Intro. [Recording date: July 5, 2023.]
Russ Roberts:
Today is July 5th, 2023, and my guest is Adam Mastroianni. His Substack is Experimental History. This is his second appearance on EconTalk. He was first here in February of 2023, discussing Peer Review in the Academic Kitchen. Adam, welcome back to EconTalk.
Adam Mastroianni: Hey, thanks for having me back.
Russ Roberts: Our topic for today is an essay you wrote for your Substack with the lovely title “You Can’t Reach the Brain Through the Ears.” It could be a good song title, I think, by the way. I think that’s an opportunity you might want to pursue. But, it’s a superb, very short essay. We will link to it obviously, and I encourage listeners to read it.
You start off the essay with the story that you used to work with undergraduates helping them get fellowships to Oxford, a university in the United Kingdom in England. How did that go?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, not so well. So, I was a graduate student adviser in graduate school, and part of my job was to counsel students who are applying for these fellowships, because I had done one myself before starting graduate school.
And so, every time a student would apply for one of these, I would have a sit-down conversation with them where I would try to explain to them that what they were applying for is not what they thought that it was.
I had a pretty bad time at Oxford. Not that everybody does, but in my experience, the median of the distribution is pretty mediocre, especially for Master’s education. I don’t know if Master’s degrees everywhere are a scam, but at Oxford they certainly were. It’s very complicated that, like, they can’t actually charge undergraduates what it costs to educate them. And so, they overcharge foreign students who are there for graduate education. And so, the advisors are checked out. The lectures aren’t very good. The cohorts of students tend to not be very cohesive or all that inspiring.
And, I try to explain this to the students who are thinking about doing this as the next step in their lives, and I’m trying to set their expectations and tell them, ‘You can have a good time there, but you have to go in knowing what you’re going to get yourself into.’ And, I explain all the bad times that I had there, but how it could have been a good experience. And, they’re nodding and they’re nodding. And at the end they go, ‘Okay, so how many letters of recommendation do I need?’
And I go, ‘Okay, so after all that, you’re still going through it.’ And, I would walk away from these conversations thinking, ‘Why didn’t they believe me?’ Like, what was it that I was doing wrong that left them still in the dark? They seemed exactly the same after the conversation than they were before.
Russ Roberts: When I used to teach a lot of undergraduates, they often would want to spend their junior year abroad, and they often wanted to spend it at a–I won’t name the college or university–but they were in England, often. And, I would say, ‘I don’t mean to disillusion you, but the education there isn’t actually–I don’t think it’s–it might not be as good as what you’re getting here.’ ‘Oh, that’s okay.’ ‘Well, why don’t you just go take a semester off and go have fun? Because that’s really what you’re going for. You’re going to be in a nice–in London or some other place. Go enjoy it.’ He said, ‘Well, my parents won’t pay for that.’ Okay, so we’re clear. We’re pretending it’s this illustrious thing.
And, I look forward to hearing from Oxford students that Adam is insane: he’s wildly inaccurate. Maybe it was true then, but it’s not true now. So, I’m totally agnostic on this, so I am not going to weigh in on the particulars. And, you could argue that maybe they just have trouble hearing it, and that’s really the point of your piece. What do you think is the nature of the problem? And, you call it–I love this–the Leaky Bucket Brigade.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. So, I think this is a specific example of a much more general problem, which is: As we live our lives, we fill up our brains–or our buckets–with all this wisdom, all this experience. You get your heart broken. You work your first job. Your car breaks down. You go to college or you study abroad. And it’s not what you thought that it was.
All of these experiences are really valuable. And so, naturally, when the next generation is coming after us–our students, our children, or just younger people that we know–we would love to take everything that we have in our bucket and turn it upside down over theirs and fill theirs so they don’t have to get their heart broke, and have their car break down, have a semester abroad that’s kind of disappointing.
And, yet, it doesn’t seem to work. We turn the bucket over and either nothing comes out or it all splashes up. You cannot take your bucket and fill up someone else’s bucket.
Russ Roberts: Which, I’m going to read–you say it really beautifully in the essay–I’m going to read an excerpt from it:
We spend our lives learning hard things the hard way: what it feels like to fall in love, how to forgive, what to say when a four-year-old asks where babies come from, when to leave a party, how to scramble eggs, when to let a friendship go, what to do when the person sitting next to you on the bus bursts into tears, how to parallel park under pressure, and so on.
It’s like slowly filling up a bucket with precious drops of wisdom, except the bucket is your skull. The fuller your bucket gets, the more you want to pour it into other people’s buckets, to save them all the time, the heartache, and the burnt eggs that you had to endure to fill yours. This should be easy: you have the knowledge, so just give it to them!
But it isn’t easy. You tell them they’ll be sad and lonely at Oxford; they don’t get it. You warn them that holding a grudge will only weigh them down; they refuse to let it go. You explain how to parallel park; they end up jammed into a spot at a 45-degree angle with a line of cars honking behind them. It’s like you’re tipping your bucket over theirs, but all the wisdom-water splashes everywhere, and none of it ends up in their bucket.
Why is this so hard? Why must every generation of humans spend their entire lives learning what the last generation already knew? Why can’t we reach the brain through the ears? The lives we could save, the years we could get back, the progress we could make, if we could just solve this problem!
And of course, it’s a very reasonable question. I think about it a lot, which is why we’re having this conversation. What’s your–why doesn’t it work? Why can’t I just tell you the truth and now you know it?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think there are a few problems. And, the first is a language problem: that, the experience and the knowledge that we have is extremely rich. It’s multifaceted, it’s complex. It’s in mental language. But, if we want to transmit it to someone else, we have to put it in actual language.
And, as I go through in the piece, the way that we do this is we pass air over our vocal cords, and we wag our tongues, and we vibrate the air. And, that vibrates a series of very small bones in the other person’s ear, which then impinge on their neurons, and they decode that back into words in their head.
And this turns out to be a very lossy way of transmitting information from one person to another. What I experience and what I am able to put into your head are two completely different things.
Like, when I say I was sad and lonely at Oxford, it doesn’t really mean anything to you. I can’t put you in the moment that I would have twice a week coming home from improv rehearsal–like, cycling home in the dark with two of my friends. And, there would be a point where they would turn off to go to where they live. And, I lived another half mile down the road. And, when they turned off and I was left alone in the dark cycling in Oxford, I felt this profound loneliness. Like I was the only person in the world. And, even saying that, I know the words that I’m saying are not actually capturing the feeling that I had.
And so, when I tell this story to undergrads, they go, ‘So, you rode a bike in the dark and, like, that was the bad part?’ I’m, like, ‘Yes, but you don’t get why it was the bad part. There’s so much more here than I’m able to explain to you.’
And really, the only way that you could get that is by having that experience. But you can’t have that experience because that experience required my whole lifetime of experiences up until that point–my particular circumstances. Like, you can’t ride home from improv practice to the same house with the same friends and feel the same things.
So, that’s our first barrier–is that: I’m trying to use a language to explain this experience that is simply not up to the task. I cannot compress the knowledge in a way that you can decompress it and get it back again.
Russ Roberts: It’s an amazing example because nobody wants to be sad and lonely. Although, there are moments in my life where I’ve been sad and lonely and I kind of enjoyed it. And I convinced myself often that it was a growth experience, which it may have been. But, let’s say that doesn’t appeal to you.
And so, when you say ‘sad and lonely’ and they don’t get it, you say, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Very sad. Very lonely.’ And, that, of course, still doesn’t do it.
We had Patrick House on the program–the neuroscientist–a couple of times. And, he, I thought, had a different version of this. And of course, there’s an irony here. You and I are talking, people are listening, and they’re listening with their ears, and we actually think it might go into their brain. And, my argument for this is that the more cheerful version–the optimism here–is that we’re having a dialogue. And I think a dialogue might be a little easier to get into the brain than a monologue, but we’ll leave that alone and just remark on the irony here.
So, Patrick told the story of having a woman in his life who wanted to talk on FaceTime all the time. And he found that weird. Like, ‘Can’t we just sometimes just talk on the regular phone? It’s a little too much sensory overload for me. I like to think about what you look like. It’s okay, and I don’t have to see you on FaceTime, and I have to hold the phone a funny way.’
And, he discovered that she had a folder on her hard drive, on her laptop, of photographs of him. And, when they would talk on the phone without FaceTime, she would pull up the folder and open it so she could see his face. And he thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of weird, and a little bit creepy maybe.’
Until he discovered that she was one of these people who cannot see visual images in their head. And, those of us who can say, ‘What do you mean? What do you see?’ ‘Well, nothing.’
Start with that. Let me try to convey to you that I don’t see visual images in my head or vice versa. I mean, the other people are saying, ‘You mean you see things in your head without looking at them?’ I mean it doesn’t even make any sense to them.
It’s interesting, but the reason it’s profound is that Patrick made the observation that in some dimension, this is the essence of the human experience for all of us. Fundamentally, I think–mistakenly–that when I say ‘sad and lonely,’ you know what that means. You don’t. You have no idea of what sad and lonely means to me. They’re very common words.
And if anything, if you wrote a five-page story about cycling home from Oxford, there’d be a lot more words, and it would maybe get to me in a different way than the phrase ‘sad and lonely.’ But you’d think, ‘Well, come on, I’m going to be more efficient. Why do I have to add any–you know what those words mean, don’t you?’ And yet, they don’t mean the same to me as they meant to you.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. I think sometimes about trying to describe the experience of bungee jumping to someone who has never done it before. It’s a bad example. I’ve never done it before. But I just imagine: you fall, and then you bounce, and it’s scary. And, the problem–like you’re pointing out–all of these words, they seem to have one meaning, but they actually have many, many meanings. Like ‘sad’: there are many flavors of sad. And the only way you can specify those flavors is with additional words. And, eventually, you need so many words to explain the kind of flavor that you are talking about, that now you’re at 5,000 words just to explain one of the words.
And, even then, you are hoping that this person has tasted that flavor of sad before. That’s the only way that they can really understand it. And if they haven’t, then it’s like a color that they haven’t seen. You go, ‘Well, it’s not red. It’s kind of like red, but it’s lighter and it’s bluer,’ and people have no idea what you’re talking about.
I think that’s the first barrier: is that we are using words that just can’t capture what we are trying to capture. But I think there are many more barriers after that.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, we’re going to get to those. I just want to add one other example. In my book–I’ve written about it; I’ve probably talked about on the program–when I went on a silent meditation retreat for five days, most people said to me, ‘You did what?’ Yeah, I went on a silent meditation retreat for five days. And, because they know what it’s like not to talk for 30 seconds, and they know it’s hard not to talk for more than five minutes, sometimes, in some conversations, they think they have an idea what it’s like not to talk for five days. And the answer is, of course: They have no idea.
And, how do you convey that? Well, there’s an obvious way: Go on a silent meditation retreat. That’s the way number one. The best I could do after it was over was to say–when it was over, I felt like I’d seen Les Mis for the first time.
And, that’s an interesting idea, right? If you’ve seen Les Mis and you liked it, it doesn’t really work because you probably say to yourself, ‘How could being silent for five days be anything like that?’ But that’s what it felt like to me. Maybe even to you, but you’d have to live through it to feel it.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. And, maybe the most useful thing that you can tell someone is: It’s not what you think. That, what you’re doing is extrapolating your own experience into an experience that you haven’t had. And, I can’t really tell you what it was like, but I can falsify the hypotheses that you have about it. It’s not just more of what you know.
And, maybe similarly with Oxford. It’s, like, it’s not just taking a class that you don’t really like. I know that you as an undergrad have had that experience. Imagine if you never took a class that you liked and imagine if–you know how sometimes it’s hard to get your advisor to respond to an email? Imagine if you didn’t even believe that they wanted to respond to your email. It’s not that they’re busy doing a bunch of other things, and they want to get back to you, but they’re so tied up. It’s that they fundamentally wish you would not talk to them. It’s like that. And, I think that’s part of what people didn’t get.
Russ Roberts: While you were in England, did you ever have any experience with whether an English University could sue a podcast, say, based in America with an Israeli host? I’m just curious, because you keep bringing up this Oxford thing. We’re going to get in trouble, Adam. I’m getting a little nervous.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. I got in a lot of trouble over there. Well, I will say I was there for graduate education. I did a lot of improvs[?]. I did a lot of undergrad through[?] doing that. They seem to have a pretty good time, because I think that’s what that institution has done for a thousand years, and they do it pretty well.
And, I think they actually take seriously this problem that we’re talking about, where a lot of the undergraduate education is you sit in a room for a long time with someone who knows more about something than you do. You show them the ideas that you have and they talk about those ideas, and they tell you about ideas that they have.
I don’t actually know a better way of communicating complicated ideas to someone else, other than doing that. It’s not really lecture-based. It’s very dialogue based, like you mentioned. It’s very reactive. It’s very idiosyncratic and tailored to what you’re doing.
And, the people I met who were going through it seemed to really know their stuff. They seemed to be having a good time–because that’s what Oxford has done for a thousand years, is educate young people by spending a lot of time with them in a room and talking to them deeply about the things that they’re interested in.
It’s only at the graduate level where they dispense with all of that. And they go: ‘Now we’re going to do lectures and we’re going to do basically the big-box-store version of education. Now you’re not really going to have a deep personal relationship with someone who has more knowledge about this than you. You’re kind of going to get that on your own, supposedly.’
That is where I think we failed to solve this problem. Because, we failed to take it seriously. That, we thought it is easy or it is even possible to transmit this kind of knowledge from one person to another without working very hard at it, without developing a personal relationship around it, without tailoring it to the person who is receiving it. And without thinking deeply about how it is you get the contents of one brain into another.
And, that’s part of why I had a bad experience there, is I was so used to doing that that I felt like I had a lot of personal relationships, and I was in a cohort of people who really wanted to talk about the things that we were learning. And, that developed those things, too, rather than feeling like I was going to Costco and buying a big jar of mayonnaise, and the mayonnaise was supposed to be knowledge.
Russ Roberts: We’re now in a story within a story. I think it’s probably a Borges short story. I’ve never read Borges, I’m ashamed to say. But you’re using the metaphor of you can’t learn through your ears to now not just apply to your advice as people after experiencing Oxford, for why it didn’t work so well at Oxford. We will come back to that, I hope. We’re going to come back to teaching.
I want to just mention that the thing you sort of said in passing about, ‘Well, at least I can rule this out: it’s not like what you think,’ is actually somewhat powerful. It still might not be credible. It still might not go into the brain. But, the idea of saying, ‘I can’t tell you what it’s like, but I know what it’s not like. It’s not like being quiet, but just longer–say, for a meditation retreat.’ That’s interesting. Maybe that’s helpful to some people.
Talk about the study–this is very beautiful–the 1990 study that a graduate student, Elizabeth Newton, did. Maybe we could reenact pieces of it for ourselves or for listeners. I tried it with my wife. She didn’t[?did?] go one for two. I stopped there. I thought that was interesting. But tell us about that study.
Adam Mastroianni: This is a great study, and part of what makes it great is it was never formally published. Like, I don’t know what Elizabeth Newton did with the rest of her life, but she just did this beautiful study and then walked away. I think there’s something very profound about that.
Anyway, here’s how the study works. You come into the lab: there’s you and another participant, and there’s a screen between you. And, you get a list of some common songs that anyone would know, like “Jingle Bells” or “Joy to the World.” And, you are told which of these songs you’re going to tap out on the table in front of you. You just take your index finger and make little tapping sounds, to try to play the melody of that song to the person on the other side of the screen.
So, they can’t see you doing this. And, their goal is just to guess which song you’re tapping.
It’s the dumbest setup in the world. One person taps, the other person guesses.
You, as the tapper, the other thing you do is try to predict how often the other person is going to know which song you’re tapping. And, I have the actual numbers in the piece, but basically the tappers think that the other side is going to get it most of the time. And the other side gets it basically none of the time. [More to come, 20:18]
