Really a must read article from Wired, which highlights one of the reasons why it's important to talk with others about what we do is that the process of explaining our cherished theories to others forces us to be more analytical about them:
Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.
This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.”
What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain. It’s not until we talk to a colleague or translate our idea into an analogy that we glimpse the meaning in our mistake. Bob Dylan, in other words, was right: There’s no success quite like failure.
Hi, I just hopped on the site through my google alert for the words "cognition" and "metaphor." I found the title of this post really interesting because it's the very topic I've told a few grad schools that I'd want to research. Thanks for posting Lehrer's article, I particularly like the way that he explains certain regions in the brain as "buttons."
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