Learn about new Common Craft videos, useful resources, and the skill of explanation from Lee LeFever, author of The Art of Explanation.
Two Big Ideas from the Science of Explanation
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Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Hello friends, A couple of weeks ago, I invited you to my free newsletter: The Science of Explanation. It was gratifying to see so many of you subscribe! Today, I'm writing to share a couple of recent posts. #1 What Happens in the Mind When We Explain?This shares a big idea from cognitive science that relates to the idea of sharing knowledge. Excerpts from the post: When a child asks a question like, “Why does the sun always rise in the east?” Our mind automatically accesses our knowledge, and we communicate an answer in the form of words or a diagram.
This happens so often that we don’t think about it. Our explanations just… happen.
Sometimes they work, other times they don’t. To get to the bottom of what makes an explanation work, we need to understand what’s actually happening in the mind when we explain.
Since we can’t read minds, there is no way for us to transfer knowledge directly. To explain an idea, we’re forced to create a version of our knowledge that can be shared.
This is the basis of explanation: representing our knowledge to others.
The idea of representation is foundational to the subject of explanation. When an explanation succeeds or fails, the culprit is not often our intelligence or knowledge, but how we represent that knowledge for others. The best explanations are carefully crafted representations.
What are representations? They are real-world artifacts of what we know, curated for other minds. They include what we write, say, or create. When we explain the sun rising in the east, we create representations of our knowledge that we hope are useful for the child’s mind.
The big idea: We don’t share knowledge; we represent it for others.
I also created a short explainer video about this idea. #2 The Baseline ProblemExplanations require a shared understanding of what is real. And that's the problem. We take our reality for granted and assume everyone experiences the world as we do. Excerpts from the piece: As we get into the science of explanation, it’s important to discuss the baseline problem. Do we share the same reality? What does that even mean? For this, we’ll need to get into a bit of philosophy. Imagine a single rose. It’s red, smells like a rose, and has sharp thorns. This rose is very much a part of reality. However, the colors you see, the smells you detect, and the feeling of a thorn’s tip seem like reality to you; a reality shared by all humans.
Now think of my dog, Piper, sniffing the same rose. To her, the rose is not red at all. Her vision is dichromatic, meaning it uses only two colors: blue and yellow. Her sense of smell is thousands of times stronger than yours. The scent is a cacophony.
Now we can ask: Who is experiencing “true” reality?The answer is neither. The difference between Piper and you is not the rose, but how your senses and brain process it. The rose has physical properties that are part of “true” reality, but the color and smell you both experience are perceptions in your mind and not properties of the world. You and Piper can never experience the true version of the rose.
When we assume our experience is reality itself, we assume everyone else shares the same baseline. This assumption makes misunderstanding inevitable. We talk past one another, argue about facts that feel obvious, and struggle to explain things we understand clearly. The problem isn’t intelligence or information, but a mismatch of baselines. We automatically work from the reality we know. The solution to this problem is bigger than one article. But the answer lies first in recognizing that we all work from different baselines. Our entire lives are spent existing in a reality that is unique to us, yet feels real and shared.
The key, going forward, is thinking about how to craft explanations that create a workable starting point, one that we can reasonably assume is shared between us and our audience. We’ll do that by considering how the mind filters and evaluates incoming information.
Coming SoonI’m just getting started, so now is a great time to follow along. In upcoming issues, I will bring cognitive science to life.
That's what I have for now. I'll be in touch again soon!
Lee LeFever, Common Craft |
The Common Craft Newsletter
Learn about new Common Craft videos, useful resources, and the skill of explanation from Lee LeFever, author of The Art of Explanation.
Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe here Hello friends, I'm writing to invite you to my free newsletter: The Science of Explanation. Here's why I think you'll find it fascinating: The biggest challenge of explanation is invisibility. We can’t see what’s happening in someone else’s mind or how they interpret what we say. For most of human history, that gap was unavoidable. Today, brain science is revealing the...
Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe here Hello friends. We've hosted the Explainer Academy since 2015 and have seen nearly 1,000 professionals take the courses. I'm writing today because the Explainer Academy has moved to a new address that will serve as a platform for a new set of courses with a new perspective on explanation. More on that soon. The former domain, ExplainerAcademy.com, has transitioned to...
Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe here Hello friends. Last week, I wrote to share new directions for Common Craft. Our videos are now available to purchase as digital downloads with a lifetime license, meaning the videos are yours to keep and use professionally. Each download contains everything you need to share the videos (captioned version, thumbnail, transcript, and more). We've also changed how we offer Common...