Cognitive psychologist Barbara Tversky discusses the relationship between physical navigation circuits in the brain and abstract human reasoning with Shane Parrish.
Assertion Supported
Tversky: Hippocampal grid cells map conceptual and social spaces, not just locations
“And later work, work that came quite a bit later, beautiful work, showed that place, the single cells in hippocampus, also in cold people, Events in time, conceptual relations, and that grid cells map them in temporal space, conceptual space, social spaces.”
Insight
Tversky: Visual, verbal, and mathematical abilities operate mostly independently
“You can be good or bad at any of them more or less independently, so that's discouraging in, in some way. You think if you're a visual person, if you're not very good at visual, maybe you're better at verbal, and maybe you are, because we do tend to compensate…”
Insight
Tversky: Gaze direction controls meeting dynamics, and women are systematically overlooked
“If you're around a table, who you look at next gets the floor, and women aren't looked at.”
Insight
Tversky: Human spatial memory operates as a fragmented collage, not a map
“And it's not going to be combined in a two-dimensional or even three-dimensional map, nor do we have them stored in our heads. We have partial information stored in our heads, and making it coherent is by no means easy. And so I called it, I said the analogy i…”
Assertion Supported
Tversky: Visual-spatial processing precedes language and occupies more of the cortex
“The visual spatial world precedes language evolutionarily. It takes up far more of the cortex than language, and it has to have its own logic, not logic based, not a logic or a structural Based on language.”
Insight
Tversky: The basic biological action of approach versus avoidance is inherently emotional
“The most basic action is whether to approach something or avoid it. To go forward, we like something, we're attracted to it, we must interact with it, or we avoid it in one way or another. And that simple basic action that even one-celled creatures must take S…”