YANSS 196 – How scientists use art to better understand how minds struggle to share their inner worlds

Moira Dillon studies how “the physical world in which we live shapes the abstract world in which we think,” and in this episode we travel to her Lab for the Developing Mind at NYU to sit down and ask her a zillion questions about how the brain creates the reality we interact with, and how we attempt to communicate that reality to others through language, art, geometry, and mathematics.

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Moira Dillon studies how the brain uses spatial reasoning to locate objects in her “round room” at NYU

In the show, we ask: How does an organism communicate what it is experiencing in a symbolic medium so that can transfer that information from one mind to another?

You will learn all about Dillon’s work studying children’s (and adults’) drawings, spatial reasoning inside her special “round room” at NYU, and “infants’ sensitivity to shape changes in 2D visual forms,” all of which illuminate like never before how we turn objective reality into our personal, and sometimes agreed-upon, abstract hallucinations.

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Previous Episodes

Moira Dillon

Lab for the Developing Mind

Previous Episodes

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Cognitive scientist Moira Dillon of the @labdevelopingmindnyu closes the hidden door to her giant “Round Room” at #NYU where she studies how “the physical world in which we live shapes the abstract world in which we think” by tasking children and adults to communicate the realities she generates in the room to others through language, art, geometry, and mathematics. Hear @moirarosedillon talk all about it in the latest episode of the #YouAreNotSoSmart #Podcast and read about it in my upcoming book #HowMindsChange

A post shared by David McRaney (@davidmcraney) on Dec 28, 2019 at 6:52pm PST