Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 15

Whether we are making sense of something for ourselves, or others, the questions are the same: How does understanding happen? And—more fundamentally—where does understanding take place?

Think of cognition as a distributed system of resources, resources that include mental perceptions but also much more. Where understanding takes place depends upon what resources we use.

Here is a brief explanation:

In some cases, what you think is in your head, based on prior associations. If you multiply 32 by 11 in your head, the cognitive work happens—in that moment—in your brain.

But where does the cognitive work happen when you use pencil and paper? Not in your brain and not in the pencil either. It happens everywhere, spread across brain, hand, pencil, and graphite symbols etched on the page. In this case, we introduce interactions with external representations.

When we introduce more resources into the mix, things get more interesting. Now, what we think of as cognition is spread through a collection of people, resources, tools, interactions, and so on.

To say that cognition is distributed across people and things doesn’t mean we’re talking about a new kind of cognition. It’s about seeing how all forms of cognitive activity—remembering, planning, reasoning, deciding, analyzing—depend on the ways people use their available resources. Moreover, these cognitive resources can include everything from neurons and whiteboards to laptops and airspeed indicators. Figuring it out is the art of bringing all this to bear.

This shift in perspective, away from just objects and representations and interactions and toward distributed cognitive systems, is vital for taking on complex understanding problems. This also requires coordination, whether this is simply coordinating the cognitive resources at your desk or the resources at play within a globally distributed team of people.

So where understanding takes place really depends upon the complexity of the topic you’re trying to understand. A relatively simple problem—with sufficient prior associations—might actually be solved “in your head,” as the expression goes. But it’s more likely the case that you will need to employ or engage with other cognitive resources in the environment, be these other people, tools, time, and so on.

In sum, where understanding happens depends upon the nature of the problem, while how depends upon:

• Prior associations

• External representations

• Interactions

• Coordination

This is how we’ve come to understand understanding, and how we’ve chosen to structure this book.