Figure It Out. Stephen P. Anderson
as a resource, as raw material rather than a finished product, we give ourselves permission to adapt, modify, and transform it into a shape that aids understanding and makes us better thinkers.
Of course, this leads us to ask “where does understanding happen?” It’s a simple enough question, but one whose answer has broad implications for how we approach all problems of understanding.
We’ll explore how different schools of thought have answered this question, before sharing our own perspective on cognition, a perspective that allows us to make substantial headway on a wide range of messy, complex, real-world problems of understanding. In short, we’ll argue that thinking is spread across the brain, the body, and anything in the world.
This is critical, because we don’t just think. We create tools and technologies to help us think better, understand more, and solve bigger problems. Our ability to understand is limited when we try to do everything in our head, especially when we have lots of information and when the challenges are daunting. But when we spread the cost of understanding into the world, we open up incredible possibilities for understanding. We increase our capacity for understanding when cognition is seen as something that happens in and through the world.
CHAPTER
1
From Information to Understanding
Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.
—RAY BRADBURY, FAHRENHEIT 451
We all want to understand. None of us wants the information in our lives to leave us confused or ignorant or frustrated, though it often does. What we want is for information to inform, for that is the fundamental job of inform_ation—a job that includes making us smarter, educated, and more knowing, not to mention entertained. Life is unimaginable without information, and although we have gobs of it, the goal is not having it, but using it to some end. We want information to help us solve problems, make decisions, create insights, reveal truths, and set us on a better path. Information should add to our lives, not subtract, though when we lack understanding that is just what it does.
When we consider the arc of civilization, humanity has been relentless in developing more powerful information technologies—from clay tablets to sticky notes and smartphones—along with more effective ways to share this information, organize it, and search for it. This relentlessness has only intensified as we have built a global digital infrastructure. This effort has rendered information both abundant and cheap, and, as a result, it has been injected into the whole fabric of life. We have seemingly infinite information at our fingertips, often literally, no matter where we are or what we are doing. You will even find Wi-Fi at Mount Everest, and the first climber to tweet from the summit did so in 2011. We use information for grand challenges, such as climate change or curing cancer, or small ones, such as staying in touch with friends or digging up obscure baseball stats. But in every facet of life, whether our need is ambitious or trivial, information fails us unless we also understand it.
Even as authors of a book on understanding, we are not immune to the challenges posed by so much information. We, too, often find ourselves with piles of information and a paucity of understanding. At the same time, we have, both of us, built careers by making information more understandable. We have created websites, mobile apps, concept models, data visualizations, navigation systems, organization schemes, university courses, strategy sessions, and endless presentations. We have learned, often the hard way, that simply giving people information, or making it easier to find, is just a halfway measure. Providing information is merely the start. The whole job includes figuring out how to fit the pieces into a cohesive, useful, understandable whole in much the same way that a recipe and the freshest of ingredients does not make a meal. Understanding, like dinner, doesn’t happen by magic, and in this book we aim to provide a full-spectrum picture of how we, as human beings, go about making sense of the information in our lives.
Living with Diabetes
When information is everywhere, so, too, is understanding problems. Allow me (Stephen) to share a personal example.
My son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes just before his fourth birthday. Previously known as juvenile diabetes, Type 1 diabetes is when your pancreas— for reasons unknown—stops producing insulin, a hormone we all need in order to live. Without insulin, your body has no way to convert sugar from carbohydrates into energy and no way to maintain healthy blood sugar levels. It is a life-changing disease.
When we got the diagnosis, my wife and I knew it meant big changes for our family. We knew that living with diabetes meant insulin shots. What we didn’t know, but quickly learned, was the sheer number of activities that diabetics must do to maintain their health. One activity is finger pokes, where you draw a small sample of blood to test blood sugar levels. If you’re diabetic, you do this about a dozen times a day to make sure that your blood sugar levels are within a safe zone—not too high and not too low.
Type 1 diabetics also have to count carbohydrates on absolutely everything they eat. Setting aside social graces, most of us begin eating right away when a meal is served. Diabetics have no such luxury. Instead, they have to calculate how many carbs they think they’re going to consume, before eating. This is even more troublesome in restaurants, where access to nutritional information is nearly impossible, and where predicting their appetite is difficult. Will I want a dessert later or not?
And the reason diabetics count carbohydrates? So they can inject the right amount of insulin. These are the needle shots you so often see associated with diabetes. While healthy bodies are great at producing and regulating the amount of insulin to produce for all the carbs people consume, Type 1 diabetics must do so artificially, including the math needed to balance things out. Give themselves too much insulin, and they have a “low,” quickly leading to a diabetic coma. Not enough insulin, and they have high blood sugar, which causes long-term complications, including loss of limbs, eyesight, and failing organs.
All of this is a lot to learn and a lot to take in as a parent of a diabetic child. For the child, it’s a whole new way of living that—until a cure is found—overshadows everything else. My wife and I were fortunate in that our hospital had a superb training program to prepare parents and children for this new life, this “new normal” that you quickly adjust to.
During the three-day “retraining” process, the hospital gave us a lot of useful information. They helped us process what to expect. And they gave us plenty of paperwork.
Among the many forms we were given, mostly of a legal/compliance nature, special attention was given to the form in Figure 1.1.
This is the sheet that you put on your refrigerator, the “one-pager” that is meant to organize everything you’ll do in a day. It is the checklist of all the things that you need to know: When to give your child insulin. When to test blood sugar levels. How many carbs they can eat. How many units of insulin to give. All the information you need to know is in this form.
This form is also broken.
FIGURE 1.1 The diabetes management aid provided to families as a daily checklist for monitoring blood sugar, tracking carbohydrates, injecting insulin, and so forth.
This form is so very confusing that nurses routinely spend 30 minutes explaining it. Moreover, a couple areas on this form are outright dangerous—if misunderstood, you could harm your child by giving them too much insulin.
After the nurse left the room, my wife looked at me and said, “You’ve got to fix this.” What you see in Figure