Interview with Barbara Tversky
Contents
Barbara Tversky is Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and Professor Emerita at Stanford University.
It Depends
Max Raskin: How do you read books?
Barbara Tversky: Like everything else, it depends. I spend an awful lot of time on computer screens, and that has bad associations – it's tiresome on the eyes. I generally prefer reading real books because I like the feel. However, real books can be too heavy for reading in various places, and there sometimes a screen is better. So it really depends on the circumstances.
MR: Do you travel a lot?
BT: I used to. The whole world has changed in the last year and a half. When I traveled, I mostly worked, and I found that sitting in an airplane seat without the normal distractions was a good way to work. Usually I was traveling to a meeting, so I needed to prepare a talk or I had an overdue paper and was concentrating fully on that. I didn't get to do too much recreational reading when I traveled.
MR: You would read and write on the plane?
BT: Mostly write – I can work efficiently without the distractions of the news and emails from people. I only need the Internet for searching literature, so everything gets updated when I’m on the web again when I’m on the ground. I don’t sleep well on planes, so it was a good use of time.
MR: How do you carve out time for yourself – not on a plane – to be able to think – how do you structurally do it?
BT: I walk a lot. I’m a recovering runner. I ran many years and loved running. I still dream that I can run – my back sort of gave out. I walk instead. It’s not as endorphin-producing as running, but in either case, I can set my mind to thinking. I can work through a problem, and I find the rhythm of walking or running can help thinking.
MR: You’re like Kant – they said the people of Königsberg could set their watches to Kant’s daily constitutional.
BT: I’m not as predictable – I’m predictable, but not quite that much.
MR: How often do you walk?
BT: Everything depends. Recently I’ve been walking late afternoon because my better work hours are in the afternoon.
MR: How long do you go at a time?
BT: I’m trying to cut down, but in general an hour and half. I usually combine it with errands. I used to walk to the opera.
New Sounds and Perspectives
MR: Are you a big fan of opera?
BT: Yeah, I'm an uneducated fan. It was a new passion. When I was younger, I thought opera was silly, and in many ways it is silly. The plots are over the top, bombastic. The women are saints, the men are bastards, and the women die. But I've learned to just become enthralled with the music – again music that wouldn't have appealed to me when I was younger. I acquired a taste for opera almost blindly by just going.
MR: Was there an opera that turned you on to it?
BT: No – I think it was just experiencing all the different operas, learning the genre a bit, learning the music, learning how to follow it. Even the audiences contribute.
MR: What’s the first opera that comes to your mind right now?
BT: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. It’s an obscure one, but one of the better ones I’ve seen at the Met.
MR: Where do you listen to music?
BT: Again, it depends on circumstances. I was alone many years and spent a lot of time listening to music. I didn’t use Spotify. I don’t listen to songs, I’m not into the usual sort of music. It would be symphonies, concert music, or operas.
I’ll use Apple radio to get radio channels. I became a fan of John Schaffer’s New Sounds, which introduced me to all kinds of international genres that I wouldn’t have been exposed to. Otherwise, I’m not so interested in pop music, the percussion is distracting to me, and I don't enjoy it.
MR: Do you listen to music when you work?
BT: So that’s the issue. I’m working most of the time, and some music is distracting. I can’t multitask as well as I could when I was your age. The music interferes with thinking and I need silence.
MR: It’s interesting that you recently got into opera – do you like trying new things?
BT: I like to think that I like trying new things. Most of my research has been on the mind, and everything is fodder to the mind on how we perceive things, how we create things, how we put them out into the world.
And so that's really what has occupied me: How do we get the world into the mind? And how do we get the mind out into the world? And for whom? Or what? Whether it's in music, which I don't know much about, or whether it's in art or writing, which I think I know a little bit more about – how do we put the products of the mind into the world – into sketches, into words. Almost anything is fodder for that kind of thinking.
For many years I was at Stanford and surrounded by Silicon Valley. It was an extraordinarily exciting time; I taught many of the students who became famous and wealthy when they were young and fascinating minds.
Silicon Valley was a lot about communication – about interfaces and how people use them, and what they use them for. So I ended up doing consulting and collaborating with people in computer science. I loved it, partly because it was so many exciting and innovative minds.
But then I moved to New York, and New York gave me an opportunity to experience the arts in a way that I'd always wanted to experience them. By then my children were grown and my husband had died, so I spent a lot of time alone or in social networks that I maintained. I was able to indulge the arts in ways that were exhilarating – visual arts, dance, music, theater. There's so much experimental art here, and so much what is called high art. You could go anywhere.
Because I was interested in how things get into the mind and how things get out of the mind, this exposure of the arts did two things. It was exhilarating in and of itself – uplifting, mind-stretching. But it also helped my professional work.
MR: Before the pandemic, how many times a week would you attend an art event?
BT: Easily, three, four, five. I could get by with very little sleep – I was running off to the theater or the opera after class. Weekends, I often stopped at a museum or set of galleries.
In Sync with the World
MR: Do you have any guilty pleasures?
BT: I don’t think anything’s guilty, but I don’t have any illegal pleasures.
MR: Do you watch reality television?
BT: I'm not good at sitting in front of a screen and watching TV or even movies. My family would watch TV and often go to movies I didn’t want to see. They supplied me with that information. I didn’t have to do it myself.
MR: Do you own a TV right now?
BT: I’ve never owned a TV.
News I get from reading or NPR.
MR: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
BT: Probably email. I skim through the New York Times with breakfast.
MR: Do you read it in hardcopy or digitally?
BT: I like the hard copies – the New Yorker, the New York Times.
MR: Do you do the crossword puzzle?
BT: No. My kids do. They sometimes get me involved in it.
MR: What do you have for breakfast?
BT: You don’t want to hear, but the coffee is good.
MR: How do you make your coffee?
BT: We recently got a machine, so I’m a barista – it’s great fun!
MR: Do you make espresso?
BT: Yeah.
MR: Do you have a lot of coffee during the day?
BT: During the day less because it interferes with sleep, and I’m not a good sleeper. I never was a good sleeper – not from when I was a small child.
Everything changes – there was a period when I was young where I drank huge amounts of coffee. Then in my 30s and 40s it gave me the jitters, so I quit. Then I read it’s good for the aging mind.
MR: Do you have a favorite bean or blend?
BT: Variability. You go to hotels, they have different beans. Different beans after dinner. I find that variability makes it interesting. In general, I like dark roasts, but it can vary.
MR: How do you take your coffee?
BT: I usually add steamed milk – for a variety of reasons, both taste and health.
MR: If you had to give one tip for keeping your mind plastic as you get older what would it be?
BT: Probably exposing yourself to many different things. The literature shows that physical exercise is more important than mental exercise like crossword puzzles. This fits a bit with the sorts of things I work on – if you're moving outside and walking, you're constantly having to keep your balance, you're constantly referencing the world and integrating it with some mental map inside. You’re keeping yourself in sync with the world, you're dodging things in the world, observing things in the world, integrating the world. That spatial motor behavior is constantly being challenged and being worked.
The essence of a lot of the work I've been doing is that it's those spatial motor representations that underlie thinking. Thinking is built on this foundation of spatial motor reaching for things in the world, acting on things in the world, and moving your body in the world with respect to other objects, people, and so forth. That relationship between acting in the world and thinking is quite tight.
MR: How does that mesh with all of us sitting in front of our screens for hours and hours a day?
BT: Some of that works in the sense that what the human mind can do is imagine other worlds. If you're thinking actively while you're on the screen and integrating information and placing it in this conceptual network – that’s doing some of the same things that moving in the real world does, but apparently the benefits to health and longevity aren’t as great. Probably both help because the foundations are similar.
Myopic, But Not Short-Sighted
MR: Did you ever do sports or martial arts?
BT: Martial arts, not. I did a lot of gymnastics, a lot of synchronized swimming.
I grew up in a generation where women and girls weren't so much into competitive sport. I did do a lot of field hockey. That was what was played when I was in high school. My vision is terrible – I was born that way. My vision wasn’t corrected until after the brain had matured – nobody had known that then. Certain kinds of sports like tennis, I didn’t have the vision for.
MR: I have this half-serious theory I always share with my ophthalmologist – that people who have naturally bad vision should not correct it. The idea is that it’s nature’s way of saying “put down the football, go be a lawyer.” Myopic people should be running, not playing baseball. It also makes you less shallow in dating. My ophthalmologist says he probably wouldn’t be on his third wife if he listened to it. This is my theory.
BT: That was the prevailing view when I was young. My mother knew my vision was off right away and took me to an ophthalmologist who had your view. Now we know that binocular vision develops before two, so that correcting amblyopia – where one eye is much better than the other – before two actually helps with depth vision.
But otherwise, your theory is probably right. There's some evidence that some artists really benefit from flattening the world – from not having 3D vision. Because that's a real challenge in art: how do you flatten the 3D world that you’re seeing. When people learn to draw and learn to paint or even photography – that’s a huge difficulty that the art educators I have worked with have pointed to. I can’t help but think that some people who have compromised 3D vision might be better at flattening the world.
The other thing that I think about given my difficulties with vision, was in a world without glasses, I wouldn't last long. We go back to hunters and foragers. Especially if I were the male and doing hunting – I wouldn't last long.
The Architecture of Fashion
MR: Where are your glasses from? They are very cool.
BT: Ah, thank you. They are Anne & Valentin.
MR: What’s your view about fashion?
BT: My view about fashion is it’s a cheap form of art.
MR: Are you a clothes hound?
BT: I’m a teeny bit of a clothes hound. I really like offbeat designers, and I learned to appreciate architectural forms of design. Many Japanese designers have that. Many of them have a tongue in cheek attitude to fashion.
MR: Who’s the first designer that comes to your mind right now?
BT: Issey Miyake – I’m wearing it.
MR: Who’s the first architect that comes to your mind right now?
BT: Diller Scofidio + Renfro partly because of the effect they’ve had on New York. They’ve been terribly creative, and I don't like everything they've done, but they've been very creative. They did part of the Highline. They did the redo of Alice Tully Hall, some of which I like, some of which I don’t.
MR: Where do you enjoy walking in New York?
BT: I love downtown.
MR: Is there a particular neighborhood?
BT: I walk every which way. I walk to either river, I go into Alphabet City, I go way down to Wall Street.
MR: Did you ever live in New York City before?
BT: I was born here, and then yanked out. People often ask me why I left Stanford, in many ways the best university and best psych department in the world – and it was for personal reasons that would take a while to explain.
I lived many years with three children and one car and a husband who was gone at least two months a year. And it was a lot of pressure. And so being in a place with outdoors was a bit of a relief – it was empty and beautiful. There was so much in the house with constant visitors, in addition to the chaos of the kids and their friends, all of which I loved. So the quiet outside was great.
When all of that was gone, I needed life around me. I didn’t need mountains and I didn't need the natural beauty – I needed what people created, and New York is full of that. Rauschenberg taught me to appreciate the detritus on the streets, and to see that as art. And to see crumbling buildings as art. I love it all. The rebuilding, the old, the crumbling. One of my favorite spots is 125th Street and Broadway where the Number 1 line comes out of the ground – you have those bridges and the West Side Highway.
MR: Do you photograph or paint or draw?
BT: I don't draw so much because drawing became obsessive. It was a career I once thought of, and when I start drawing, I can’t stop.
MR: What about photographs?
BT: Photography I do a bit of – especially during the pandemic. I didn’t stay inside, I couldn’t.
MR: When you see something beautiful is your instinct to take a picture of it with your phone?
BT: Yeah. It’s not just something beautiful, it’s something meaningful.
MR: What do you do with that picture once you have it?
BT: I look at them again, and I delete them. I don't have Instagram – people tell me I should, and I should post. I have hundreds of pictures of New York when it got empty – of refrigerator trucks outside of hospitals, helicopters overhead when the Black Lives Matter protests were going on, of the art on the boarded-up stores. Hundreds of them – it was just amazing to see.
MR: You take them on your iPhone?
BT: Yeah, and I don't know what to do with them.
MR: I can put them in the interview online – then it will be out there in the world.
BT: Okay.
Trying to curate them is hard – there’s so many.
When In Rome
MR: Do you like pizza?
BT: I think when I started to have favorite pizza places, I became a real New Yorker
MR: Where are your favorite pizza places?
BT: Eataly does a focaccia with mozzarella and eggplant that’s terrific. There used to be a place in the West Village that closed that I liked. It keeps changing in general. I don't like greasy pizza, so not too cheesy. And the dough has to be really good.
MR: How do you eat your pizza? Do you fold it?
BT: No.
MR: Why?
BT: I like the taste better of having good dough and the layers on it. Even in Rome, there was a place in Campo de’ Fiori that is famous for its pizza – there I get a pizza rosso and didn’t fold it – in Italy everybody’s folding it.
MR: Do you snack during the day?
BT: Again, it varies. Sometimes some fruit. At some point in my life, to my great disappointment, I became averse to fat and sugar, and this deprived me of many pleasures.
MR: What do you drink during the day?
BT: Coffee, ginger tea, sometimes real tea, sparkling water.
MR: What kind of sparkling water?
BT: I like the kinds with flavors added.
MR: Is there a brand you like?
BT: Not too salty – Pellegrino is too salty. Perrier is less salty.
I think you can become an aficionado, a feinschmecker of almost anything, including water.
MR: Is there anything you are a feinschmecker of?
BT: You know, my husband always said he’d rather be a gourmet than a gourmand. By the time you’re too refined in your taste, there are too many things you don’t like. There are many things I simply won’t touch. I do like street food.
Always Mind
MR: Do you like wine?
BT: I like the taste of wine, and even some hard liquors, sake. The trouble is they instantly go to my head, and I don’t like the feeling. I taste, but I don’t drink. It’s more because I really get a headache – I don’t feel in control of my thoughts. I feel nauseous.
MR: Do you have any thoughts on all the research on psychedelics now? Have you ever tried a psychedelic?
BT: Not really, and they were very popular in my youth. Marijuana certainly – but I read stories of trips and they scared me. I know people who had bad trips. I once had a terrible trip from highly potent marijuana, and I never want to go through that again. You have to listen to your own brain. I never felt the need that some people do of getting out of this life. To me, life is intense and I love it. I love every bit of it just about, except terrible headaches. Meditation is the same for me.
MR: You don’t enjoy meditating?
BT: No. I walk and I think. I do understand people who are rattled by thoughts in their heads that they can’t escape – that has happened to me, ruminating. But on the whole, I don't feel that intense kind of need to escape.
MR: You said you get migraines?
BT: I used to, yeah. And I still can get them on and off.
MR: What did you do to get rid of them?
BT: You try different drugs. There were things that helped them. I’ve been mercifully relieved of most of them now. I can handle them with ordinary ibuprofen.
Whereof We Can Speak
MR: Do you practice any religion?
BT: I’m culturally Jewish. I never was a believer.
When I was a small child, I read about other religions. My grandfather sent me a book when I was six – it was essentially anthropology about different cultures and their origin stories and their beliefs. I thought this is interesting – people need stories. None of them are true. And for me, this insight seems so obvious that I couldn't see how other people could believe in their own particular story in the face of other stories.
MR: This reminds me of something funny an old friend told me. When he became baal teshuva I asked him this point – every religion believes they’re correct – Hindus think they’re correct, Presbyterians think they’re correct. He looked at me and said, “Yeah I know it’s terrible.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because we really are correct.”
BT: Right. I think everyone has that, and on political beliefs too. But it doesn’t work on me.
MR: Did you ever dabble with it?
BT: Not really. Those things confront you when you're a teenager or early teens – I tried to understand at some point. I saw friends becoming religious, so I was interested in their experience, and kind of followed along.
MR: Do you believe in God?
BT: No, never believed in God. But I learned you couldn’t say that to people – they were scandalized as though you were a baby killer.
MR: What about the afterlife?
BT: No. It was just absurd. What age would you be? What age would your parents be? The afterlife just struck me as absurd.
MR: Do you think that everything that creates consciousness in the mind is purely physical?
BT: I’m not going to know what purely physical is – are our thoughts physical?
MR: Yeah, that’s the question.
BT: I don’t know. In some sense, you can pick them up with an EEG. But to some extent you can’t. My own research in my own laboratory shows that a great deal of thinking is in your hands and body. That if you sit on your hands, you can't think as well, and you can’t speak as well.
MR: Tom Nagel thinks consciousness can’t be reduced to physical facts – do you agree?
BT: So probably yes. Now, will that make us understand those processes better? There I’m not sure. Some of this is the hard problem of consciousness – what is for us understanding – what’s an explanation?
MR: Who’s a philosopher today you enjoy reading?
BT: Wittgenstein was someone who deeply influenced me.
MR: Tractatus or Brown Book?
BT: Not Tractatus. Although Tractatus was a fascinating enterprise and influenced many great thinkers. It’s the other – it’s how we use words and how meanings are plastic.
MR: Were you ever interested at all in Chomsky?
BT: Yeah, Chomsky had a huge effect on language. He’s the reason I didn’t go into psycholinguistics. I thought semantics was what was interesting and not syntax. The last time I saw him in person I asked him about gestures and for him language was how the mind speaks to itself. And that’s not what I mean by language.
Chomsky to me was personally fascinating because his transformational theory looks very much like Hebrew and he grew up on Hebrew.
Swedish Fishman
MR: Do you speak Hebrew?
BT: Yes.
MR: Do you speak Yiddish?
BT: No, unfortunately. My father was Yiddish-speaking, but my mother a Swedish Jew who didn’t know, so Yiddish got lost.
MR: Swedish Jew – I didn’t know there was such a thing.
BT: There aren’t too many of them and her family is mostly inter-married. But the remnants are there. I go back and visit. It was a huge family, and her branch was the only one that came to the U.S. My great-great-great whatever grandfather was the first rabbi of Gothenburg.
MR: [in Hebrew] Where did you learn Hebrew?
BT: [in Hebrew] In Israel.
I went to Israel a young bride in the middle of graduate school, married to an Israeli, and I had to learn Hebrew extremely quickly. And in five months I was understanding and speaking and teaching.
MR: Do you go to Israel often anymore?
BT: Less so. My husband died – there’s a small amount of family, but a lot of friends there.
MR: Do you feel a connection to place?
BT: Oh my God, yes. The critical period in my life was there. My husband was an officer in the Six Day War. He’d been an officer and a paratrooper in the Sinai Campaign. I was in shelters. My kids were born there. Many of my good friendships were there.
MR: Where did you live in Jerusalem?
BT: In Beit HaKerem and Neve Granot.
MR: I’m reading Amos Oz’s memoir right now. It’s fantastic.
BT: He’s amazing.
MR: Where would you raise children today?
BT: It depends. Peace within the parents first. I think for small kids being outdoors and running around and having freedom to explore is terrific – walking to school, biking to school. So I did end up raising kids on the west coast, and two of my children are doing that. Especially the child who's back in Stanford – the kids can go to school alone, to the swimming pool alone, to their friends alone. That’s an enormous empowerment for children.
MR: Do you know Jonathan Haidt?
BT: Yeah, sure.
MR: Do you know about Free-Range Kids?
BT: That’s what they are. That’s how I raised my kids, and it builds competence in them. When my son was 13, we brought him back to Israel for a year. He didn't know much of the language, and we sent him to Hebrew school – it took two buses, it was forever getting there. He said, “I can go anywhere in the world. I get on a bus, I get on a train, I get on a plane. I can go everywhere.” He had that in his mind, and he has gone everywhere.
MR: When you listen to interviews with people you find interesting, what do you want to ask them?
BT: It depends. I’m usually after ideas.
MR: You’re not so interested in how someone takes their coffee.
BT: That less – I’m interested in peoples’ life paths – why they made the decisions they made.
MR: Do you floss?
BT: My teeth are no good – yeah I floss. I have a huge ritual for my teeth – they’re no good, I want to keep them.
MR: But you’re not interested in whether someone flosses?
BT: No, not in the least. I'm not interested in how they shower.
When we had our first kid, and the kid had a bris, a good friend came over who had his first kid nine months earlier. He couldn’t wait to tell us how to treat the bris and how to do this and how to do that. He was a high-powered economist and very active in politics. This was a surprise. He said, “You learn so much when you have a baby – you want to tell it to everyone who can listen.”
There are times in life where flossing and diapering gets interesting. But at another times in life, they are less interesting. My friend and colleague Laura Carstensen has studied aging long before it was in. She found that for younger people, conversation is about information. They need a lot of information – where to buy a house, how to get insurance, where to send your kids to daycare. When you get older, you don't need information – what you want is emotional bonding. You see that in the elderly conversations.
When you’re alone a lot, you observe. I was once having dinner before the theater in Berkeley, and there were two older women having a conversation. The content was irrelevant. What the conversation was, was “I like you.” “I like you.” When you think about it, emotion is really the basis of spatial behavior. What do you go toward and what do you go away from? Approach or avoid. Those are the basic behaviors, and they are at their foundation, emotional.