(202) 885-1231 And if it doesn't, that's okay too because science is a work in progress. This idea that the bumps on your head, everybody has slightly different bumps on their head due to the shape of their skull. At the same time I spent a lot of time writing and organizing lectures about the brain for an undergraduate course that I was teaching. Pingback: MAGIC VIDEO HUB | Have we made any progress since 2005? It explains how we think about the universe. The trouble with a hypothesis is its your own best idea about how something works. The Masonic Philosophical Society seeks to recapture the spirit of the Renaissance.. And those are the things that ought to be interesting to us, not the facts. What crazy brain tricks is my brain playing on me to allow this to happen and why does it happen? Unfortunately, there appears to be an ever-increasing focus on the applied sciences. As mentioned by Dr. Stuart Firestein in his TED Talk, The pursuit of ignorance, " So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content. So, the knowledge generates ignorance." (Firestein, 2013) I really . REHMAnd here's a tweet. His new book is titled, "Ignorance: How it Drives Science." To Athens, Ohio. Please review the TED talk by Stuart Firestein (The pursuit of ignorance). I'm big into lateralization of brain and split-brain surgery, separation of the corpus callosum. The data flowed freely, our technology's good at recording electrical activity, industries grow up around it, conferences grow up around it. You were talking about Sir Francis Bacon and the scientific method earlier on this morning. FIRESTEINYou know, my wife who was on your show at one time asked us about dolphins and shows the mirrors and has found that dolphins were able to recognize themselves in a mirror showing some level of self awareness and therefore self consciousness. Its just turned out to be a far more difficult problem than we thought it was, but weve learned a vast amount about the problem, Firestein said. And I really think that Einstein's general theory of relativity, you know, engulfed, after 200 years or so, Newton's well-established laws of physics. It's absolutely silly, but for 50 years it existed as a real science. They need to be able to be revised and we have to accept that's the world we live in and that's what science does. Unsubscribe at any time. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. REHMYou write in your book ignorance about the PET scanner, the development of the PET scanner and how this fits into the idea of ignorance helping science. Reprinted from IGNORANCE by Stuart Firestein with permission from Oxford University Press USA. REHMAnd one final email from Matthew in Carry, N.C. who says, "When I was training as a graduate student we were often told that fishing expeditions or non-hypothesis-driven-exploratory experiments were to be avoided. Now, we joke about it now. Science doesnt explain the universe. Some issues are, I suppose, totally beyond words or very hard to find words for, although I think the value of metaphors is often underrated. FIRESTEINBut in point of fact, geography is a very lively field, mapping other planets, mapping other parts of this planet, mapping it in different perspective, mapping the ocean floor. You wanna put it over there because people have caught a lot of fish there or do you wanna put it somewhere else because people have caught a lot of fish there and you wanna go somewhere different. So for all these years, men have been given these facts and now the facts are being thrown out. The activities on this page were inspired by Stuart Firestein's book, Ignorance: How It Drives Science. FIRESTEINWell, so they're not constantly wrong, mind you. All rights reserved. Please submit a clearly delineated essay. Firestein was raised in Philadelphia. Science can never be partisan b. And then, somehow the word spread around and I always tried to limit the class to about 30 or 35 students. You had to create a theory and then you had to step back and find steps to justify that theory. And so we've actually learned a great deal about many, many things. It's what it is. THE PURSUIT OF IGNORANCE. He describes the way we view the process of science today as, "a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for . This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. REHMI'm going to take you to another medical question and that is why we seem to have made so little progress in finding a cure for cancer. Stuart Firestein joins me in the studio. For more of Stuart Firesteins thoughts on ignorance check out the description for his Columbia course on Ignoranceand his book, Ignorance: How It Drives Science. Scientists have made little progress in finding a cure for cancer, despite declaring a war on it decades ago. Oddly, he feels that facts are sometimes the most unreliable part of research. 4. I mean, your brain is also a chemical. In it -- and in his 2012 book on the topic -- he challenges the idea that knowledge and the accumulation of data create certainty. Firestein begins his talk by explaining that scientists do not sit around going over what they know, they talk about what they do not know, and that is how . So how are you really gonna learn about this brain when it's lying through its teeth to you, so to speak, you know. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. I mean, you want somebody to attack your work as much as possible and if it stands up that's great. FIRESTEINI mean, ignorance, of course, I use that term purposely to be a little provocative. REHMBut don't we have an opportunity to learn about our brain through our research with monkeys, for example, when electrodes are attached and monkeys behave knowledgably and with perception and with apparent consciousness? Immunology has really blossomed because of cancer research initially I think, or swept up in that funding in any case. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, Pp. The result, however, was that by the end of the semester I began to sense that the students must have had the impression that pretty much everything is known in neuroscience. It's like a black room with a cat that may or may not be there. You have to have Brian on the show for that one. And that's the difference. In the end, Firestein encourages people to try harder to keep the interest in science alive in the minds of students everywhere, and help them realize no one knows it all. It means a lot because of course there is this issue of the accessibility of science to the public FIRESTEINwhen we're talking some wacko language that nobody can understand anymore. Good morning, professor. He has published articles in Wired magazine,[1] Huffington Post,[2] and Scientific American. Knowledge is not necessarily measured by what you know but by how good of questions you can ask based on your current knowledge. At the heart of the course are sessions, I hesitate to call them classes, in which a guest scientist talks to a group of students for a couple of hours about what he or she doesnt know. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. Stuart J. Firestein is the chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his laboratory is researching the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron. FIRESTEINYou're exactly right, so that's another. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. He concludes with the argument that schooling can no longer be predicated on these incorrect perspectives of science and the sole pursuit of facts and information. And we do know things, but we dont know them perfectly and we dont know them forever, Firestein said. We accept PayPal, Venmo (@openculture), Patreon and Crypto! Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was His Major Gift to Citizen Kane, Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong, Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW). It's telling you things about how it operates that we know now are actually not true. 1,316 talking about this. So what I'd like you to do is give us an example where research -- not necessarily in the medical field, but wherever where research led to a conclusion that was later found out to be wrong. Knowledge enables scientists to propose and pursue interesting questions about data that sometimes dont exist or fully make sense yet. In this witty talk, Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don't know -- or "high-quality ignorance" -- just as much as what we know. And now it's become a technical term. You might see if there was somebody locally who had a functional magnetic resonance imager. As the Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles describes it: Its groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says, Oh, wow, so thats how it looks, and then its off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline. Ignorance can be big or small, tractable or challenging. Go deeper into fascinating topics with original video series from TED. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, the chair of Columbia Universitys Biological Sciences department, rejects any metaphor that likens the goal of science to completing a puzzle, peeling an onion, or peeking beneath the surface to view an iceberg in its entirety. Many of those began to take it, history majors, literature majors, art majors and that really gave me a particularly good feeling. You go to work, you think of a hundred other things all day long and on the way home you go, I better stop for orange juice. Finally, I thought, a subject I can excel in. ignorance how it drives science 1st edition. . These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. And then one day I thought to myself, wait a minute, who's telling me that? Hi there, Dana. I dont mean a callow indifference to facts or data or any of that, Firestein said. Professor Firestein, an academic, suggests that the backbone of science has always been in uncovering areas of knowledge that we don't know or understand and that the more we learn the more we realize how much more there is to learn. We have things that always give you answers to thingslike religion In science, on the frontier, the answers havent come yet. And we talk on the radio for God's sakes. Knowledge is a big subject, says Stuart Firestein, but ignorance is a bigger one. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself. In his neuroscience lab, they investigate how the brain works, using the nose as a "model system" to understand the smaller piece of a difficult complex brain. I'm Diane Rehm. The course consists of 25 hour-and-a-half lectures and uses a textbook with the lofty title Principles of Neural Science, edited by the eminent neuroscientists Eric Kandel and Tom Jessell (with the late Jimmy Schwartz). He is an adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program for the Public Understanding of Science. The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that turns your crank, the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. Here's a website comment from somebody named Mongoose, who says, "Physics and math are completely different animals from biology. FIRESTEINBut I call them case histories in ignorance. FIRESTEINWell, the basis of the course is just a seminar course and it meets two hours once a week in an evening usually from 6:00 to 8:00. Join neurobiologist Bernard Baars, originator of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), acclaimed author in psychobiology, and one of the founders of the mode In his TED Talk, The Pursuit of Ignorance, Stuart Firestein argues that in science and other aspects of learning we should abide by ignorance. For example, in his . And it looks like we'll have to learn about it using chemistry not electrical activity. And that got me to a little thinking and then I do meditate. And so I think the black hole idea is one of those things that just kind of -- it sounds engaging whereas a gravity hole, I don't know whether it would -- but you're absolutely right. REHMYou know, I'm fascinated with the proverb that you use and it's all about a black cat. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. As neuroscientist Stuart Firestein jokes: It looks a lot less like the scientific method and a lot more like "farting around in the dark." He clarifies that he is speaking about a high-quality ignorance that drives us to ask more and better questions, not one that stops thinking. translators. In this witty talk, Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don't know or "high-quality ignorance" just as much as . Science must be partisan You understand that of course FIRESTEINbut I think that it's a wonderful example because we've had this war on cancer that we all thought we were gonna win pretty quickly. Simply put, the classroom is focused on acquiring and organizing facts while the lab is an exhilarating search for understanding. A biologist and expert in olfaction at Columbia. Etc.) The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers. I think we have an over-emphasis now on the idea of fact and data and science and I think it's an over-emphasis for two reasons. Part of what we also have to train people to do is to learn to love the questions themselves. And then reflect on it to determine the next questions. What are the questions you're working on and you'll have a great conversation. Facts are fleeting, he says; their real purpose is to lead us to ask better questions. The speakers who appeared this session. Let me tell you my somewhat different perspective. Or, as Dr. Firestein posits in his highly entertaining, 18-minute TED talk above, a challenge on par with finding a black cat in a dark room that may contain no cats whatsoever. This button displays the currently selected search type. ANDREASAll right. We still need to form the right questions. So I think that's what you have to do, you know. His thesis is that the field of science has many black rooms where scientists freely move from one to another once the lights are turned on. The difference is they ought to begin with the questions that come from those conclusions, not from the conclusion. Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, biologist Stuart Firestein says in todays TED talk. In a 1-2 page essay, discuss how Firestein suggests you should approach this data. He feels that scientists don't know all the facts perfectly, and they "don't know them forever. We're learning about the fundamental makeup of the universe. MR. STUART FIRESTEINWe begin to understand how we learn facts, how we remember important things, our social security number by practice and all that, but how about these thousands of other memories that stay for a while and then we lose them. It is certainly more accurate than the more common metaphor of scientists patiently piecing together a giant puzzle. Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. REHMAnd welcome back. Learn more about the Addeddate 2013-09-24 16:11:11 Duration 1113 Event TED2013 Filmed 2013-02-27 16:00:00 Identifier StuartFirestein_2013 Original_download I call somebody up on the phone and say, hi. 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So proof and proofs are, I think, in many sciences -- now, maybe mathematics is a bit of an exception, but even there I think I can think of an example, not being a mathematician even, where a proof is fallen down because of some new technology or some new technique in math. Open Translation Project. If you want we can talk for a little bit beforehand, but not very long because otherwise all the good stuff will come out over a cup of coffee instead of in front of the students. Finally, the ongoing focus on reflection allows the participants to ask more questions (how does this connect with prior knowledge? I mean, in addition to ignorance I have to tell you the other big part of science is failure. Tell us about that proverb and why it resonates so with you. As opposed to exploratory discovery and attempting to plant entirely new seed which could potentially grow an entirely new tree of knowledge and that could be a paradigm shift. that was written by Erwin Schrodinger who was a brilliant quantum physicist. But I have to admit it was not exhilarating. FIRESTEINI've run across it several times. It was a comparison between biologists and engineers and what and how we know what we know and how the differences are, but that's another subject. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. "[8] The book was largely based on his class on ignorance, where each week he invited a professor from the hard sciences to lecture for two hours on what they do not know. Send your email to drshow@wamu.org Join us on Facebook or Twitter. In Dr. Firesteins view, every answer can and should create a whole new set of questions, an opinion previously voiced by playwright George Bernard Shawand philosopher Immanuel Kant. It's a big black book -- no, it's a small black book with a big question mark on the front of it. What do I need to learn next?). Firestein worked in theater for almost 20 years in San Francisco and Los Angeles and rep companies on the East Coast. We never spam. DANAI mean, in motion they were, you know, they were the standard for the longest time, until Einstein came along with general relativity or even special relativity, I guess. That's a very tricky one, I suppose. [9], The scientific method is a huge mistake, according to Firestein. It's the smartest thing I've ever heard said about the brain, but it really belongs to a comic named Emo Phillips. I had, by teaching this course diligently, given these students the idea that science is an accumulation of facts. And those are the best kinds of facts or answers. And through meditation, as crazy as this sounds and as institutionalized as I might end up by the end of the day today, I have reached a conversation with a part of myself, a conscious part of myself. Photo: James Duncan Davidson. And we're very good at recording electrical signals. Ignorance beyond the Lab. FIRESTEINBut to their credit most scientists realize that's exactly what they would be perfect for. but you want to think carefully about your grade in this class because your transcript is going to read "Ignorance" and then you have to decide, do you want an A in this FIRESTEINSo the first year, a few students showed up, about 12 or 15, and we had a wonderful semester. [6], After earning his Ph.D. in neurobiology, Firestein was a researcher at Yale Medical School, then joined Columbia University in 1993.[7]. book summary ignorance how it drives science the need. If all you want in life are answers, then science is not for you. REHMAnd especially where younger people are concerned I would guess that Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, those diseases create fundamentally new questions for physicists, for biologists, for REHMmedical specialists, for chemists. to those who judge the video by its title, this is less provocative: The pursuit of new questions that lead to knowledge. The book then expand this basic idea of ignorance into six chapters that elaborate on why questions are more interesting and more important in science than facts, why facts are fundamentally unreliable (based on our cognitive limits), why predictions are useless, and how to assess the quality of questions. Science is always wrong. Well, this now is another support of my feeling the facts are sort of malleable. In this witty talk, Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don't know -- or "high-quality ignorance" -- just as much as what we know. Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. Answers create questions, he says. In fact, I would say it follows knowledge rather than precedes it. Stuart Firestein teaches, of course, on the subject of ignorance at Columbia University where he's chair of the Department of Biology. FIRESTEINWe'd like to base it on scientific fact or scientific proof. But part of the chemistry produces electrical responses. Don't prepare a lecture. REHMBrian, I'm glad you called. In his new book, "Ignorance: How It Drives Science," Firestein argues that pursuing research based on what we don't know is more valuable than building on what we do know. And nematode worms, believe it or not, have been an important source of neuroscience research, as well as mice and rats and so forth and all the way up to monkeys depending on the particular question you're asking. Now I use the word ignorance at least in part to be intentionally provocative. You have to get to the questions. And FMRI's, they're not perfect, but they're a beginning. Reprinted from IGNORANCE: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. 14 quotes from Stuart Firestein: 'Persistence in the face of failure is of course important, but it is not the same thing as dedication or passion. Revisions in science are victories unlike other areas of belief or ideas that we have. The course I was, and am, teaching has the forbidding-sounding title Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience. The students who take this course are very bright young people in their third or fourth year of University and are mostly declared biology majors. In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Why you should listen You'd think that a scientist who studies how the human brain receives and perceives information would be inherently interested in what we know. Stuart Firestein teaches students and "citizen scientists" that ignorance is far more important to discovery than knowledge. And that really goes to the heart of your book. And you have to get past this intuitive sense you have of how your brain works to understand the real ways that it works. [4] Firestein's writing often advocates for better science writing. Stuart Firestein: The Pursuit of Ignorance. stuart firestein the pursuit of ignorance ted talk. We may commonly think that we begin with ignorance and we gain knowledge [but] the more critical step in the process is the reverse of that.. In his TED Talk, The Pursuit of Ignorance, Stuart Firestein argues that in science and other aspects of learning we should abide by ignorance. REHMBut what happens is that one conclusion leads to another so that if the conclusion has been met by one set of scientists then another set may begin with that conclusion as opposed to looking in a whole different direction. This is knowledgeable ignorance, perceptive ignorance, insightful ignorance. Its not facts and rules. The Act phase raises more practical and focused questions (how are we going to do this? The Quality of Ignorance -- Chapter 6. Limits, Uncertainty, Impossibility, and Other Minor Problems -- Chapter 4. Stuart Firestein begins with an ancient proverb, "It's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat.". And I say to them, as do many of my colleagues, well, look, let's get the data and then we'll come up with a hypothesis later on. Firesteins laboratory investigates the mysteries of the sense of smell and its relation to other brain functions. Please explain.". And then, a few years later FIRESTEINeverybody said, okay, it must be there.