Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Mind's Eye | 295Memory images must be labeled and organized within a propositionalsuperstructure, perhaps a bit like hypermedia, where graphics files arelinked to attachment points within a large text or database.Visual thinking is often driven more strongly by the conceptualknowledge we use to organize our images than by the contents of theimages themselves. Chess masters are known for their remarkable memoryfor the pieces on a chessboard. But it's not because people with photographicmemories become chess masters. The masters are no betterthan beginners when remembering a board of randomly arranged pieces.Their memory captures meaningful relations among the pieces, such asthreats and defenses, not just their distribution in space.Another example comes from a wonderfully low-tech experiment by thepsychologists Raymond Nickerson and Marilyn Adams. They asked peopleto draw both sides of a penny, which everyone has seen thousands oftimes, from memory. (Try it before you read on.) The results are sobering.An American penny has eight features: Abraham Lincoln's profile, IN GODWE TRUST, a year, and LIBERTY on one side, and the Lincoln Memorial,UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, E PLURIBUS UNUM, and ONE CENT on the Other.Only five percent of the subjects drew all eight. The median numberremembered was three, and half were in the wrong place. Intruding intothe drawings were ONE PENNY, laurel wreaths, sheaves of wheat, the Washingtonmonument, and Lincoln sitting in a chair. People did better whenasked to tick off the features in a penny from a list. (Thankfully, no oneselected MADE IN TAIWAN.) But when they were shown fifteen drawings ofpossible pennies, fewer than half the people picked out the correct one.Obviously, visual memories are not accurate pictures of whole objects.And if you did get the penny right, try this quiz. Which of these statementsare true?Madrid is farther north than Washington, D.C.Seattle is farther north than Montreal.Portland, Oregon, is farther north than Toronto.Reno is farther west than San Diego.The Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal is farther west than thePacific entrance.They are all true. Almost everyone gets them wrong, reasoning alongthese lines: Nevada is east of California; San Diego is in California; Renois in Nevada; therefore Reno is east of San Diego. Of course, this kind of