The Gradient Podcast - Judy Fan: Reverse Engineering the Human Cognitive Toolkit

Episode Overview

• This episode features Judy Fan, director of the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford, discussing her research on how humans use external tools like sketches and diagrams to think, learn, and create.
• The conversation explores the gap between traditional cognitive psychology, which tests abstract hypotheses, and engineering disciplines like AI, which require "sturdy" findings to build functional systems.
• Fan explains why drawing serves as a powerful model for studying human cognition, framing it as one of the oldest and most fundamental technologies for externalizing thought.
• The discussion culminates in the importance of fostering "intellectual agency"—the ability to learn and reason with evolving tools—as a crucial skill for education in a technologically advancing world.

Key Concepts

• Cognitive Tools: The use of physical artifacts and abstractions, such as sketches and data visualizations, to augment and externalize human thought processes.
• Human Creativity: The foundational motivation for the research, aiming to understand the uniquely human capacity to create new and meaningful things.
• Bridging Psychology and Engineering: Highlighting the challenge of translating conceptual insights from cognitive science into the robust, mechanistic principles needed to build functional AI and other technologies.
• Drawing as a Foundational Technology: Viewing drawing not merely as art but as one of humanity's first and most enduring tools for recording, communicating, and developing ideas.
• Historical Context in Cognitive Science: A critique of the tendency to study the human mind as a static entity, arguing for the importance of understanding how cognition co-evolves with its cultural and technological tools.
• Intellectual Agency: The ultimate educational goal of equipping people with the adaptable skills to reason, learn, and make sense of a complex world, rather than teaching a fixed set of skills that may become automated.

Quotes

• At 3:12 - "[I] had originally become interested... in this idea that humans can create new things that didn't exist before." - Fan explains that her core research interest is rooted in understanding human creativity.
• At 27:03 - "...is not necessarily the kind of like sturdy finding that you can then build like computer vision technology on top of necessarily." - Capturing the disconnect between abstract psychological findings and the practical needs of AI engineering.
• At 56:59 - "Why drawing? Well, because it is one of the... first kinds of technologies that humans invented for recording thoughts, feelings, ideas in physical form." - Fan provides the scientific rationale for studying drawing, highlighting its historical significance as a foundational human tool.
• At 65:42 - "There's a way in which... cognitive psychology is sort of like not able to like handle that its target of inquiry is like moving and changing under like historical processes." - Fan critiques the tendency of her field to view the mind as a static, timeless object, ignoring the impact of evolving cultural tools.
• At 85:46 - "...how can we, you know, equip people, as many people as we can, with the kind of like intellectual agency to make sense of this complex and changing world." - Fan summarizes the broader educational and societal goal of her work, which is to empower people to think critically and adaptively.

Takeaways

• Externalizing thoughts through tools like sketching is not just an act of documentation but a fundamental part of the cognitive process itself, helping us to reason and solve problems.
• Our cognitive abilities are not static; they co-evolve with the tools we create and use, from ancient drawings to modern data visualizations.
• In an era of rapid technological change, education should prioritize teaching intellectual agency—the ability to understand and adapt to new tools—over mastery of specific, perishable skills.