1. The Essential Howard Gardner

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You're listening to Radio PZ.
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Hey PZ fam, Geordie here.
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Welcome to our very first episode of Radio PZ.
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Who better to kick this podcast off than our very own Howard Gardner, a founding member of Project Zero?
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The following event was recorded live in Aswith Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in April 2025.
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Enjoy.
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You know, in the age of uh e-books, uh, this what I'm about to say may not be uh relevant much longer, but for those of us who really care about physical books, uh, one of the topics that comes up a lot in places like uh the New York Times Book Review or other places where books are discussed is the question of how do you organize your books?
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How do you lay them out?
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You know, should they be um uh chronological, alphabetical, uh, in the order that you bought them, uh by height, so they have nice uh cross lines or color, so they just are part of the decor.
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But um, I actually uh organize my books by subject, and here are some of the subject sections in my books.
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And because of that, I have this has brought home to me very powerfully what an incredibly diverse uh literary output and research Howard Gardner has created because he has books in my education section, including uh some that I think many people here will be familiar with, but also uh basic research in cognitive uh psychology.
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Uh Harvard uh Howard's also uh ventured into the arts and in fact into philosophy, uh, books on uh leadership, uh books that have taken him into the realm of uh biography and history, and in fact, books that are so hard to categorize that I kind of keep moving it back and forth between sections, which is why that's on its side there.
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So, in that context of the incredible varied work that Howard's done, it's not entirely amazing that the books that we're especially spotlighting today, the new collections of um Howard's work that you can see in the table there, uh, contains a huge range, addresses a huge range of subjects.
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So, Howard, thank you.
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I'm so pleased to have this uh chance to talk to you in front of hundreds of people.
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We don't get to do that too often.
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And I'm gonna um mainly talk about your research and your work, but I do have a couple of um biographical questions.
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So, first is would you agree that you are the second most famous person to come from Scranton, Pennsylvania?
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First of all, thanks, Joe, very much for that nice introduction.
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We didn't prepare anything, so this is so uh both what you said and what you asked me are unrehearsed.
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Um, yes, uh, and uh it's interesting um because Joe Biden was here yesterday at Harvard, but we don't know each other, even though we're the same age and we both come from Scranton.
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He left pretty early, and we were in different worlds, and I don't I don't know him, and he doesn't know me.
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Nonetheless, uh given he he looks he looks pretty good in comparison to what we're dealing with now, which is the most political statement I will make.
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I bet not, but we'll we'll see.
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Uh yeah, I I knew he came to Harvard.
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I actually thought he came to Harvard District because of this event.
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He wanted to make sure that he was still number one from Scranton.
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So maybe there's an active Scranton to Cambridge pipeline that I don't know about, but I'm guessing not.
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I'm guessing that then you arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate pretty much on your own.
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So just say a little bit about what it was like to come here as a freshman.
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Yeah, I was born in 1943 in Scranton.
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Um my parents were German-Jewish immigrants who made it to the United States on the night of the shattering glass, November 9, 1938.
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So I had over my shoulders not only the Holocaust, but also uh a brother who who died when my mother was pregnant with me.
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Um as a kid, I was a studious kid, but not um frighteningly studious, and a serious canist.
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Um and when I turned 12, my teacher said, Well, now you have to go to New York and practice three hours a day, which meant I would have to take a bus or a train and practice three hours a day.
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And I said, No.
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And I think that was a good decision for me and for the rest of the world.
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Um, but I mentioned that background because uh my mind really was opened up by coming to Cambridge in the early 1960s, and I haven't been here for 64 years, which makes me at Harvard longer than 90% of the audience has been alive.
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Um and uh I don't like the metaphor of Kid in the Candy Store, but I just couldn't take enough courses and couldn't form enough relationships with uh with teachers.
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It was a wonderful experience for me.
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And um, it was a time when um men were incredibly predominant.
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There were almost no women faculty members.
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And while Radcliffe existed in Long Longfellow was actually a Radcliffe uh um uh building, they used to say that professors would give lectures in the yard, and they would come over to Radcliffe and take out the dirty jokes and give the same lectures.
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I've no idea whether that's that's true or not.
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Um and uh Did they get paid again for doing it twice?
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That sounds like worth looking into.
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That I don't know.
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But um I saw the questions that were submitted, and I'm not going to go into this unless you want want to, but a very interesting question was uh submitted.
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It said, if you could relive a part of your life, which would it be?
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And the very short answer is when I graduated graduated from college in the next five years, that was absolutely formative for me, and no one could have predicted it even a year earlier.
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So when you got here and there was this candy store of options and courses in front of you, did did you know that psychology was going to be the destination, or when did that emerge?
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No, and this this is actually relevant to the book.
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Um the book contains uh uh stuff I wrote that I thought was worth preserving.
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I've written over 30 books and countless articles, and I always say not even my mother would have read would have read all of them.
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So I had the chance to distill them into two volumes.
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But the book is not just, the books are not just my collected papers.
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There are a hundred what I call legends.
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And these are before the articles or the chapters from the books, I say, this is where I was, this is what interested me, this is why I uh did what I did, and here's where I would change my mind now.
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So it's an intellectual autobiography as well as greatest hits uh uh kind of kind of thing.
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I was actually going to ask you about that later, but since you brought it up now.
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Um is is it your intent?
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Was it your intent to motivate or or context the work?
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Um do you think it needs to be appreciated in its uh original historical context?
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Or what what I mean that's a lot of extra work.
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You're reminding me of the question you just asked, which I jumped over.
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I was going to be a history major because when you're in high school, you hear of history.
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I never heard of psychology, except I had an uncle who gave me a psychology book when I was in high school because he sensed I was interested in psychology.
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And I my eyes are terrible.
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I don't have binocular vision, I can't recognize faces, I don't have stereopsis, but I also prosobagnosic, I can't recognize faces.
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But in this textbook by Norman Munn, they showed um what it was like to be colorblind.
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Um and I said, my goodness, somebody can explain some of the craziness in my head.
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But I was gonna be a history major, um, um, but the history tutorial, you had to take a tutorial, um, was doing historiography.
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And historiography is not reading history, it's not the decline and fall of uh you know the Third Reich or the Roman Empire, it's how do you do history?
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And I wasn't interested in that.
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So um I was very interested in Eric Eriksson, who was a very famous psychologist, psychiatrist who did psychohistory.
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And so I decided to work in what was called social relations, an amalgam field of psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
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But even when I was graduating from college, I wouldn't have known that I was going to be going to psychology.
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I just knew this was my general interest.
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But here's an interesting thing, which I think is in the book, um, because in the last few years of my life I become very interested in synthesizing.
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And you can ask me what I mean by that.
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My memoir is called A Synthesizing Mind.
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But um, I became interested in how historians synthesize, because they take lots of information and put it together and organize it and make it palatable.
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So I discovered that the man who suffered, man who did my sophomore tutorial, his name was Eric Grun.
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He's even older than I am.
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He's a professor at Berkeley, retired.
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And I wrote to him, I said, I'm finally ready to take your seminar because I'm interested in historiography.
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And you know, professors do talk to each other.
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So he he wrote back, and that was a nice closure.
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Um, but one of the very sad things now, and this is not particularly about um the current administration, um, it's about what's happening in colleges generally.
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Um, Wendy Fishman and I wrote a book called The Real World of College, and some people who are here actually work with us on this work in college.
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The whole notion of liberal arts and of having a broad education, which you had because you went to Harvard College, is really being squeezed out by uh professionalism and and muddy on the one hand, and I have to say, I'm sure this will come up, you know, what AI can do, um, because you know, if Chat GPT can write your papers, then uh you might not uh decide to write them yourself.
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So I illustrated the um the range of your work in all the different uh disciplines.
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Do you think that that being in Socrel, that uh amalgam of of various uh traditional disciplines, set you on the course of looking so broadly and in such an interdisciplinary way?
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I think it certainly um consistent with that, but I took music courses, I took art courses, I I wasn't so focused particularly on the social sciences.
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Um and uh I think if I'd had a different um tutor, I went might well have ended up doing history.
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Um so it was almost an accident that I ended up in psychology.
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And then, as you know, it was um a I hitched a ride to Ann Arbor at the end of my senior year at college because I was thinking I would do clinical psychology at the University of Michigan.
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But the guy who drove the car was a cognitive psycholinguist, uh, um, David McNeil.
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He would be known to people who um know that sort of thing.
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And he said, well, you know, there's this guy, Bruner, and I may or may not have heard his name, I don't even know.
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He's hiring people to work with him on a curriculum um for kids to learn about social studies.
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It was called, and this is again very dated, man or course of study.
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You would never call a curriculum now man or course of study.
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And I said, what the hell?
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So I went to visit Bruner.
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I had already accepted a job at the Devereaux Clinic to work with psychiatric patients.
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Um but uh uh Bruner was a very magnetic personality, and it sounded to me like it'd really be interesting.
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And I knew I was going away in England for a year, so I didn't have to go right away to graduate school.
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Um, so that that flipped me, and that's why I said if I could look at myself from roughly 1965 to 1971, that's the answer to the question about how I'd like to understand better uh um why I became what I became.
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Um, because I have a good memory for stuff I've read and even for stuff I've written.
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But I don't have a I don't even have a particular memory for experiences.
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Uh photographs, of course, are very helpful and movies now are helpful, but it's not like I can run a uh a video of what it what I was like in the summer of 65.
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How many of you can kind of um how many of you can kind of run a video of what you were like 10 years ago?
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And I guess uh video is helpful because that then it then it comes back.
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So um I I just parenthetically, uh, for because there's I imagine a lot of people here don't know about the man or course of study, that also anticipates kind of the present era, right?
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Didn't that provoke a whole lot of uh controversy and banning and so on?
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Sure, and we need to talk about that, but let me first say that if I had to pick three most important experiences in my life, clearly working on man a course of study was one of them.
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Because we worked in the underwood school in Newton, where I eventually became a teacher.
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Almost nobody knows that I taught K through two for a year.
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I was terrible.
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Uh but I did I did it because I felt that I was studying kids, I should uh uh I should uh I should work with them.
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Um, but um every day we would um develop a curricular unit, we would try it out with kids who were fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, and then we would analyze how it worked, and we would rewrite stuff for the next day.
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Uh, it was very, very exciting.
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And man, of course of study, again, the name is very anachronistic.
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Three questions.
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What makes human beings human?
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How did we get to be that way?
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And how can we be made more so, more human, or we might say more humane?
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What makes human beings human?
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How do we get that way?
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Of course, that's an archaeological and anthropological and uh uh genetic question, and how can we be made more so?
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That's a question about ethics and about uh love and uh love of the planet, love of uh living things, you know, love of uh even the mountains and the water.
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And uh if you were to ask me, and you may, um you know what I think students should be studying now, I think I think those those three questions.
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But what you asked me was uh, and this is so reminiscent of today, that's why I hadn't put two and two together.
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This curriculum was well supported by the government and by private foundations.
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That's when I first learned about fundraising, and it was used in Newton public schools.
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In fact, uh um Leah Rosowski, the daughter of Henry Rosovsky, was the dean.
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She's now the head of um the Athenaeum.
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She was a student in on the Underwood School uh in in 1965, and uh that that's that that that summer.
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Um the curriculum was very um very contemporary, and it dealt with things which upset people who were on the political right.
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For example, the Nasillic Eskimos, who, when uh they get old, they put the old people on the ice flows, people like me, and they let them out to sea.
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I think that's a great idea, by the way.
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But uh count me in.
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But but uh the Congress didn't like it at all, and it was seen to be sort of spoiled uh Cambridge intellectuals.
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There was a lot of Chomsky linguistics.
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How many of you know about Chomsky?
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Okay, well, he was just getting to be known at that time.
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I met him and many other people through working on this stuff.
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And so the so the House of Representatives type decided to make man course of study uh something to attack.
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And Peter Dow, who's still alive, was a contemporary of mine, wrote a book called Schoolhouse Politics about how the conservatives of that era, um, you know, people in the right wing demolished the curriculum.
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And Bruner, who was kind of witty, said, we never solved the problem of getting from Widener to Wichita.
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You all know Widener Library, you know, that's where people hang around.
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How many of you go to Widener Library?
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Good.
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Well, but Wichita is far away.
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It's Kansas.
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What's the matter with Kansas?
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So that curriculum worked very well for people who were interested in shop skin linguistics, how you know what's Newman language like.
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We worked with Irving DeVore on baboons and on evolution, and we worked on different norms, not silic Eskimos, as I just said, but uh people who lived uh in other um non-Western societies, and that was seen as being brainwashing.
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And uh uh if I were I made a decision, which I is a public decision, I decided not to write, not to sign any petitions about what's going on in Harvard.
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I just thought that was a good decision.
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But I decided that if I want to write something, I'll write it in my own name.
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And maybe I'll go back and read Peter Dow's book.
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It's a book I actually saved and see how much of the stuff that was said in the late 60s and early 70s is being said again.
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Um it is history repeating itself.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I hadn't thought of the parallel until you mentioned uh man, the course of study.
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So we're gonna turn to your work in just a minute, but just one last um autobiographical question, which is you've been talking about uh the enthusiasm that you felt in school and um uh reading Bruner and so on.
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But my sense from your autobiography is that there came a point in graduate school where you were ready to throw off the whole, throw up the whole thing.
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Is that did I get that right?
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Right.
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Well, I don't want uh um Helen to hear this, or um uh uh Katie, because they're about to go off and do doctoral work.
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Oh, dear.
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No, then they they're years and years.
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They're allowed to they're allowed to look in the book.
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Yeah, no, um professionalism then as now, and I think most of you here are in that world, is very much going down a straight and narrow and behaving in a certain way, and particularly if in a rather hierarchical male society, which was what Harvard was like in the 1960s, uh you were expected to people in people's labs and do what they were doing.
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And um, that wasn't what I was, and it's not what I am.
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Um, as it says in the book, I was actually writing three books at the time.
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Uh, and I didn't like the idea of being uh socialized just to try not one experiment after another, which is what the psychology department went.
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So this is this is a memory that's true because I've rehearsed it a lot.
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I sat down and wrote down all the reasons to leave graduate school and all the reasons to stay.
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Uh this is actually, do any of you know that Darwin did this when he was trying to decide whether to get married?
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He made a list of he had like 12 kids.
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Um and uh I decided to stay, and I'm glad I did.
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But I was protected by Roger Brown, who was a great professor.
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He was my professor, Steve Pinker's professor, my wife Ellen Winter's professor.
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And he said, let these let these people alone know what they're doing.
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But people who I won't name said we weren't going through the we weren't going through the straight and narrow, and we did there wasn't a place for us.
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And that I think is probably um even truer now uh in many fields.
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It's very, very, very, very strict.
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It's not good for people who have more wandering kind of mind.
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And one of the reasons I became interested in synthesizing, and that's discussed in both of these books as well in my memoir called A Synthesizing Mind, is I think that's actually what I am.
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Um when I decided to write an autobiography some years ago, I assumed I'd be writing about multiple intelligences, because if you have heard of me, that's what you've heard of.
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But I realized that didn't really explain my mind.
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I have a fairly typical academic mind.
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I'm fairly linguistic, I'm fairly logical.
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Music is kind of a bonus, otherwise, I'm a schlemeel.
00:20:46.640 --> 00:20:54.480
Um but what I am is a person who takes lots of information in very easily, organizes it, and reorganizes it all the time.
00:20:54.720 --> 00:20:59.359
And psychology has nothing to say about synthesizing.
00:20:59.519 --> 00:21:00.559
Do you want to know why?
00:21:00.799 --> 00:21:07.839
Because you can't bring somebody into a lab and say, in a half an hour, here's 20 books, read them and put them together.
00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:09.599
It takes a long time.
00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:22.720
And uh the people who found the work on my work on synthesizing most interesting, uh, I won't mention them, um, are people who find it also describes what they do.
00:21:23.039 --> 00:21:28.319
And it's a fascinating question in the time of large language machines.
00:21:28.480 --> 00:21:35.920
Um, because not only can they synthesize, but they can synthesize in the way that um different people would.
00:21:36.079 --> 00:21:45.359
So let's take the ed school faculty uh and let's take 10 books, and you could say you could say, tell me, Chat GPT, how would Catherine Snow organize these?
00:21:45.440 --> 00:21:47.920
How would Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot organize these?
00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:48.960
How would Richard Light?
00:21:49.200 --> 00:21:50.319
How would Andrew Ho?
00:21:50.640 --> 00:21:57.359
It's really uh so it may they may be able to do it much, much better than human beings, but currently that's what I do.
00:21:57.519 --> 00:22:00.960
And the people who work with me know basically I read a lot.
00:22:01.119 --> 00:22:03.599
Every day I look at a lot of newspapers and magazines.
00:22:03.839 --> 00:22:09.599
I don't read whole books much anymore, but I read books that I need to read.
00:22:09.680 --> 00:22:11.359
And then I try to put it together.
00:22:11.599 --> 00:22:15.680
And if you get these books, they're my last books because I'm not writing any books.
00:22:15.839 --> 00:22:18.960
But if you want to know what I'm thinking, I am an inveterate blogger.
00:22:19.119 --> 00:22:22.720
I don't think anybody in Cambridge blogs as much as I do.
00:22:22.880 --> 00:22:30.799
And in poor Annie and Shinri, who here have to socialize my blogs, but I probably have done several hundred blogs in the last few years.
00:22:30.880 --> 00:22:37.920
And then whatever I think about, and I might go back and read Peter Dow and say, when do you think these things statements were made?
00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:40.000
And see what people would think.
00:22:40.799 --> 00:22:53.440
So when you talk about the synthesizing process and the reading, but does it happen in the writing, or does it happen in your head and then the writing is just distilling it?
00:22:53.680 --> 00:22:55.920
Um I think the answer is yes.
00:22:56.240 --> 00:22:56.559
No.
00:22:57.359 --> 00:22:58.960
It happens in the head first.
00:22:59.200 --> 00:23:04.480
And often if I can't sleep, uh it happens, or when I get up in the morning, it happens.
00:23:04.640 --> 00:23:07.759
But then it is a I can't sleep, I'm synthesizing.
00:23:07.839 --> 00:23:08.160
That's it.
00:23:08.240 --> 00:23:10.480
Yeah, it's a that's a Descartes.
00:23:11.200 --> 00:23:13.680
I'm awake after I synthesize, right?
00:23:13.759 --> 00:23:15.119
Or I'm I'm nodding.
00:23:15.279 --> 00:23:28.640
Um but um you know at a minimum, I will show the blog to Shinri and Annie who work with me, and to my wife Ellen, who's a very good writer, and sorry she can't be here, but she's not not feeling well.
00:23:28.799 --> 00:23:32.799
And then sometimes um I'll send it to other people who are interested in.
00:23:32.960 --> 00:23:35.759
And sometimes people will comment on the blogs.
00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:40.079
But um to me, it's the writing that's that that's the fun.
00:23:40.400 --> 00:23:46.799
Um, and uh there's a uh a story which I don't think anybody here knows.
00:23:47.039 --> 00:23:48.640
Um do I know it?
00:23:48.880 --> 00:23:49.359
Yes.
00:23:49.519 --> 00:23:57.440
Uh there was a couple in uh in at Stanford, and they were both linguists, and I could probably dig up their names.
00:23:57.680 --> 00:24:06.720
Um, but um uh they would often talk about their work, and they had a son, Adam, who was four years old, and he wanted to get their attention.
00:24:06.880 --> 00:24:10.480
And one day at breakfast he said, I read this very interesting paper.
00:24:11.599 --> 00:24:16.640
That's that's that's that's what you need when you have uh people who sort of live live in their heads.
00:24:16.799 --> 00:24:21.680
So, yeah, a lot of my time, and many people here are really nice, have come from Project Zero.
00:24:22.319 --> 00:24:29.599
We we deal with my definition of Project Zero is we develop ideas in education and we give them a push in the right direction.
00:24:29.759 --> 00:24:35.839
We don't run schools, we don't put out books of curriculum, but we deal with ideas.
00:24:35.920 --> 00:24:42.799
Um, and we want educators all over the world to find them interesting and to try to apply them.
00:24:42.880 --> 00:24:57.119
And then Helen, who I mentioned, is now trying to document the impact of Project Zero's work, which has been uh amazing, but it's but Project CERC itself isn't known that well, and that's why Krista Livingston is gonna make that the reality.
00:24:57.279 --> 00:25:03.279
This is this this is the first of a thousand things that she's gonna uh do to make Project Zero better known.
00:25:03.599 --> 00:25:04.960
But uh actually, that's great.
00:25:05.039 --> 00:25:10.640
I was gonna just turn to Project Zero, which is our host, and this is the kickoff of uh what we hopefully a series.
00:25:10.799 --> 00:25:22.960
So I'm not gonna get into the origin story of you in the early 1970s uh giving an amazing opportunity with Nelson Goodman and David Perkins because the story is in the book, and people should get the book and read it.
00:25:23.119 --> 00:25:33.440
But I will ask you, given this amazing 60-year trajectory, and folks here will appreciate that research projects don't have 60-year lifetimes.
00:25:33.519 --> 00:25:35.359
I mean, that's just an astonishing achievement.
00:25:35.680 --> 00:25:38.799
Research it's research projects without any endowment.
00:25:39.039 --> 00:25:41.039
That's what Lizard Carey said.
00:25:42.480 --> 00:25:48.640
Many places exist because they have, you know, maybe let's say$20 million endowment.
00:25:48.720 --> 00:26:03.759
So every year there's a few hundred thousand dollars, which they can say is so so illustrate, tell us one example that one of your favorites of of a PZ project that has had that kind of uh impact.
00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:09.519
Um well, um I hear Dave Perkins is there, but I can't see him.
00:26:11.200 --> 00:26:11.599
Yeah.
00:26:11.759 --> 00:26:21.839
Um, you know, Dave and I worked in propinquity um for close to 60 years, and um I don't know that we ever had a fight.
00:26:21.920 --> 00:26:36.799
I'm sure we had some disagreements, but um we were fortunate to get um a sizable grant from the Spencer Foundation, which was very nice to us over many years, um, to um develop something.
00:26:36.880 --> 00:26:42.480
And I forget whether they gave us the topic or whether we did, but what it meant to understand things.
00:26:42.799 --> 00:26:45.680
Now, understand seems to be totally obvious.
00:26:45.759 --> 00:26:49.680
You know, either you understand something or you kind of understand or you don't.
00:26:49.920 --> 00:26:59.759
But we had time to work with many good educators um locally, and some of them were not so local, to try to understand what understanding is.
00:27:00.079 --> 00:27:06.880
And uh a key idea, which I think came more from David than anybody else, that understanding is a performance.
00:27:06.960 --> 00:27:09.759
Uh when you say to understand, people say, Well, that's something in the head.
00:27:09.839 --> 00:27:10.240
I understand.
00:27:10.319 --> 00:27:12.480
Oh, yeah, I understood that question, Joe.
00:27:12.640 --> 00:27:14.160
But I might just repeating it.
00:27:14.240 --> 00:27:16.079
I might not know what you were talking about.
00:27:16.400 --> 00:27:23.759
But if you were to say to me, Well, um, you've seen how Joe Blatt does an interview.
00:27:24.000 --> 00:27:33.920
Now, I want you to tell me um how he would prepare if he had instead to interview um uh Liz Durising.
00:27:34.240 --> 00:27:43.440
Um now that's performance of understanding because I have to take what you did with me, and you know me somewhat, um, but figure out how you would do it.
00:27:43.680 --> 00:28:00.319
And so, you know, we we have a we have a scheme where you have uh what you call a generative question, you have um performances of understanding, you have ongoing assessment, but it's that's easy to say, but it took us uh quite a few years to work it out.
00:28:00.400 --> 00:28:08.720
And there's books uh which a number of people have written, Stone Weiskey, you may know, probably wrote the book that I always recommend, about what it means to understand.
00:28:08.880 --> 00:28:20.400
And uh I think people who take Project Zero ideas about understanding seriously think very differently about what it means for themselves or for students to understand.
00:28:20.559 --> 00:28:32.240
Uh I mean, I was just saying, let's say you read about um Peter Dow's book, Schoolhouse Politics, and what happened to Bruner's work in the late 60s and early 70s.
00:28:32.400 --> 00:28:37.920
And I said to you, all right, now can you explain to me what's happening now in the Congress?
00:28:38.240 --> 00:28:44.559
Uh if you could draw the things that were relevant, but not the things that were irrelevant, that would be a performance of understanding.
00:28:44.799 --> 00:28:49.599
And uh it causes a very different kind of dialogue in your head and with other people.
00:28:49.680 --> 00:28:51.200
So that's an example of something.
00:28:51.599 --> 00:28:56.240
It's really interesting too, because I think that's an idea that has really permeated this school.
00:28:56.400 --> 00:29:01.920
I think that performances of understanding are increasingly seen as the culmination of a course here.
00:29:02.079 --> 00:29:03.200
So it makes sense.
00:29:03.440 --> 00:29:10.480
Well, I know from your advanced questions and from what you said, Howard, that everybody here is aware of uh multiple intelligences.
00:29:10.720 --> 00:29:18.319
In fact, probably a lot of people here could list uh the original seven that appeared in Frames of Mind in 1983.
00:29:18.720 --> 00:29:27.759
But I bet also that a lot of people wouldn't be able to describe why that book had such impact.
00:29:27.920 --> 00:29:35.839
And I think it's because of the uh superstructure, substructure that that justified those uh intelligences.
00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:42.400
So maybe you could um sort of review the criteria for us a little bit because I think that's not as widely known.
00:29:42.880 --> 00:29:50.000
Okay, well, um uh I just described teaching by understanding and how that was a several-year project.
00:29:50.240 --> 00:30:02.799
So was multiple intelligences, in the sense that the again the edge school, this wasn't Project Zero, but the Ed School as a whole, got a very sizable grant for a kind of a weird uh assignment.
00:30:02.960 --> 00:30:06.880
What is known about the nature and realization of human potential?
00:30:07.119 --> 00:30:10.880
I like to joke, that's a West Coast question, not an East Coast question.
00:30:10.960 --> 00:30:13.599
It's more California than it is Connecticut.
00:30:13.759 --> 00:30:22.079
Um, but um my job on that project, which was a five-year well-funded project, was to know what was understood about cognition.
00:30:22.240 --> 00:30:50.000
And I used that opportunity in a wonderful research group that I had, roughly late 1970s, early 1980s, to visit different countries, consult with different um experts, uh comb through genetics, neurology, archaeology, uh, anthropology, to really take a with it was a synthesizing really, um, a lot of information about human thinking.
00:30:50.160 --> 00:30:59.440
Um but the big mystery, which I don't know, and I don't think anybody else will ever know, was the decision to call it human intelligences.
00:30:59.759 --> 00:31:05.279
Because if I had written human talents, nobody would have known or cared, and I wouldn't be sitting here today.
00:31:05.359 --> 00:31:11.279
Uh but somebody, it might have been I, I just don't know, decided to call it intelligence.
00:31:11.440 --> 00:31:30.000
And by pluralizing the word intelligence, I picked a fight with the IQ establishment, which uh you know has a big vested interest in thinking intelligence is a single thing which can be tested uh adequately with a half an hour paper and pencil or interview.
00:31:30.640 --> 00:31:35.759
And so this really stepped on the toes of um many, many people.
00:31:35.920 --> 00:31:42.880
And there are almost no psychometricians, people who do measuring of the mind, who buy multiple intelligences.
00:31:43.119 --> 00:31:46.640
But when I when they say that to me, I say, have you ever read frames of mind?
00:31:46.960 --> 00:31:54.640
And then that just stops the silence, that brings silence, because I have 400 pages of evidence for these different intelligences.
00:31:54.960 --> 00:32:07.119
And um I I I have just recently come up with this, but if you were going to Harvard in the 19th century, you would have to do Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
00:32:07.359 --> 00:32:12.079
If you were going to Harvard in the 20th century, you'd have to do well on your college board.
00:32:12.240 --> 00:32:14.480
So basically, linguistic and math.
00:32:14.640 --> 00:32:18.640
In the 21st century, who knows what it's going to be in the era of Chad GPT?
00:32:18.720 --> 00:32:25.359
So what we valorize as intellect changes enormously over long periods of time.
00:32:25.519 --> 00:32:46.400
Um, but the answer to your question is um that an intelligence is a capacity to um ask certain questions um to um advance in making progress with them.
00:32:46.960 --> 00:32:59.599
Um it has to be um seen as useful in at least one culture, um and um it needs to be transmutable, referable to others.
00:32:59.759 --> 00:33:18.640
So I have a set of eight criteria of what counts in intelligence, and I'm glad I said that because um in October with uh Shinri and Annie both of you to den, we wrote a 10,000-word essay called Who Owns Intelligence?
00:33:18.960 --> 00:33:31.599
And I had written an article for the Atlantic, what's called the Atlantic Monthly then, the Atlantic magazine on Who Owns Intelligence in 1999, so 25 years ago.
00:33:31.759 --> 00:33:36.880
And there I tried to say intelligence doesn't belong to the IQ establishment anymore.
00:33:36.960 --> 00:33:44.559
And I introduced my ideas in the interview of Robert Sternberg, who is another person who has a pluralistic view of intelligence.
00:33:44.880 --> 00:33:48.880
But 1999 is not 2024.
00:33:49.440 --> 00:34:10.960
So that article has a brief review of MI theory and the eight intelligences that uh uh I laid out there, with linguistic and logical ones being the only ones that the IQ tests test, some of them test spatial, they don't test musical or biology kinesthetic or interpersonal or intrapersonal or naturalistic.
00:34:11.119 --> 00:34:14.880
Um but what are the intelligences of animals?
00:34:15.280 --> 00:34:24.079
Every week, Science Magazine in the New York Times finds a cognitive thing which we didn't know that anything but human beings could do.
00:34:24.320 --> 00:34:30.480
And then trees, plants uh communicate information even though they don't have a nervous system.
00:34:30.639 --> 00:34:32.239
That's a form of intelligence.
00:34:32.400 --> 00:34:37.440
And of course, AI is doing about everything we can do better better than we can.
00:34:37.599 --> 00:34:43.039
Uh, it doesn't really deal with consciousness in a way that's uh that's adequate.
00:34:43.280 --> 00:34:48.239
But the question of intelligence now, the IQ test is so much beside the point.
00:34:48.400 --> 00:34:50.719
It isn't even relevant for human beings anymore.
00:34:50.800 --> 00:34:53.440
And it's a joke when you look at the rest of the planet.
00:34:54.079 --> 00:35:00.239
But don't tell that to your favorite psychometrician because she'll he or she will tell you that Gardner is full of it.
00:35:00.639 --> 00:35:23.840
And and then just to underline the the point there that I was uh encouraging to spotlight is that is that it's the evidence in the theory uh for the theory that I think really made it so compelling and and made it such that I'm guessing now the week doesn't go by that you don't get a letter or an email or a telephone call of somebody saying, what about this?
00:35:23.920 --> 00:35:24.719
What why not find the other thing?
00:35:24.880 --> 00:35:29.280
I mean, the example that that pops to mind is in the Caroline Islands.
00:35:29.440 --> 00:35:32.639
I don't even know whether I could find them on a map, somewhere in the Pacific.
00:35:32.880 --> 00:35:44.960
What's been valued is people who can navigate without a compass, looking at hundreds of stars in the sky and the way they're configured, and the way the boat has been moving, what the water is like, where it was yesterday.
00:35:45.199 --> 00:35:47.440
That has nothing to do with what's an IQ test.
00:35:47.760 --> 00:35:48.239
Yeah.
00:35:48.400 --> 00:35:50.480
But that's what counts as intelligence.
00:35:50.639 --> 00:36:02.400
You know, and and often in um certain societies, uh I won't mention which ones, how well behaved the child is and how obedient it is, that's what counts as intelligence.
00:36:02.639 --> 00:36:09.920
Um uh and uh, you know, in some societies, uh people were on the spectrum, it'd be sign of an intellect.
00:36:10.079 --> 00:36:14.960
In other societies, they put them to death because they can't pick up cues from other people.
00:36:15.199 --> 00:36:29.760
And if all you've done is just sit around universities and test people to see whether they can handle books the way you and I could in going to college, they have a really narrow view of what intellect is, and the plant and animal and computer stuff just explodes it.
00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:32.000
But you're never going to change their minds.
00:36:32.159 --> 00:36:33.440
What is it the saying?
00:36:33.599 --> 00:36:38.400
Um disciplines change one gravestone at a time.
00:36:39.599 --> 00:36:43.840
People learn certain stuff in in graduate school and they can't get beyond it.
00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:53.280
I try to I try not to really interesting way to put the Thomas Kuhn uh uh paradigm change in in very concrete terms.
00:36:53.519 --> 00:37:00.880
So would would synthesizing have made it as an intelligence if you were writing, doing that work today?
00:37:01.440 --> 00:37:03.920
Um it might have.
00:37:04.159 --> 00:37:10.960
Um the I stopped in actually in 1994, I stopped adding intelligences.
00:37:11.119 --> 00:37:11.599
Why?
00:37:11.920 --> 00:37:23.519
Because it takes a year of research, especially about the nervous system, because one of the claims about the original intelligence is that they have um cortical representation, which is are not identical to one another.
00:37:23.679 --> 00:37:32.239
And so brain damage depends where the brain damage is, how big, how deep, left and right, that determines which intelligences are compromised.
00:37:32.320 --> 00:37:35.599
This is a shorthand, it doesn't pass the test totally.
00:37:35.920 --> 00:37:43.519
Um, and um synthesizing probably wouldn't pass the test very well.
00:37:43.840 --> 00:37:57.679
But what I do now is um I simply say that if you want to if you want to nominate something as an intelligence, you do need to take a look at the factors that I looked at.
00:37:57.840 --> 00:38:12.719
Last week, as you know, I had a conversation, a public conversation in New York with Dan Goldman, who is even better known than I am for intelligence because he coined emotional intelligence, which everybody's heard of, EQ.
00:38:13.360 --> 00:38:23.039
And he's very interested now in spirituality, and I'm interested in what I call existential, namely the asking of big questions.
00:38:23.199 --> 00:38:28.159
Um spiritual has a religious aspect to it, which makes makes me nervous.
00:38:28.400 --> 00:38:34.719
But you know, if we were 20 or 30 years younger, we would probably look at it in a much more systematic way.
00:38:34.880 --> 00:38:41.760
But I think my, I mean, my honest answer, I open the door, and to me that's what uh that's that's what's what's important.
00:38:42.239 --> 00:38:53.280
And what what I do get all the time is people say, is there a financial intelligence, is there a humor intelligence, you know, and I say, well, um, you need to have some to you need to have some evidence.
00:38:53.360 --> 00:38:58.159
You can't just uh uh um pronounce and enunciate it.
00:38:59.519 --> 00:39:03.119
So um I'm gonna turn to your questions in in just a couple of minutes.
00:39:03.199 --> 00:39:06.480
I just want to uh two more that I can't resist uh asking.
00:39:06.639 --> 00:39:17.039
Um one is that the multiple intelligence work was published first in the mid-80s, and uh no you continued, and as you mentioned, you still uh are blogging about it.
00:39:17.119 --> 00:39:23.440
But I want to make sure everybody knows that you're still active and uncovering new ideas and doing research.
00:39:23.679 --> 00:39:34.639
So I think one of the uh broad categories of work that you've been doing over the last decade or more, uh the so-called good projects, uh good work and so on.
00:39:34.800 --> 00:39:38.000
And then I know you're just starting a new one.
00:39:38.079 --> 00:39:40.400
Uh so can you tell us a little bit about the new one?
00:39:40.800 --> 00:39:41.280
Sure.
00:39:41.599 --> 00:40:01.840
Um this would take three minutes, not not 30 minutes, but um in actually literally 30 years ago, with two colleagues, also psychologists, uh Bill Damon and Mike Sixant Mahai, we spent a year together at a research center in California.
00:40:01.920 --> 00:40:08.639
And the question we were asking at the time was can you be creative and humane at the same time?
00:40:08.880 --> 00:40:24.079
So is can you use your mind freely the way we we would like to be able to do at universities and I guess in life, it's not just in educational institutions, um, but also um make sure that the ideas don't get abused.
00:40:24.239 --> 00:40:26.320
I mean, the Einstein is the classic example.
00:40:26.400 --> 00:40:36.559
I mean, Einstein was a physicist, he wasn't thinking about nuclear weapons, but you know, the atom got split and he carried that as a burden for the last years of his life.
00:40:36.800 --> 00:40:46.880
So we coined a phrase called humane creativity, which nobody understood, but we eventually decided to call what we're doing good work.
00:40:47.199 --> 00:40:54.320
And some people, including Kerry, worked worked on uh this project uh for for many years.
00:40:54.559 --> 00:41:03.599
And we became interested in the uh intertwining of excellence, engagement, and ethics.
00:41:03.840 --> 00:41:05.840
Excellence means do you know what you're doing?
00:41:06.079 --> 00:41:07.920
And the answer is we hope you do.
00:41:08.000 --> 00:41:12.880
And whether you're a doctor, a lawyer, a journalist, a teacher, you know, you need to know your stuff.
00:41:13.199 --> 00:41:15.760
Two and very important, particularly nowadays.
00:41:16.000 --> 00:41:16.960
Do you find it interesting?
00:41:17.119 --> 00:41:18.079
Do you find it engaging?
00:41:18.159 --> 00:41:21.199
Do you do you look forward to going to work or do you dread it?
00:41:21.440 --> 00:41:27.119
And work is now an enormous challenge and puzzle in many parts of the world.
00:41:27.280 --> 00:41:34.639
But then what I became particularly interested in was do you carry out this work in a way that's responsible and ethical?
00:41:34.719 --> 00:41:47.679
Um, because you can be very knowledgeable, you can uh um enjoy what you're doing, uh, but I won't fill it in, finish the I won't finish the sentence, but I think you can all fill it, figure, see where that's going.
00:41:48.239 --> 00:41:55.920
Uh and so I'm interested in uh ethics and respect.
00:41:56.320 --> 00:42:11.760
Um and respect is the way I talk about how we should deal with one another as human beings, the the golden rule, the Ten Commandments, ethics is what do we do in difficult positions when we don't know the right answer?
00:42:11.920 --> 00:42:14.719
Um just imagine you're the Harvard Corporation now.
00:42:14.960 --> 00:42:15.599
What do you do?
00:42:15.760 --> 00:42:17.039
There's no right answer.
00:42:17.199 --> 00:42:20.880
Um, you know, there are lives at stake, there's money at stake, etc.
00:42:21.199 --> 00:42:22.800
There are values at stake.
00:42:22.960 --> 00:42:25.440
Um, so we're very interested in that.
00:42:25.599 --> 00:42:31.119
And we started with adult professionals, and then we work with um younger people.
00:42:31.199 --> 00:42:41.760
And we one of the things that was very upsetting to uh Wendy Fishman and me was a lot of young people, even younger than you, would said ethics is for later.
00:42:41.920 --> 00:42:43.679
You know, we can't afford to do it now.
00:42:43.760 --> 00:42:48.880
And you've got kids, and uh you know it's very easy to push ethics off.
00:42:49.039 --> 00:42:54.320
So we became interested in the development of good work and and good play at much younger ages.
00:42:54.480 --> 00:43:28.559
And uh uh Shelby Clark and Lynn Goldsmith and uh uh Danny Basinskis and Kirsten Adam have been developing curriculum for good work and good play in middle school and high school, and now uh uh I know that Mara's here, I don't know, um Shirley is here, but we're working on good starts, and good starts is um a when do young people, and people like really young, three, four, five, um begin to think about themselves with reference to other people.
00:43:28.960 --> 00:43:32.800
Um you know, do they ignore other people?
00:43:33.360 --> 00:43:35.519
Do they respect other people?
00:43:36.159 --> 00:43:38.239
Do they hate other people?
00:43:38.559 --> 00:43:41.360
It's basically the what I would call the Robert Putnam question.
00:43:41.440 --> 00:43:44.800
Robert Putnam balding alone, most of you have heard that phrase.
00:43:44.960 --> 00:43:50.880
Um, America's become a very egocentric, very egotistic country where it's all about high.
00:43:51.039 --> 00:43:53.920
That's not entirely wrong, but it's gone way too far.
00:43:54.079 --> 00:43:56.559
And we're interested how early that starts.
00:43:56.719 --> 00:43:59.280
And so we're interested in this cross culturally.
00:43:59.360 --> 00:44:08.079
Um And so, you know, we've been working with colleagues, China, Taiwan, Japan, um, Africa, students here.
00:44:08.239 --> 00:44:23.119
We bring together students from different countries and have them talk about their childhoods and what they remember and how kids had taught and uh you know where we're now uh in a situ we're now in a situation where we need to have support to do this.
00:44:23.360 --> 00:44:29.679
But we we think that it's never too early to begin to think of yourself in relationship to others.
00:44:29.840 --> 00:44:51.440
And probably at this point, um I should mention um Mara Khrushewski, who's worked with me forever, and I've worked with her forever, but um she um is our expert on the the schools in Reggio Emilia, which are for many people, including me, the most exciting schools for young kids in the world.
00:44:51.679 --> 00:44:59.679
And there they work very hard not to make it just about I, but to develop a corporate sense from a very early age.
00:44:59.760 --> 00:45:00.880
And it's hard.
00:45:01.360 --> 00:45:07.440
It's very hard in the 21st century because almost all of our media are very high-centered.
00:45:07.599 --> 00:45:16.400
They don't they don't bring people together to either clash them or make you push your own, how many influencers you can be.
00:45:17.760 --> 00:45:20.320
So um let's turn to uh audience questions.
00:45:20.400 --> 00:45:27.440
You mentioned uh one already, which I also thought was particularly interesting about what phase of your life would you most want to relive?
00:45:27.519 --> 00:45:30.480
And you mentioned uh good old college uh years.
00:45:30.559 --> 00:45:43.920
Uh another one that uh really struck me was um what ways do you see the um body of research and and and theories that you've created uh having an impact on professions other than teaching and learning?
00:45:44.159 --> 00:45:51.360
What's the sort of broader uh impact of your work in other fields, other disciplines, other practices?
00:45:51.920 --> 00:45:55.840
Yeah, I would say it's less than I would like.
00:45:56.079 --> 00:46:00.400
Um initially our work was very influential in journalism.
00:46:00.559 --> 00:46:14.880
Um, and there was a lot of work in journalism using materials we developed, but journalism now is in such crisis that it doesn't really have much bandwidth to work with the kinds of materials that we developed.
00:46:15.119 --> 00:46:21.599
Um I do think that uh a lot of the work in artificial intelligence does have to do with ethics.
00:46:21.760 --> 00:46:29.119
Um and uh some of the people who work with us uh uh um are actually working those issues now.
00:46:29.280 --> 00:46:34.239
Whether they know about our our work in particular, um I don't know.
00:46:34.400 --> 00:46:47.039
But I think um, you know, the big question is to what extent do we consign difficult ethical issues to computational entities as opposed to having human beings deal with them?
00:46:47.280 --> 00:47:03.760
And uh um my I gave a talk at at MIT last week, and I said that I think a lot of the stuff which we used to require of students in my day, and maybe in your day, and maybe in your day, it's all in here.
00:47:04.079 --> 00:47:08.159
And uh so it becomes more of an option and then something you have to learn.
00:47:08.320 --> 00:47:10.400
But respect in ethics can't be in here.
00:47:10.559 --> 00:47:16.079
Respect is how we deal with the people whom we see every day, and ethics is when a difficult question comes up.
00:47:16.239 --> 00:47:18.239
Let's say you're in the Harvard Corporation.
00:47:18.400 --> 00:47:19.039
What do you do?
00:47:19.199 --> 00:47:20.480
You can't look it up.
00:47:20.639 --> 00:47:27.119
Uh so um this is an experience that I've had frequently.
00:47:27.519 --> 00:47:38.320
I bet some of you know that I work especially in media and technology, and invariably people whose meme work is technology have trouble with the technology.
00:47:38.559 --> 00:47:42.880
So I am not seeing uh a flood of uh questions on the Slido.
00:47:43.280 --> 00:47:46.880
So I'm gonna ask uh our colleagues to see if they they do.
00:47:47.039 --> 00:47:50.239
Um I'm only seeing um uh a single uh question.
00:47:50.400 --> 00:47:58.400
Um but I'll ask it to you while um my colleagues I have I have the questions if you want to see them.
00:47:58.559 --> 00:48:02.239
No, I'm trying to the live questions uh submitted.
00:48:02.320 --> 00:48:08.719
Um we were using, we haven't tried this um SIDO technique before, and I'm not getting uh much of a feed here.
00:48:08.880 --> 00:48:33.679
So anyway, um one of the questions um is um uh is the problem that we seem to be not seem to clearly are facing in K-12 education across the United States, um, different from what other countries are experiencing because we haven't figured out how to make good use of multiple intelligences' insights.
00:48:34.159 --> 00:48:36.400
I think that's the thrust of the question.
00:48:37.760 --> 00:48:42.400
Well, but um to me, this is two separate questions.
00:48:42.639 --> 00:48:49.440
Um we have good educators in this country, but education is not taken terribly seriously in this country.
00:48:49.679 --> 00:49:00.400
So I look at Finland and Singapore, they're two countries which couldn't be more different than one another, but students there get a better education because it's treated as a real profession and is a way to advance.
00:49:00.559 --> 00:49:10.320
And I often say if we tripled the salaries of teachers in the United States, the situation would be totally different, but but uh that that that that's not that's not the case.
00:49:10.559 --> 00:49:20.159
Um the um I don't think that multiple intelligences is the missing ingredient in American education.
00:49:20.320 --> 00:49:33.840
Um but when I talk about this, I say there are two ideas that are very consonant with um multiple intelligences, and both of the books discuss it, and that's individuation and pluralization.
00:49:34.159 --> 00:49:44.320
Individuation means know as much about every person as you can and teach the person in a way that they find it easier to learn.
00:49:44.400 --> 00:49:48.480
Um easier to, I mean, I I mentioned I was a bad teacher of K-12.
00:49:48.639 --> 00:49:56.880
I was a piano teacher, I wasn't so bad at that, and I try to adjust how I taught the piano, given uh whoever whoever the student was.
00:49:57.039 --> 00:50:02.880
Um, and individuation can now be done with anybody who has any kind of technology.
00:50:03.039 --> 00:50:12.400
There's no reason why, if you have six kids, that they can't learn uh Pythagorean theorem or the French Revolution in ways that uh make sense to them.
00:50:12.639 --> 00:50:17.679
Well, not my kids, I'm obviously having trouble in this viewpoint generally.
00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:18.159
Yeah.
00:50:18.320 --> 00:50:21.440
Um but um the that's individuation.
00:50:21.519 --> 00:50:25.280
So everybody have people learn in ways that's that are comfortable to them.
00:50:25.440 --> 00:50:29.280
Um but pluralization is anything that's important.
00:50:29.440 --> 00:50:37.199
And I talked earlier about understanding evolution or revolution, um, should be taught in more than one way.
00:50:37.440 --> 00:50:45.599
And if a teacher says, um that's how I learned it, and that's the only way to teach it, that teacher is guilty of malpractice.
00:50:45.760 --> 00:51:01.840
Um, I mean, there may be certain things very advanced in certain fields, which we don't have a number of ways of teaching, but anything which we want our students in general to know, any of the uh you know, sort of the major disciplines and topics, can be presented in many different ways.
00:51:02.159 --> 00:51:15.119
And what I'm saying now, to be very literal about it, is multiple intelligence is useful in helping individual kids learn something they need to learn in ways that are comfortable for them.
00:51:15.440 --> 00:51:23.360
And it's useful for teachers because teachers should decide what's important and then present it in a number of different ways.
00:51:23.440 --> 00:51:36.159
Um is it inherently um uh an interactive practice, or would you working with a learner and and finding out what uh works with them, or could you write it into a curriculum, for example?
00:51:36.559 --> 00:51:38.800
I'm thinking I'm sure you could write it into a curriculum.
00:51:38.880 --> 00:51:42.239
I mean, um this is what David Rose works on.
00:51:42.400 --> 00:51:43.840
Um what's the name of his?
00:51:43.920 --> 00:51:45.360
Uh the Universal Design for Learning.
00:51:45.519 --> 00:51:54.800
The Universal Design for Learning is trying to find lots of different ways to present kids, particularly ones who have a lot who have learning problems of one another.
00:51:54.960 --> 00:52:00.159
Um so I think the answer is sure, you could create textbooks like that.
00:52:00.480 --> 00:52:04.320
But um once you have the idea, you can co-construct.
00:52:04.400 --> 00:52:06.960
I mean, I used to have a line, see if I can remember it.
00:52:07.119 --> 00:52:09.599
When I had one kid, I thought all kids were the same.
00:52:09.920 --> 00:52:12.480
When I had two kids, I said there are two kinds of kids.
00:52:12.719 --> 00:52:15.119
When I had three kids, I said all kids are different.
00:52:15.280 --> 00:52:19.760
When I had four kids, I was so busy making a living that I had no time for theories.
00:52:20.559 --> 00:52:25.280
But yeah, the war would never be the more we even I was just watching something today.
00:52:25.440 --> 00:52:36.639
Even identical twins, I I guess this was the uh some podcast I was watching, even identical twins um after a certain age uh don't necessarily learn in the same way.
00:52:36.719 --> 00:52:44.000
And of course they have the same genes, but not only are their environments somewhat different, but they often are motivated to be different from one another.
00:52:44.239 --> 00:52:51.760
Um so interestingly, someone has asked a question which feels kind of personal, but I'm gonna relay it.
00:52:51.920 --> 00:53:06.480
I'm interested in your answer, and I'm just making clear that I'm not responsible for the question in case you don't like it, which is um the question is uh literally, what what is your routine or technique for staying so mentally sharp and healthy?
00:53:07.360 --> 00:53:09.920
The obvious answer is pick pick the right parents.
00:53:12.079 --> 00:53:14.480
Is it a morning practice that you do every day?
00:53:14.639 --> 00:53:17.119
Is it um a spiritual thing?
00:53:17.440 --> 00:53:18.960
Yeah, no, I mean I wasn't kidding.
00:53:19.039 --> 00:53:20.639
I mean, genetics is very important.
00:53:20.800 --> 00:53:25.920
I mean, as my friends know, I mean, I'm dealing with deaths every day.
00:53:26.079 --> 00:53:39.119
And so, you know, many people when they reach my age, uh on the other hand, we're having lunch, my wife and I, alone on Saturday with Jerry Holton, 103 years old on May 21st.
00:53:39.199 --> 00:53:42.800
He's a professor here, so yeah, and he's still totally lucid.
00:53:42.960 --> 00:53:57.840
Um so you know, genetics is obviously the thing, but loving your work, having family who's supportive, um, having colleagues whom you love, and vice versa, all that helps.
00:53:58.239 --> 00:54:08.159
I mean, one wonderful thing about being an academic um is that when you retire from your pay job, you can keep doing it.
00:54:08.400 --> 00:54:11.840
Um whereas in other jobs it's very difficult to do.
00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:23.519
So when I go to reunions of my class, I often don't don't tell them, I often don't find them very interesting because it's mostly about people's golf course, golf game.
00:54:23.760 --> 00:54:28.559
You know, and they're often in professions where they can't continue, they have to retire.
00:54:28.719 --> 00:54:43.039
Um, but uh um, you know, I'm very worried that in the 21st century, academe, which is what I've been lucky enough to be able to do, may end up being just something that only people with means can do.
00:54:43.360 --> 00:54:46.000
Um I we I worry a great deal about that.
00:54:46.159 --> 00:54:52.480
Um and you know, there are some things which you can do as a hobby, but there are other things where you need to have.
00:54:52.559 --> 00:54:58.239
I mean, if I were doing uh bench top work in neurology, you know, I would need to have the grants.
00:54:58.480 --> 00:55:05.519
Um and uh, you know, maybe if I wanted to go to Singapore or China uh master the language, I could do that.
00:55:05.679 --> 00:55:11.119
But uh, you know, I mean our our entire funding uh stuff is very much up in the air now.
00:55:11.360 --> 00:55:17.840
And uh we have we in the young universities have not found a way to make the case.
00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:27.360
Um if I were more of an optimist, I would point out that um except for the Catholic Church, no institutions have lasted as long as universities.
00:55:27.519 --> 00:55:30.400
The Catholic Church has lasted for 2,000 years.
00:55:30.559 --> 00:55:41.199
Um if you watched Turk Classic Music movie last night, you could see the greatest story of all, because I was able to George Stevens movie about Christ.
00:55:41.440 --> 00:55:44.719
But universities have lived have existed for a thousand years.
00:55:44.800 --> 00:55:47.039
Um don't bet against them.
00:55:47.199 --> 00:55:49.440
But I think we're going through a very hard time.
00:55:49.599 --> 00:55:51.599
And you know, there is we take some blame.
00:55:51.679 --> 00:55:54.960
I mean, yeah, there is some blame for that we need to take.
00:55:55.199 --> 00:55:57.599
But getting rid of them certainly is not the solution.
00:55:58.079 --> 00:56:04.559
So you sound like you're actually optimistic about how this is all gonna turn out.
00:56:05.039 --> 00:56:12.000
Well, I think anybody who knows history knows that unless we destroy the planet, the pendulum is gonna swing back and forth.
00:56:12.239 --> 00:56:14.159
How it's gonna swing, nobody knows.
00:56:14.320 --> 00:56:17.280
You know, I have five grandchildren and I'm rooting for them.
00:56:17.440 --> 00:56:27.039
Um but I think it's for people uh in the uh starting out in the workplace now, it's a very difficult time.
00:56:27.599 --> 00:56:39.440
Um so just so folks know, we're gonna wrap up in about five minutes and then um have an opportunity, I believe, to buy the uh the collected works and also to uh get them signed by the uh authors.
00:56:39.599 --> 00:57:11.440
So um I do want to ask you one more uh sort of sort of, if you will, synthesizing uh a couple of uh audience questions here and say um you've spoken several times about artificial uh intelligence, but um I think what we really want to know is are you optimistic that it um uh uh encourages and fosters people's thinking, or are you more on the side of, gee, people are gonna think less because they're more dependent on uh become dependent on AI?
00:57:12.159 --> 00:57:13.760
That's a very good question.
00:57:14.000 --> 00:57:31.840
I have to preface it by saying that by nature I'm a pessimist, though I like to I try to live like an optimist, but but you know, I I'm you know given what my family went through, uh you know, I mentioned you know, at your Holocaust survivors, it's hard to be be optimistic.
00:57:32.079 --> 00:57:44.559
I guess what I think is I'm maybe just repeating myself here, that a lot of what we required people to learn until now is going to become optional.
00:57:44.880 --> 00:57:49.760
And that's okay as long as they as they still want to learn.
00:57:50.079 --> 00:58:14.320
So, you know, if you're really interested in geography or geometry or um in uh in what it takes to write a fuguque or uh in in understanding um uh string theory, uh that's uh that's you have an incredible opportunity to do so.
00:58:14.559 --> 00:58:30.320
Um but um if you don't if you're not motivated to exercise the parts of your mind that uh would do that, then you will have a uh, I would think, a much interesting, much less interesting kind of life.
00:58:30.480 --> 00:58:54.079
Um at Project Zero now we have a Center for Digital Thriving, and that title is an optimistic title, um, but uh you know uh you don't have to be uh uh a uh a pessimist to think that a lot of people are more isolated and uh have less of a respect for truth now than certainly they did 50 years ago.
00:58:54.239 --> 00:58:57.920
Um and we need to have strong counters to that.
00:58:58.159 --> 00:59:08.000
Um and uh so I'm really looking for people and places and experiences which can push things in the right direction.
00:59:08.159 --> 00:59:38.960
And when you say are you optimistic or pessimistic, um, you know, I'm gonna use the Jewish community on the one hand, the Chinese community on the other, and then I'll use a Romanian example because it's on my mind, um, you know, when both for Jews and for people in China, um when there were repressive regimes, people just worked in the basement and didn't show anybody anything, anybody else what they were doing.
00:59:39.280 --> 00:59:47.519
And I had friends in Romania, in fact, one of them was a student here, um, and uh he lived through the Chayscu period.
00:59:47.840 --> 00:59:50.960
He was a terrible dictator, ruthless.
00:59:51.119 --> 00:59:53.840
And I said, How do you live through that period?
00:59:54.079 --> 00:59:58.480
And uh my friend said, music and mathematics.
00:59:58.639 --> 01:00:00.000
And I said, Why?
01:00:00.559 --> 01:00:02.559
Because nobody could keep me from that.
01:00:02.800 --> 01:00:15.280
So if you ask me, am I optimistic that the life of the mind will continue, I think, as long as human beings exist, whether or not we use AI as irrelevant, people will have the opportunity to use their mind.
01:00:15.440 --> 01:00:22.960
But if you say, is it gonna be easier or harder in the 21st century, it's very hard, very hard to be optimistic about that.
01:00:23.119 --> 01:00:28.719
Um, but people wouldn't come to an education school unless you believed that you could do it.
01:00:28.880 --> 01:00:32.159
And I have five grandkids, and damn it, they're gonna do it.
01:00:33.280 --> 01:00:34.639
Well, that's terrific leading.
01:00:34.880 --> 01:00:44.880
I'm gonna give myself the privilege of the last two questions, and you just let into one of them, which is somewhere uh in this audience may very well be the next power gardener.
01:00:45.039 --> 01:00:47.679
And so what poor poor person.
01:00:48.880 --> 01:01:02.400
What what problem in or challenge in education or human development should that person start thinking about and working on in order to have the kind of uh breakthroughs and insights and impact that you've had?
01:01:02.960 --> 01:01:06.559
Okay, well, that that's a question which would require thought.
01:01:06.719 --> 01:01:16.880
Um but uh you suggesting the rest of my questions didn't No, but I would give a glib answer, which is sort of what I've begun to think and write about.
01:01:17.119 --> 01:01:30.880
My wife and I have uh we're both very interested in the arts, so we've come up with a clever title, um, AI in the age of AI, artistic intelligences in the age of artificial intelligence, what happens to artists.
01:01:30.960 --> 01:01:34.079
So that's something that uh we're interested in.
01:01:34.239 --> 01:01:37.119
Um so that's that's uh one one thing.
01:01:37.360 --> 01:01:58.480
The other thing is that uh in this talk I gave at MIT last week, which I think I probably won't write up, um, I said we have to throw out the notion, and this will not win me a lot of points at the ed school, but I'll say it of you know, preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, maybe college, and maybe university.
01:01:58.880 --> 01:02:01.119
I think it's going to be cradle to grave.
01:02:01.360 --> 01:02:11.199
Um and uh people who take the mind and the body seriously will be able to start as early as they want and go as far as they want.
01:02:11.519 --> 01:02:15.119
But um, when you don't have that kind of support, what happened?
01:02:15.280 --> 01:02:25.519
And I did watch the uh um the Zance um um web webinar today um on homelessness.
01:02:25.920 --> 01:02:36.400
Um there are um countless homeless homeless infants and children in America now who don't have a home.
01:02:36.719 --> 01:02:53.119
Either they live in um hotels, where they live in tents, where they live on the streets, or you know, they are able to stay in a on the couch, but other people can't stay there.
01:02:53.440 --> 01:02:58.880
And um I asked, I said, well, you know, is this true in other countries?
01:02:59.039 --> 01:03:01.119
And nobody had a particularly good answer.
01:03:01.280 --> 01:03:03.760
But I remembered I was in Adelaide, Australia.
01:03:04.079 --> 01:03:05.760
Anybody here from Australia?
01:03:06.960 --> 01:03:19.039
Okay, I can say no, um, about 20 years ago, and uh uh for some reason I was interested in homelessness, and I said, How many homeless people are there in Adelaide?
01:03:19.119 --> 01:03:22.079
And they said there's 60 of them, and we can tell you who they are.
01:03:22.400 --> 01:03:22.559
Wow.
01:03:22.719 --> 01:03:25.119
That's a society that cares about that so nice.
01:03:25.519 --> 01:03:26.159
Yeah, yeah.
01:03:26.559 --> 01:03:36.000
Well, last question before we um let folks go buy your books, and that is um what question should I have asked you if I were smart enough to?
01:03:36.239 --> 01:03:37.920
What do you want to ask?
01:03:43.679 --> 01:03:45.039
Yeah, if you all right.
01:03:45.599 --> 01:03:55.760
You are well known as being uh not only a Sesame Street person, but having your own Muppet, which almost no other human being has.
01:03:56.239 --> 01:04:12.079
Um But I think Sesame Street is it's searching now for what should what should be its equivalent for 2025, because I was around when it was started, Lloyd Morissette and uh uh who was a Joan Joan Jones clean, right?
01:04:12.239 --> 01:04:14.719
I'm glad the names came still came back to me.
01:04:14.960 --> 01:04:26.800
So if uh you know if Lloyd Morissette, who was then at Carnegie, uh later at Mark but came to you as all right, how can we do the Sesame Street for 2025 to 2050?
01:04:26.960 --> 01:04:28.880
Um what would you tell him?
01:04:29.440 --> 01:04:31.920
Oh no, I didn't mean the question for the night.
01:04:32.800 --> 01:04:34.960
That's uh that's not the role reversal.
01:04:35.039 --> 01:04:39.760
I wouldn't No, I mean anything I didn't think to ask you that you I'd like to have shared.
01:04:40.000 --> 01:04:41.679
But thank you for asking that question.
01:04:41.840 --> 01:04:45.599
I I will just mention that that's something I'm thinking about and trying to work on a lot.
01:04:45.679 --> 01:04:47.840
But I meant what should I have asked you?
01:04:48.079 --> 01:04:56.000
Um, I I think the question of uh I mean the last questions, you know, what what do I think people should be working on?
01:04:56.159 --> 01:05:11.119
But maybe another thing to say is that uh psychology was very exciting in 1960 when Jerome Brunner started the Center for Cognitive uh Studies, and many people uh hung around there.
01:05:11.280 --> 01:05:22.559
Um, I think I would say um take a look at what uh the people who are have the liveliest minds now, what what is it that they're interested in, what questions are they asking?
01:05:22.880 --> 01:05:32.719
And you know, you may not be something that's you're interested in, or it may not be something that you're good at, but if you have a uh you know wide open mind, that's good.
01:05:32.800 --> 01:05:36.079
And that's why I look at a lot of magazines and newspapers.
01:05:36.159 --> 01:05:42.159
I don't go look at social media and I don't look at uh podcasts unless somebody says you have to look at it.
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But if you read widely, you get a sense of what people are interested in.
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When Ezra Klein says he's worried about how hard it is to build things, I pay attention to that.
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If you don't know Ezra Klein, he's the uh he's the very good reporter and interviewer for the New York Times.
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So also you see where people who have lively minds what they're what they're asking and thinking.
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And I think it's fair to add that with the uh wonderful sampling of your work so far in these two books, you're still doing it.
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And one good place to read about uh current ideas and what people are thinking about, and we're just getting really stimulated uh about things to think to work on are your blogs.
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So uh I just want to remind people that Howard continues to write and to share really good insights and really worth really stimulating stuff.
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So please join me in thanking Howard for sharing so much with me.
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Thanks for joining us, PZ Fam.
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For all things PZ, like invitations to future book talks, visit pz.harvard.edu and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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This episode was hosted by me, Jordy Oakland, produced by Kristen Livingston, and featured music from Adam Sachs.
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See you next week.