mouthful,
the technologies of literacy and cognitive distance,
and what I want to do is explicate the latter
in part by talking about the former,
that is to say our sort of collective progress
as a species with these technologies of literacy,
and then individual's facility with
developing practiced naturalness with
those very technologies, and those are
the things that contribute to what
I've called called cognitive distance.
Okay, and I hope that this will become clearer
as I move ahead.
Alright, my brief natural history
of the technologies of literacy (laughing).
The foundation of this is the fact
that we're the linguistic species, right?
We're the ones that talk.
Interestingly, I mean we may not be
the only ones that are capable of talking,
but we're the only, well sorry, of being language users.
We are the only ones capable of talking,
but of being language users, but there is some evidence
that, for example, chimps, actually at my own university
this research was done, where they have acquired
certain elements of sign language,
but this is not something they do spontaneously
the way we do, okay, but what this shows is
is that spoken words are sort of
our natural abstract symbols.
I mean, what I mean by that is
crucially the words are not the things.
I trust at one level that's obvious to everyone.
I mean, apple, the utterance apple,
the word, spoken utterance apple,
is not that wonderful fruit.
I haven't conjured one up by having said it, right?
Okay, that's a first degree of
what I'm talking about as cognitive distance,
in this case from the world,
but the first step is really now,
then that's a sort of foundation
for the development of these technologies of literacy,
but what do they ultimately require?
Well, the general consensus seems to be
that this is a function, first of all,
I mean of something that may strike you as odd
until I lay out the causal chain real quickly here for you,
but that's the development of agriculture,
that you don't get literacy until you have agriculture,
and after you get agriculture, of course,
what you get are sedentary lifestyles.
People quit wandering around the landscape,
and they stay put in one place sort of guarding
the farm so to speak, and taking care of the farm.
That produces concentrated populations,
which leads to villages and towns, and ultimately cities.
It also leads to the production of surpluses,
and the production of food surpluses leads to
problems about food storage.
All of these new specialized tasks
in sedentary setting require new
sort of social rules for people,
which generate hierarchical societies,
which generate state kleptocracies,
that's a fancy word for saying that they tax us, okay.
They take our wealth, and taxes and tributes,
and so on, and of course that produces
a need for accounting, and leads us to
our first sort of stage here, and that is
the invention and evolution of written iconic
or pictographic symbols.
Now this all got started in what is actually now Iraq,
right, in the fertile crescent, in Sumer,
about somewhere between 6,500 and 7,000 years ago.
There were tokens that were initially used
to kind of keep track of things
as counting devices, and they eventually evolved
into written iconic pictographs.
Now, the point about a pictograph is
that it now stands apart.
It creates a new kind of cognitive distance
over spoken words.
The icons, also, are not the things,
that's obvious enough, but they're also
now distant from their creators.
When I speak a word, there are two points about it.
One is that it's something that's come from me.
It's from my mind, and secondly it's ephemeral.
The second a word is uttered, it's gone.
These things are not gone.
They stick around.
They're lasting, enduring, external representations,
and they achieve a further cognitive distance,
both from now the world and the spoken words.
Written pictographs quickly become
abbreviated and regularized from the world
since they're less iconic.
I mean, you may start out with sort of
an oval and a couple of little points on the top,
and four little things sticking out of the bottom,
and a little squiggly thing at the end,
and that's our pig, right, but very, very quickly
this just becomes a sort of quick oval
with a little mark on it, and that's the evolution
from pictographs to where we're sort of heading next,
and that is to the invention and evolution
of written linguistic symbols.
Okay, now what's the point here?
The word that's in italics is linguistic.
The point about this is is that what's happened now
is symbols no longer stand for things.
They stand for the words for things,
and that's a crucial transition,
and again it produces greater cognitive distance,
and note the exact words.
With writing, language is no longer just, again,
momentary speech, but again, persisting
external representations of sometimes
what are even unspoken assertions.
Now, written linguistic symbols come in
lots of forms, originally logograms.
Logograms are where you have a single symbol
for a whole word.
Syllabaries, eventually we get alphabets.
Famously, hieroglyphics are actually,
I mean, most Americans at some point
or other kind of bump into the notion of hieroglyphics.
Hieroglyphics are actually sort of
hybrids of all of these things.
They have a little bit of all of them.
They have logograms, syllabaries, and alphabets all,
but then we get alphabets with vowels.
Alphabets with vowels are the first example
of making literacy easier to, sort of,
as it were, making reading and writing
easier to learn, and more accessible.
Why?
Because now the symbols simply stand for the sounds,
and note natural languages have
a very circumscribed set of sounds.
I mean, in English, I've forgotten candidly,
but I think it's about 52 sounds.
Now, we represent that in English with 26 letters.
So, you see that there's still some problems there,
but most languages have somewhere between 35
and maybe as many as 60 sounds.
That's a lot easier than having a symbol
for every word, let alone a symbol for every thing, okay?
Alright, the Greeks are the people who invented vowels,
the ancient Greeks, and what this does
is it helped to undo what is known as craft literacy.
In ancient Greece you had the first culture
where it was more than just the scribes
and the priests who could read.
Okay, and they've, the alphabet with vowels
sort of undoes their knowledge monopoly.
Okay, now we're gonna make a big leap in history,
because, in short, I'm gonna suggest
that the next crucial thing is
something that occurs almost 2,000 years later,
and that is the invention of the printing press
in the 15th century in Europe.
Now, I specify in Europe, because there were
predecessors in other cultures,
but in neither, in the two prominent cases,
they neither became widespread, nor did they persist,
and by contrast Gutenberg's invention
was copied repeatedly, and indeed within 50 years
of the invention of the printing press,
there are over eight million books in Europe.
What we then do is we move from a narrow to scarcity
to a radical availability of knowledge.
Now, unlike sort of hand copied Medieval texts
in the Middle Ages, books are no longer personalized
in this way, but they're standardized in form, okay?
Each convention of book publishing,
paragraphing, page numbers, titles, chapters,
section designations, tables of contents,
standardized references, figures, charts,
indexes and more has made books less personal
and a lot easier to read, okay?
Now, there aren't as many of those conventions
in Dick, Jane, and Sally, but they're there, okay?
They're still there, a number of them.
Note that developing, by regularizing these,
they're easier to read, and it makes it easier
to acquire practiced naturalness with them,
and that means then that the symbol systems themselves,
the details of the symbol systems
no longer pose any barriers, and when you become
an expert with a symbol system like this,
you become blind to things like
how many F's there are in the sentence.
Okay, because, by the way, there's literally
experimental research on this.
You can give people sentences in which
you put the first two letters of the word
correct, the last letter of the word correct
for all of the words in the sentence,
and scramble all the intermediate letters in the words,
and people will just read the sentence
and not even notice it, okay?
Alright, what I'm gonna do now is then
quickly turn to two consequences of
these large repositories of knowledge
becoming available and accessible.
First is a social consequence.
The second is a cognitive consequence.
The social consequence is the invention of the,
I'm sorry, what happened here?
There it is, okay, the proliferation of schools,
and a phrase that may strike you
as a little surprising, and that is
the invention of childhood.
In England, when the printing press
was invented in the middle of the 15th century,
there were less than 35 schools in the entire country.
150 years later, there are more than 13 times
as many schools, over 450 schools in England,
just to give you a sense.
What culture suddenly realizes there's
a premium on literacy, and there are suddenly
new huge investments in time and resources.
I mean, not just resources for building schools
or facilities to have schools, but also time.
I mean, you're making lots of kids
go in and do something that's extremely unnatural to them.
I mean, they've got to sit still.
They've got to concentrate.
They've got to spend time learning how to,
in effect, gain practiced naturalness
with these tools of literacy,
these technologies of literacy.
The necessity of schools leads to
the cultural invention of childhood,
because it redefines what a fully functioning adult is.
A fully functioning adult, once these,
a culture has these tools is someone
who has mastery of these tools,
and someone who fails to have mastery of those tools
is no longer accounted as a fully functioning adult.
It also, quite frankly, I mean they have
to operate with more than just mere memory,
and I should say there's no question
that the invention of literacy also
transforms what we mean by memory.
You got to a non-literate culture,
and you try to explain to them
what it means to have verbatim memory of something,
and they'll just be utterly baffled
about what you're talking about.
That very standard is a function
of the invention of literacy.
Okay, I'll return to this in the last part of the talk,
but now I want to say something about
the cognitive consequence, and that is
is that it puts a premium on acquiring,
as I've said, practiced naturalness
with symbol systems, and crucially abstractions, okay?
Yes, there we are, okay (laughing),
and printed general assertions are lasting,
external, transportable, impersonal
representations of abstractions.
They permit prolonged consideration
of abstract concepts, general assertions,
and the kinds of arguments in which
general assertions figure, alright?
Prolonged consideration, note.
I'm happy to say I have a sense
that most of you are attentive,
and with me, and I'm very pleased about that,
but note what you have to do.
You have to follow, in your linguistic processing,
you've got to follow every little utterance
that comes out of my mouth, and as soon as
it comes out of my mouth, (snapping fingers) it's gone,
because I'm producing another one.
That's not the way written language is.
You've had quite a while now to
contemplate those three sentences, alright?
That's what I mean by prolonged contemplation.
I suggest to you that this involves,
it means that you have access to levels of abstraction
that are simply not available to non-literate people,
that it enables you to have to detect,
now admittedly, there isn't much vagueness
or ambiguity in these sentences,
but it a whole bunch of sentences
that a lot of people say, especially politicians,
there's lots of vagueness and ambiguity,
and it also enables you to ponder counter examples,
and that of course encourages critical reasoning.
New levels of abstraction means you acquire
greater cognitive distance, and that cognitive distance
is the key to having critical distance.
Printed general assertions, occasional levels
of abstraction that are utterly foreign
to the deliverance's of maturationally
natural capacities, live vision,
and like spoken language, and they enable
forms of reasoning that no images can support.
Okay, so now I'm ready.
Boy, this has been a lot of work
to explicate for you the title of the talk, right?
This is why the cognitive distance,
the printed general assertions elicit,
make them worth more than innumerable pictures.
No image is, no number of images,
is equivalent to a general assertion.
Pictures are always particular.
Pictures do not show concepts.
They show things.
There's no arguing with images
which are automatically processed
by your visual capacities.
There's no rules of evidence or logic
to which a picture must conform,
and a picture is irrefutable,
but note interestingly it's precisely
general claims like this that tell you,
sorry, general claims like that one right there,
that tell you which pictures are important.
(audience chuckling)
Okay, that said, unlike the processing of images,
which relies on natural, maturationally natural capacities,
obtaining cognitive and critical distance
are overwhelmingly cultural accomplishments.
that turn an individual's developing
practiced naturalness with the technologies of literacy.
Trafficking in images, by contrast,
at the expense of cultivating practiced naturalness
with the technologies of literacy
sacrifices cognitive distance, which in turns
destabilizes critical distance, and with that comment
let me turn to the final part of the talk.
I'm gonna briefly examine four social consequences
in contemporary American life of the new
ubiquitous electronic technologies
that deliver de-contextualized visual images to us.
More people than ever now acquire information
primarily by means of such visual images.
Now, the origins of this have to do with
lots and lots of other inventions
of technologies over the last couple hundred years,
from photography to telegraphy, and motions pictures
in the 19th century, to television,
and personal computers in particular
in the 20th century, and our mobile devices,
and the availability of Wi-Fi now
in the century in which we live.
Okay, let me get a drink.
(audience member coughing)
Before I launch into this, I want to make
three preliminary comments.
The first one is that I assume that
what I've just said is uncontroversial
about the pervasiveness of these images.
If I can give any other illustrate,
I mean I can't, I don't think I can give
any better illustration that simply what was going on
in this auditorium before this talk started.
30 years ago when you were in a situation like this,
people came, they sat down, they saw friends,
they sat and they talked.
What happened overwhelmingly is people came here
and they had their cell phones out looking at them.
Okay, Facebook estimates that Americans average
three and a half hours daily simply viewing online videos.
I'm not talking about T.V. or anything else.
Just online videos.
Three and a half hours daily, on average.
Common Sense Media shows that,
that's an organization that does research on these things,
Common Sense Media shows that teenager's parents,
who view themselves, and they found that they
unequivocally do view themselves as trying to
set a model for their kids, and among other things
they say they try to set a model for their kids
so that the kids don't become deeply, deeply invested
in these technologies.
Nonetheless, the parents average nine and a half
hours daily viewing a video screen.
Okay, now the thing that's really interesting here is
their best estimates suggest that only
one and a half out of those nine and a half hours
has anything to do with looking at a screen
that has anything to do with their work.
This is just a footnote.
I mean, my guess is maybe some of you
don't know, or don't care about this,
but let me tell you something.
Economists have been scratching their heads
for two decades now trying to figure out
why it is that productivity is not
growing faster in The United States.
I think you've got at least a kernel
of an answer right here, okay?
Alright, next preliminary comment,
and that is some disclaimers.
As I trust my mode of presentation,
after all I'm using PowerPoint,
my comment on, my comments on reflective perception,
that is to say the notion that there are
sorts of forms of study where you learn
how to see certain things, and if nothing else
my black sheep illustration show that
I do not think that getting information
from images is always problematic.
I don't think that.
Also, images are not inherent to computerized technologies.
Lots of people, including me, but you know
lots of folks use computers to read and write.
They are different from televisions.
They don't have to be video devices.
Though, in fact, that's, it turns out,
how most people use them most of the time.
I mean, note computers are importantly different
from television, in particular,
and this is gonna matter in some ways.
This is why I'm really quite open about computers.
I'm a little, I'm afraid, more pessimistic about television,
but television only transmits information.
That's all it can do, right?
Computers, by contrast, can store information
and process information, and those are
two very, very different kinds of things.
Finally, the great Canadian social critic Marshall McLuhan
now, my goodness, almost 50 years ago, got it right.
His famous byline was the medium is the message,
and I do want to say that the medium is the issue, okay?
I think the T.V. content is wildly uneven.
Some of it is just absolute drivel,
and other parts of it are just terrific.
I mean, there's lots of good things
on television that are engaging and interesting,
but that's not the point.
I'm not saying watch good T.V., don't want bad T.V.
I'm saying you need to understand
what's going on as you watch any T.V.,
or any video, or you're consuming information
overwhelming by means of images,
and that is you're relying on instant,
automatic, visual processing, okay,
and I trust you've now seen that
that's not necessarily reliable.
Remember the illusions, okay,
and that's in contrast to the cultural achievement
that knowing how to carry out careful analysis
and argumentation is with the technologies of literacy.
Okay, that said, many people, I mean this is
kind of a, sort of a favorite activity
of talking heads, right, these days,
is to speculate about what new technologies
might do for us.
What I want to do is spend a little bit of time
here at the end pondering what they're undoing
in the world we live in, okay?
Specifically, what the pervasive acquisition
of information by means of electronically delivered images
is doing to contemporary American culture.
Now, the first is straight forward.
You're gonna, you know, this is when
McCauley gets to shoot one fish in a bucket,
in a barrel here, right, and that's the decline of literacy.
Now, my first clue about this is,
at more than now 20 years ago,
my daughter will be 34 years old this month,
when my daughter came home and she had
a writing assignment in elementary school,
and I was interested in that, as any parent is.
I mean, when I was in elementary school,
I'm now gonna sound like one of those old goats, right,
by crikey in my day, when I was in elementary school
I had to write reports on Presidents and things like that.
My daughter's assignment was to write
an advertisement for a basketball,
and as soon as she came home with that assignment,
I knew there was something very seriously wrong.
Okay, but there's better objective evidence than this.
Here is SAT scores in The United States
over the last 50 years, alright?
It's, what I'm most interested in, actually,
is this initial decline.
That initial decline is not any of
the students in this room.
That's old guys like me, okay?
This is the baby boomers who have
spent their, basically the first generation
looking at television throughout their childhood,
and into their adolescence, and this is
what happened to their verbal scores on SAT exams, okay?
Now, watching actual T.V. has declined
in the subsequent years.
People don't spend as much time watching T.V.
as they did in those days, but that doesn't mean
they're watching less video.
In fact, they're watching more video.
It's just not on television, okay,
and moreover the chart itself does not even
reflect the fact that in 1995, the verbal scores
were re-centered, that is to say that
the college board had to change the way
they scored the SAT, because in fact
things were sort of plummeting so badly
compared to where they were not that many years before,
and so, in fact, in effect it helped these scores.
They would be, if they were graded
the same way these were, they would be lower yet, okay?
Alright, now there is a subsequent, and less precipitous,
but there's still a subsequent decline
over the last 15 years, as well,
after that re-centering that occurred in the middle 90s,
and of course what's happened in the last 15 years?
Well, among other things people in America
have returned, in lots of cases, to pictographs.
Rather than articulate an emotion,
you simply insert an image.
Instead of learning how to become articulate
about the complex character of human feelings
in social settings and situations, we stick an image in,
and it's also, of course, the era of Twitter.
Twitter's 140 characters encourage all sorts of shortcuts
that disable literate discourse, analysis,
and argumentation, not the least is simply
requiring that ideas be no more elaborated
than what can be captured in 140 characters.
Okay, that's the first one, decline of literacy, okay.
The second one is the rise of celebrity culture.
Again, I presume that this is uncontroversial
for anyone observing contemporary American life.
Celebrity culture is all about images.
Now, at this point you might be expecting
that I'm going to put up an image
of someone on the runway, some celebrity
or other on the red carpet, but, you know folks
I'm an academic.
I'm gonna show you bunch of text (laughing), okay.
This is a selection from a book
that I hardly recommend all of you,
Joe Henrich's book, The Secret of Our Success,
it just came out this year.
Joe, I'm gonna read this passage to you.
So, just hang in there with me.
In fact, I've got a tool for doing this.
Didn't work, okay, in any event.
Henrich is arguing that human beings
have a learning bias, that is to say,
you know, whether or not it's innate or not I don't know,
but human beings have a learning bias,
and he calls it prestige psychology,
and he, frankly, I mean it's all about
explaining cultural transmission and cultural evolution.
Okay, that's the subtitle, as you see, of the book.
In short, he's suggesting here that celebrity culture
is a by-product in an environment that is permeated
with electronically delivered visual images.
Okay, Henrich says part of figuring out
who to learn from is attending to whom
others are looking at, listening to, and emulating.
People end up attending to whomever
the popular media is covering.
Attention cues cause people to
unconsciously perceive someone as a worthy model.
These attention cues can cause our prestige psychology
to automatically infer that these individuals
are worthy of our imitation, respect, and admiration.
Now, one, the first thing I want to show you is
is that prestige psychology as he describes it
right here in this passage, shows the marks
of cognitive naturalness, and I think,
actually, maturational naturalness, okay.
That is to say attention cues cause,
or trigger, both unconscious perceptual processing
and automatic inferences.
What I'm suggesting to you is
is that celebrity culture may be a persisting illusion,
just like the Muller-Lyer, okay,
induced by the ability of repeated visual cues
to automatically trigger prestige psychology.
Now, if you think hold it.
I can resist that.
I don't really think, actually Joe calls this
the Paris Hilton effect, okay.
I'm not influenced by Paris Hilton.
I'd suggest to you that any time
you are in a setting where it's overwhelmingly
conspicuous to you that a large group of people
are paying attention to someone else,
even if it's Paris Hilton, you can't resist it,
no matter how hard you try.
Okay, the third development is
what I'll call the debasement of democratic processes.
Now, discussing these matters at such a politically
fraught time is a challenge, but I'm gonna try
to do so in a way that I take will be,
I hope you'll regard as non-partisan.
So, let me tell you about two well-documented patterns.
This is a quote from the fellow that I told you
I owed some of the inspiration for this talk from,
and that's Neil Postman.
More than 20 years ago, Postman said
technologies create new definitions of old terms.
And, this process takes place without our
being fully conscious of it.
Television changes what we once meant
by political debate and news.
Now other than our age of television,
without a doubt the most famous debates
that occurred in American political history
were between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas
in 1858 when they were running for
the senate seat in Illinois.
Let me just share a couple of facts
about those debates with you.
First, there were seven of them,
not two, not three, seven.
There were seven of them.
They occurred in various towns around the state of Illinois.
Here was the format for the debates.
The first speaker spoke for 60 minutes.
The second speaker responded for 90 minutes,
an hour and a half, and the first speaker
then had a 30 minute, a half hour rejoinder.
All these debates were printed in full in newspapers.
They were attended by thousands of citizens
in all seven cases, and you must remember something.
They had no voice amplification.
I invite you to imagine what that was like.
In our age of television debates,
and those are scare quotes, okay.
In that era, with candidates from both sides of the aisle,
or three sides in the case of the 1992 situation,
what we have are candidates and their teams,
as it were, negotiating to ensure that
they never need to speak more than two minutes.
Actually, I think in this modern T.V. era
the most that, in any of the debates they ever had,
was five minutes, but you need to know something.
That wasn't the T.V. stations clamping down of them.
They wanted it that way, and indeed we've moved
from those 5 minutes, now down to two minute statements.
The candidates want it that way.
Why?
So that they can memorize stuff that they
can spiel our without any thought.
They can give you slogans.
I mean try thinking, think about any
of our current candidates speaking for 90 minutes
on a focal topic for the debate.
You can't just crank out stuff that you've memorized.
You can't just utter slogans.
It won't cut it.
Okay, in such an era, that is to say in a T.V. era,
image is everything, as opposed to having
particular positions, being able to articulate
them clearly, having knowledge about them
and the facts that are relevant
to support them in terms of arguments, and analysis.
Now, when I said that I was doing it in
a non-partisan way, I'm reaching back into history.
I see there are a few folks in this room
that are old enough to remember this.
I remember it, okay, and the 19,
the first televised debates between
Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Now, this was a landmark point in American
political history, but it has some
very, very interesting features.
Famously, Nixon eschewed a lot of makeup
in the first debate, and he kinda looked
a little sort of, you know, old and not so great,
and then what happened is is that there's some evidence,
and some people believe he over corrected
in the second debate, which is to say
he used too much makeup, okay?
But, here's the famous finding.
When pollsters went out and checked
people's responses to the debate,
people would watch the debate on television
decidedly tilted in Kennedy's favor.
They thought that Kennedy had won the debate.
Maybe it was the makeup on Nixon.
Who knows, I don't know, okay.
A clear majority of viewers on T.V. said
Kennedy won the debate, he had performed better.
The majority of people who only
heard the debate on the radio said
that Nixon won the debate.
People who had, were not sort of overwhelmed
by visual images, but rather had only
to do the linguistic processing part,
still maturationally natural, but at least
it's linguistic, right?
I mean you're processing what they were saying,
tilted in favor of Nixon.
Now, remember in that quote I had for Postman.
He said that debate and news.
T.V.'s transformed what news means.
I mean, in political news, for example.
What we have are accounts of horse races and polls,
and I trust no matter how meaningless
those polls are, and I trust every American,
on the basis of the, you know, this last
presidential election, and the election in 2000,
understands that a national poll doesn't mean anything
in the American electoral system.
What we have are 51 individual presidential races,
and an electoral college.
So, the fact that they keep telling you what those polls,
you know, what the latest poll is,
it doesn't mean anything, and they only report
about sort of who's winning, or who's up,
who's down, that sort of thing.
Here's what I, I mean quite frankly,
I find this a frightening report.
Another one of these think tanks, the Tyndall Report,
studies the major television networks.
Listen to this one.
The three major T.V. networks for this
election cycle in 2016, the presidential election cycle,
averaged one minute of covering issues per month
in their national news telecasts.
Okay, be clear.
Even newscasts are about the attention economy.
Now, this is opposed to sort of the quaint notion
that access to the broadcasting spectrum
is a sacred public trust.
The aim of television, the aim of websites,
the aim of anything that is trying to attract your eyes
is to attract your eyes, and to hold your eyes,
because that's how they make money,
and that's like just as true about so-called fake news.
These folks in foreign countries, I trust
you all have read enough about this to know
that there were a number of foreign websites
that were alleged news websites
making up all kinds of stories.
These people got very rich doing this,
because people did go to it.
Principally by means of links through Facebook.
Now, what I would like to suggest is
that inevitably, this will involve
a diminishing of constraints, both substantive,
so called fake news, right, and also frankly moral.
I'll say a bit more about that in just a bit.
You've all heard the local principle right?
If it bleeds it leads.
Now, my favorite example is this one
in this picture up here.
This is the human chandelier from
The Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus
in 2014 when this act first appeared.
The chandelier broke, and these women
fell to the floor, and they suffered
a variety of, sorry, of injuries.
The point I'm, the reason I have it up here is this.
ABC's national broadcast of World News Tonight
included this video for five consecutive nights
in their national news broadcast.
I'll leave it to you to assess it's
comparative importance to the welfare of our nation,
but it does keep your attention.
Okay, now I suspect that the fourth consequence,
and this is the last one, is the least obvious,
and thus most surprising, though you've already
gotten hint of it from some things I've already said.
It also probably most lends itself
to direct action by individuals,
each and every person in this room.
Neil Postman famously stressed what
he called the disappearance of childhood.
I prefer, I prefer the metaphor of the erosion of childhood.
Now, you need to understand that prior to
the opportunity created by the printing press,
and therefore a need for widespread literacy,
that is to say from human pre-history,
right through to the early modern period,
through certainly throughout the Middle Ages,
human development basically has two stages, right?
The first is at the tuning of all those
early evolving, early emerging
maturationally natural systems,
principally marked by about five, six, seven years of age
children have become competent speakers of their language.
It's not a coincidence that school age
is the same across cultures, and it's
somewhere between five and seven years of age.
The second stage, of course, is arriving
at sexual maturity and adolescence.
The point I want to make is with the invention
of the printing press, it introduces a new
culturally invented stage.
It's called childhood.
What happens between seven and at least
sexual maturity, 13 or so, but 14 maybe,
or even more, seven to 18.
This is not a natural stage.
Schools create the necessity of an extended childhood,
because it takes a tremendous amount
of time and effort to develop practiced naturalness
with the technologies of literacy.
Now, without widespread, prolonged schooling
there is no childhood to be had.
I have in mind here most of the ancient world,
and certainly the Medieval world.
Have you ever noticed, if you've been to
any art museums and look at all those
Medieval paintings of the Madonna and child,
the thing to notice about them all
is that the child doesn't look like a child.
It looks like a 42 year old guy, right?
(audience chuckling)
And, the best evidence of that is
look at the proportion of his head
relative to his body.
That's the proportions of an adult, not of an infant.
Europe, in the dark ages, returns to natural
oral culture and craft literacy.
The only people, as it were, who can read
are those scribes and priests.
No secrets are kept from children.
Pieter Bruegel's, the Elder's paintings
are wonderful illustrations of this.
The children, and I don't know
if you can see it very well, but the children
are miniature adults.
Right there is, there are two right there, actually,
and then a third who is a little older.
They're just miniature adults.
This is just as true for the uneducated
working class in the late 19th century.
This is a painting I actually just bumped into
just a month or a couple months ago
in San Antonio, Texas.
John George Brown's Street Gallantry.
The point about the painting is this.
It portrays kids who are, I would guess
somewhere between eight and 10, maybe 11 years old,
but they're conducting themselves in activities
that no eight to 11 year old conducts
themselves in if they're going to school
on a regular basis.
This is what is known as latent, the latency stage,
when boys and girls don't even want to see each other,
don't even want to be with each other.
So they find the others off-putting,
but if there is no childhood,
then eight, nine, and 10 year olds
are suddenly doing things that
they wouldn't do in other settings.
Also, now in a third world of child soldiers
and workers in Africa, in India, and The Middle East,
and in a television world, including the world
that each and every one of us lives in.
In a television world where kids always
know more than adults.
I think this started with like a fella, Gary Coleman,
if you know the history of television.
A television world where kids always know
more than adults, and of course, adults,
especially on game shows, act like little kids.
We are our most humane when we protect children
from the secrets of the world.
Sexuality, profanity, death, debilitating illness,
addiction, violence and crime, war, carnage,
torture, wealth and money, class,
political corruption, famine, and more.
The erosion of childhood is facilitated
by the erosion of shame, and T.V. and videos
are full disclosure media.
Broadcast T.V., let alone cable, let alone video streaming,
or any of those other things, has transformed standards
in just the last, I would say the last two decades,
in ways that are just patently obvious.
From ads for Viagra, and it's famous warning,
to mixed, I mean I have to say, this second example
is one that just took me back.
Advertisements for mixed martial arts
cage fighting on broadcast television.
My son-in-law and I were watching a football game
on television, and the kids were, my grandchildren
were, you know, sort of running in and out,
but they watch a little bit of T.V.
every once in awhile, and it went to a commercial,
and this is what was being advertised,
and I took my breath away.
I got up and I stood in front of the television set.
In a literate world, these secrets are locked up.
They create a knowledge gap.
Ideally, acquiring such knowledge gradually
becomes an achievement of a carefully
prepared literate mind.
Okay, types of evidence.
The sexualization of children.
I have in mind, for example, things like
Halloween costumes, French maid costumes
for nine year old girls.
Beauty pageants, if you remember,
you're old enough to remember JonBenet Ramsey.
Sexting in junior high and middle schools,
and what is my absolute favorite,
well, I mean favorite, not favorite,
but poll dancing accessories for Barbie dolls
that were sold in The United Kingdom
until there was enough public protest about it.
Secondly, treating children as adults legally.
In 2012, 2,300 prisoners in The United States
were sentenced to life without chance of parole
for crimes committed at age 17 or younger,
and 79 with life without chance of parole,
79 were sentenced for crimes they committed
at age 14 or under.
Los Angeles County, just this past year,
outlawed solitary confinement for anyone under 18,
and third, the adult child.
In a culture of electronically delivered images,
there is an obliteration of the distinction
between childish and adult sensibilities.
Regarding the latter, the adult child
is a grown up, whose intellectual and aesthetic capacities
and tastes, and whose emotional understanding
remain frozen in time, same as in their adolescence,
or perhaps even younger.
I mean, I've been quite struck by the rise
of this new phenomenon, coloring books for adults.
I would also point to the pervasive popularity
in every major American city, of radio stations
that play, as it were, one might say
the golden oldies, right?
The hits from some previous decade or other.
It's not that the music's bad.
I'm not saying that.
It's fine, of course you should have the right to do this,
but what is interesting is is that there's
such a huge audience for just listening
to that music over, and over, and over again,
the music of your adolescence is
typically what we're talking about,
and movies for adults have become comic books on video.
There's stunning special effects, images,
but often actually with very little acting in them.
Now, the crucial measure here, I've found,
is the length of a given take in a movie, okay?
I invite you all, if you've got Netflix,
go get three movies from the 1950s, 1940s.
What you will see is is that there will be scenes
where the camera is on the same scene
without changing angle for long periods of time.
People actually have to say things and act.
Contemporary movies, by contrast,
is a (snapping fingers) constant new take.
Why, why?
Because every time there's a new take,
every time there's a new angle,
every time there's a new vision, a new image,
you go back to those maturationally natural
systems kicking in.
You've got to figure out what the image is.
There's no time to be contemplating what else is going on.
Walt Disney said adults are only kids grown up.
Well, Walt should know.
Since the 1990s, the fastest growing segment
of business at the Disney properties,
in Disney World in Florida in particular,
is childless adult couples.
I'm sorry.
I understand going once or twice, maybe even twice.
We went there.
We took our daughter there when she was 11.
We said this is it.
You're going once, this is it.
It's very hard for me to fathom why people
would want to go to this place if they didn't have kids,
let alone go multiple times.
Okay, last slide.
I'm gonna let Neil Postman have the last word.
Postman said once the machine is built,
we discover, sometimes to our horror,
usually to our discomfort, always to our surprise,
that it is quite capable, not only of changing our habits,
but of changing our habits of mind.
I've argued that these kinds of technologies
alter human modes of cognition,
the capacities with which we think.
They tend yo force us back to the maturationally natural
capacities, in contrast to exercising
our practiced naturalness, particularly
with the technologies of literacy.
They change human interests, the things we think about.
Advertisers, web designers, T.V. folks
know what images grab your attention,
and therefore what things will dominate your thought,
and they also alter the character of human community,
the context in which our thoughts take shape.
The increasing acquisition of information
by means of the electronic transmission of images
may be undoing familiar aspects of human community,
human thought, and finally I think even human identity,
that merit our attention and considered response,
both individually and collectively.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- [Mark] We have a few moments if we could
have any questions from the audience.
Dr. McCauley will be glad to respond to some.
We've got microphones, so if you have a question,
if you'd raise your hand, and one of the,
one of the microphones will get over to you.
There's one over here, there we go.
- [Bald Male] Yeah, I'm wondering about
something as an instructor.
We are generally encouraged to
use more images in instruction.
Is that a mistake, because maybe we're undermining
the textual learning we want the students to have?
- [Robert] I don't think that there's any carte blanche
response to that, to say oh yes,
using more images is always a mistake.
I would, remember my disclaimer,
I mean one of the things I'm saying is
that of course people can learn from images,
and indeed there are whole disciplines
that are devoted to sort of learning,
as I put it, learning how to see.
Sometimes seeing is very, very helpful.
I mean, it's certainly a heuristic device
to help little kids first acquire a language,
sorry first to acquire literacy, right?
I mean, Dick, Jane, and Sally are
pictured in those books, and you can
kind of see what they're doing,
and what Spot's up to, and, you know,
and so that helps you to sort of perhaps make some
educated guesses about the words.
I guess I would say this.
I think that other than, unless you're working
in one of those disciplines, there probably
ought to be at least a few sessions
every semester where you never use a PowerPoint slide once.
That students are forced to engage and to think
by throwing the questions at them,
but, you know, is there, is this unequivocally a bad thing?
No, I don't want to say that.
I mean, first of all, it isn't gonna go away.
It isn't gonna go away.
It will always be with us now that these technologies exist.
What I am concerned about is the over reliance
on those technologies in a way that,
as I've said, sort of tends to displace
the development of this practiced naturalness
with the technologies of literacy,
and that doesn't have to happen.
- [Mark] Questions in the back there?
- [Male With Microphone] In your research,
did you find any information on the ability
for us to process medium where we're
looking into a light source, as opposed to
looking at a reflected light image?
So, for example, the difference between
watching a film, and looking into a tube that glows?
- [Robert] I'm, I guess I'm missing, could you
just repeat the question?
- [Male With Microphone] It's a question about
the nature of the medium that we view the image in.
- [Robert] Ah.
- [Male With Microphone] Okay, so the difference
between looking let's say at a T.V. tube
or a computer screen.
We're actually looking into the source,
a light source as opposed to seeing
an image by reflected light, which is what
we normally do naturally.
- [Robert] Oh, in other words, what you're asking about
is the difference between seeing, excuse me,
transmitted images, as opposed to seeing
them in the real world.
- [Male With Microphone] Right, and our physical ability
to process the images we see through the tube.
- [Robert] Well, that is of a piece, at least, with some of
the points I made right at the end about
the way movies work, right?
I mean, when you're watching images on screens,
you're not in control of sort of what you see, right?
I mean they're controlling (snapping fingers) the pace
of what you see, as well as the content
of what you're seeing.
By contrast, when you look at the world,
you have a good deal more control.
- [Male With Microphone] Actually there's a noticeable
difference between seeing a film,
because we're not looking into the light source.
We're seeing the film projected onto the screen,
and then we're seeing the light from the screen,
as opposed to staring into the tube.
- [Robert] Oh, okay, you didn't mean the real world.
You meant going to movies in a movie theater.
- [Male With Microphone] Versus looking at a tube.
(mumbling)
- I'm not quite sure what you're
driving for with that distinction.
I guess in terms of the issue of processing images,
they're both still the same on that front.
If I might kind of nefariously use your question,
though, to make a point that I was making
about some of the psychological distinctions
early on, there is no better illustration
of the sorts of illusions that human beings
are susceptible to visually than
going to a movie theater and seeing a movie.
Okay, now what's he talking about?
Well, all you got to do is walk down
to the side of the screen and take a look
at the movie this way, and what you'll see is
is that all you're seeing is light
changing on a white screen, just patterns of light
on the white screen, that's it.
That's it.
There are no people there.
There is no action there.
There is no causality there.
It's all an illusion, a visual illusion,
a wonderful visual illusion.
I mean we love movies, and they're lots of fun to watch,
but note it's a technology that takes advantage
of our maturationally natural tuned features
of our perception, but with regard to
the distinction between movies as opposed to
looking at a screen, I guess I, at least for
the issues that I was discussing, I don't see
any crucial difference, and maybe I'm missing something,
but in any event.
(woman coughing)
- [Young Male] So, here's a so what question.
So, I think you've convinced us all
that this in issue, this is a problem.
You've also sort of convinced me
that as consumers of the information,
because we cannot look away from Paris Hilton,
we can't look away from these images,
it's incredibly hard for us to change this behavior.
So, it would make me think that
the only way to change this are the people
that are providing the information.
How do you, how as a society do we
convince those with the power to
share the information to change how it's being produced,
when there's no economic incentive, there's no,
there's no normal outward incentive for them to do that?
- [Robert] Yeah, I was going to say, you're a
cockeyed optimist compared to me.
I don't think there's any hope of getting this changed,
because as you correctly pointed out,
there are huge economic incentives.
I mean, this is, I mentioned, no did I mention?
I guess I didn't, but I had a quote in here
that I skipped, but it's from a fellow
who was a designer for Google, who has now
started his own business called Time Well Spent,
and he has this quote that the design
of all of these imaging technologies,
as he said, is a race to the bottom of the brain stem.
(audience chuckling)
Which is to say, and you said how do we overcome it?
I want to make clear, basically you cannot overcome it
as an individual perceiver of images,
because remember what I told you about
these maturationally natural systems.
They are (snapping fingers) automatic.
So, even if it's the case that you learn
about these matters, even if it's the case
that you've actually paid attention to,
I don't know, Lindsay Lohan, or a Paris Hilton,
and you know that they have led
less than exemplary lives, you can't resist
when some, if Lindsay Lohan walked into the room, right,
and there were a gaggle of people around her
paying attention to her, you cannot resist
the notion that this going to grab your attention, as well,
and the question is whether or not
your prestige psychology will hit in,
but a certain sense of prestige is inherent
in the attention that the person gets.
But, I take it you were asking a social question, as well,
and that's why I said that especially
with the fourth consequence that I pointed to,
that this is one where it seems to me
individuals can really make a difference.
I mean, I could say really strong things here.
I think that people should assess
very, very carefully how much T.V. and video
they let their kids watch.
Doesn't matter what the contents of
the T.V. and the video are.
That's not the point.
I mean, I'm even talking about Sesame Street.
At a comment at lunch today, I've forgotten who,
but someone pointed out that, at least in
one of the conversations I had today,
that these days there, we don't let kids
have sort of time for just free play.
If they're not looking at screens,
they're booked with soccer practice
and ballet lessons, and you name it, on down the line.
I think free play's a very valuable thing.
One of my colleagues, Dick Nicer,
is really one of the most, former colleagues,
Dick's dead now, but the most famous psychologist
of the 20th century, and Dick had a very simple view
about elementary school.
He said make em sit there for 45 minutes,
and work em hard, and then give them 20 minutes
to go out and run around, and then bring em back in,
and do the same thing again.
You've got to give em time to get out there
and just run around, get the energy off,
do the kinds of things that come naturally to them,
because otherwise you pin them up with frustration.
Interestingly enough, even in education,
we do this, it seems to me, mostly the wrong way,
because what's been eliminated are
precisely things like recess and physical education.
I don't think that's good.
You can't make too strong a set of demands
on kids that aren't ready for it yet,
but there are lots of things I think that
we can try to do as individuals with regard to
sort of having an influence on, you know,
the great economic and political structures of this country.
I think that's a pretty tough job,
but we can say our piece, and do our best.
- [Mark] We have time for I think
one more question right here.
- [Woman] Where is here?
- [Mark] Okay.
- [Woman With Microphone] Hi, so I had
a question about memory.
You had mentioned briefly about
if we were to come into contact with
pre-literate peoples that they would
have a hard time kind of describing memory,
and how they remember an event.
So, I guess my question is what do we do then
with their oral, what do we do with the oral histories,
the oral traditions of pre-literate people?
How do they fit into kind of what you're looking at,
and I just was wondering if you could
kind of unpack that a little bit?
Thank you.
- [Robert] Yeah, you didn't quite accurately
describe what I said.
What I said was is that in pre-literate cultures,
in cultures that don't know anything about literacy,
the notion of what we would regard as verbatim memory,
for example, for a text, you know, you had to,
well maybe nobody does this anymore,
but you had to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg address, right?
I mean, this is just incomprehensible
in those kinds of cultures.
This is not a standard that's even employed.
There's a terrific book by David Rubin
called Memory in Oral Tradition,
I hardly recommend it to everyone.
He studied oral traditions in contemporary cultures
in the mountains of North Carolina,
as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and what you find is is that folks
who allegedly have memories of these huge epics,
or, and so on.
When scientists go with their standards of literacy,
and assess what's going on there,
it turns out, although everyone will tell you
this guy has this thing completely memorized, they don't.
They have a number of recurring themes,
and they have a number of recurring tropes,
and both are sort of get their play
any time somebody goes through a recitation,
but the notion that they get exactly
the same recitation as they gave the time before,
it just doesn't happen.
With regard to oral tradition, though.
I have other interests, I guess as
Mark's introductory comments suggested,
because I've had a longstanding interest
in religion, as well, and there's interesting evidence
about the existence of certain kinds of oral traditions.
It's not exactly in non-literate cultures, though.
It's typically in literate cultures where,
which is true, by the way, of most literate cultures.
For most of human history, most people
were not literate, okay?
Everybody follow what I just said, okay?
So, even in the cultures where literacy existed,
for most of the time, for most people,
they weren't literate.
There were a few people who were literate.
They were craft, there was called craft literacy,
and so occasionally for, I mean if you,
you conquered, or you know, somebody kills all your priests,
or who knows what, you're sorta stuck,
and so there are, there is some very interesting
evidence in India, in Kerala state in India,
about memory for certain ritual texts
in a setting of people who were not literate,
and what you see is is that if you sustain
anything remotely close to what we could call
verbatim memory, there's just a huge
cultural investment in it.
So, these people are not literate,
but interestingly enough, they have
sort of what me might call schools,
and that is, and so what you see is
is that there are all sorts of things
going on in those schools, and it's sort of
standard stuff, with regard to what psychologists
have found about pneumonic devices.
I mean, first of all, you have prose,
or well, it's prose that in effect become poetry, right?
I mean, first of all you have rhymes (snapping fingers),
and you have rhythms, and it turns out that,
for example, when you have kids practicing these rhythms,
you have them go through certain bodily motions,
so quite literally, and, you know,
the priest will have the kid's head,
and as the kid is reciting this stuff,
he'll take the kid's head and go.
Right, in rhythm with this, and various moves
mean various tropes.
Frits Staal at Berkeley went and
sort of found these folks in Kerala, and it was fascinating.
I mean, we're talking about the equivalent of
scores of pages of text.
Basically, these folks had had it for about seven years,
sorry, 700 years, by way of an oral tradition
that was sustained in a way that I've just described.
But, to have sustained it in that way,
and to have made that cultural investment,
already presumes, I think, the fact that
literacy already existed, and so that standard
was there to be met.
In cultures where literacy doesn't exist,
so far as I know, there's not ethnography anywhere
that reports anything like that.
I hope that helps.
- [Mark] We'd like to continue this downstairs
in the Rapture dining unit area.
For those not familiar, you can go out either door
and down that way.
Those needing an elevator, go out on the right side.
It's down the hall.
Second point.
- [Robert] You ought to tell them they
don't have to buy a book.
- [Mark] If you would, please remember
on April 4th, Cyber Attacks, The Weapon of Choice
of Criminals, Terrorists, and Spies,
Dr. William Ebersole of our faculty
is gonna do a presentation that I think
will, again, entertain.
For now, I'd like to ask you all to join me in,
once again, thanking Dr. Rober McCauley
for this evening's presentation.
(audience applauding)
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