"Making Thinking Work Well is a Great Art": an interview with psychologist Vladimir Spiridonov

Vladimir Spiridonov is a Doctor of Psychology, who studies thinking and how people solve problems.

We talked with Vladimir Spiridonov about the myths of popular psychology and about intelligence, found out what is good and bad for thinking and how to solve life problems more effectively. They also found out if there is any benefit from crosswords, school math problems and why interview assignments are needed.

About myths

- What are your favorite myths from popular psychology?

There are a lot of such myths, and over the years they become more and more. These are misconceptions from the category that we only use the brain by 10% and that the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, and the right is creative. And there is also a myth about a significant difference in the structure of the psyche. in men and women. There is an insane amount of such goodness.

- Why is it not true that we use only 10% of the brain?

On the one hand, this idea is not supported by any measurements. If you start recording the work of the brain using any tomograph or electroencephalograph, then every time you will see that the brain is working as a whole.

There are more and less activated zones and structures, but at the same time it works all the time and all, even when you sleep. The idea that we have latent abilities tied to inactive parts of the brain does not fit any physiological reality.

On the other hand, there is another idea behind this metaphor that has nothing to do with the main organ of the central nervous system. The bottom line is that we are, in a sense, poorly trained brain users. He needs constant training, like an athlete, in order to play football or basketball well. If we developed intellectual, mnestic (the ability to remember the necessary information in time) and other abilities, they would be much better. Yes, the brain takes part in this, but this has to do not with 10%, but with training cognitive skills.

- Why is it not true that the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, and the right one is creative?

The situation here is even simpler. To study cases where the right and left parts of the brain work in isolation, psychologists and neurophysiologists have come up with a special test - the Wada test. Special "inhibiting" substances are injected into one of the hemispheres in a clever way. Accordingly, it is possible to construct a situation when one part of the brain is "silent", and the other works. Then you can really see some specificity of the hemispheres. But in real life circumstances, they both work together and contribute to getting you to act and represent the world in a certain way.

Another situation in which the hemispheres work in isolation is split-brain syndrome after a medical procedure. This refers to callosotomy - an operation to cut the corpus callosum. - Approx. ed. for the treatment of epilepsy. Now it is carried out quite rarely, but earlier they resorted to splitting the brain in cases when epilepsy did not respond to any other therapy and was so severe that it led to lifestyle disruption human. The patient had the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres to each other, and formally they worked in isolation.

Even so, no two separate consciousnesses arise. Moreover, people who underwent this operation could not fix significant differences in their condition and cognitive processes. Neuropsychologist Gazzaniga Michael conducted very subtle psychological experiments, which he highlighted in his book "Who is in charge? Free will from a neuroscience perspective ”to show that many changes are actually occurring. This situation demonstrates that consciousness is "attached" to the brain as a whole. And yet it does not track its work in the clearest way.

On the one hand, the myth of hemispheric polarization is absolutely true. The hemispheres are specialized, they have somewhat different structural components, responsible for different tasks, and so on. On the other hand, all the specifics dissolve, because in a normal situation, the brain is a complex electrical machine that acts as a single system.

- What myth annoys you the most?

Most annoying are fairly recent delusions: for example, that our brain makes decisions for us. Ostensibly due to the fact that perceived processes are slow things. The brain works much faster, and all decisions are made by it itself, and we simply execute them. This is an annoying and not very correct idea.

The problem itself is cleverly arranged. First, you need to agree on who "I am, the decision maker" is.

For many years European philosophers, and then psychologists also interpreted "I" as a person who is well aware of what he is doing and what is happening to him. Such a rational subject. A little less than 100 years ago, this idea began to be criticized. It turned out that our limits of rationality are very small, we do not behave rationally in all cases and make a large number of mistakes. Does this mean that “behind the back” of “I” is someone else? Say, a brain that works entirely on its own?

There seems to be a logical flaw in this position: it makes sense to assert that our brain is also us. After all, he literally grew up with us. And it is absolutely unique because it is packed with personal experiences (including skills) and memories. But consciousness is not a brain, although both are our attributes.

I coarse both criticism of this idea and the position of its supporters, but opposing our conscious "I" to the brain Is a horror that does not stand up to any normal discussion associated with understanding human nature.

About intelligence

- What is intelligence? Who is considered smart in terms of psychology?

Psychologists answer completely different questions, they should not be confused with the one you have formulated. For example, how does intelligence work? Than intelligence of one person is different from the intellect of another? What factors contribute and hinder its development?

The question of who is smart and who is stupid has nothing to do with psychologists. This is everyday reasoning, and it is quite possible to give an answer from the point of view of philistine ideas.

American psychologist Robert Sternberg conducted research on this topic many years ago. He interviewed a large number of respondents trying to understand what they consider to be intelligence. Moreover, the study participants had no psychological education.

As it turned out, the first thing people take for high intelligence is good vocabulary and verbal fluency, where you quickly find accurate phrases and articulate your thoughts clearly.

The second is the ability to solve special problems in some areas, for example in physics, mathematics, chemistry or biology.

The third thing that corresponds to everyday ideas about intelligence is the ability to cope with practical tasks: to negotiate with someone, structure a difficult working day, achieve the implementation of their plans and other. I think if we repeat this survey in our country, the results will be close.

But the scientific understanding of intelligence is different. This is a thing that provides us with the ability to work in an uncertain situation, when we need to quickly pick up suitable knowledge from memory and apply it. For psychologist intelligence is something that can be measured, but he has nothing to say about the smart and stupid.

- Does the IQ test really measure intelligence, or does it just show that a person is good at taking an IQ test?

Formally, IQ is the result of passing the test. And high IQ scores are high indicators of measurable intelligence. A test is a tool with which we, literally like a ruler, measure the height of intelligence and compare it with the performance of other people.

First options test on IQ appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Then psychologists realized that it was possible to check how the results of their passage were compared with life achievements.

It turned out that IQ is remarkably correlated with learning activity. If you need to predict the performance of schoolchildren or students, then this is a very good tool. Also, IQ is quite clearly correlated with career achievements. It cannot be argued that the IQ of big bosses is always higher than that of subordinates, but to move up the career ladder, an IQ is required. For Americans, IQ is also positively correlated with income.

So, we have a correlation with some life results, so IQ shows not only that a person is doing well on the test. However, this is not a causal relationship, so IQ-based predictions are very poor.

It's a shame that very little data has been obtained on domestic samples. Vladimir Druzhinin in lectures and in reports said that about 20 years ago he conducted research and found out that in the Russian sample there is no correlation between success in life and the height of intelligence, in contrast to American.

- You said that IQ helps to predict student performance, but now you say that IQ is a poor predictor. Can you explain how it works?

Predictions in a statistical sense come in several varieties.

First option: we take a sample of students and measure them before the start of classes IQ and other indicators such as anxiety and working memory. At the end of the school year, we have the results of academic performance and we use a statistical procedure to compare the series of numbers. And we see that some psychological indicators have a clear relationship with the results of educational activities.

In this case, IQ and academic performance will have a fairly high positive correlation. Is it possible to measure the intelligence of other students next year using a test and predict their progress immediately? Unfortunately not. Correlation is not causation. Only at the level of certain probabilities can a loose prediction be formulated that people with higher IQs will perform better.

In some cases, you can carry out a more rigorous procedure - an experiment. In it we can make predictions about cause and effect. But in working with the intellect, this is practically not done. Therefore, when I talk about intelligence, we are talking about correlations and predictions more in a metaphorical sense.

About problem solving and thinking

- Why do you need to study how people solve problems?

In our culture, it is highly appreciated when people can deal with uncertainty. How do they achieve goals that are not clear how to achieve? How do they manage to find workarounds in difficult situations?

The field of psychology that I am engaged in is based on the idea that we can teach young people in our society to better cope with problem situations. To do this, you need to know how people who are able to overcome difficulties do it.

On the one hand, mental psychologists are concerned with problems and ways of solving them, and on the other hand, with problems and ways of solving them. How is a task different from a problem? A task is a goal set in such an environment that it cannot be easily achieved. If you ask me to stand up and take a book from the shelf behind my back, then there are no obstacles for this, this is not a task. And if there is a solid glass partition between me and the shelf or a viper sits on the shelf, then there are some obstacles and I need to think of something.

We can put various tricks into the condition. For example, verbal deceptions that give you the wrong idea of ​​a problem - and you will not solve it until you overcome the deception.

The situation when we cannot cope with a difficult life task arises precisely because we misunderstand it. If we have recipes for how to deal with this, it will be a great help from psychologists. An even more complicated and disgusting situation with solving problems.

- What's wrong with problem solving?

A problem is a much more complex situation than a problem, and it is solved differently. When psychologists began to understand, it turned out that if goals are defined in tasks, then they are absent in problems. Such situations are described by a wonderful formula from an old Russian fairy tale: "Go there, I don't know where, find that, I don't know what."

Problems can be activity-related: launching a new product on the market, increasing labor productivity, reducing absenteeism by students, and increasing the effectiveness of their education. Formally, the goal is indicated, but the number of variables that have to be taken into account to achieve it is so great that the goal needs to be repeatedly specified and changed to make it realizable. To start solving a problem, we need to determine where to go.

But there are situations of a different kind. For example, related to anxiety - the loss of a close relative or separation from a dear person. Both are problems because they lack target.

The practical exhaust from the work of psychologists in this area is even more understandable. Problem situations are our reality. Identifying explanatory patterns and, as a result, recommendations would enable us to better teach and advise people.

A lot has been done in this direction, but there are no general models. They are still very local, literally tied to specific types of problem situations. This does not satisfy either practitioners or research psychologists.

- From the above, it follows that all these tasks at school were not in vain?

On the one hand, it is definitely not in vain. While conducting a similar conversation with one very sensible director of a Moscow school, I heard a wonderful phrase: “You need not teach mathematics, but mathematics. " I hope the difference is clear. These kinds of activities shape thinking.

The role of mathematics in modern schools or ancient languages ​​in gymnasiums in the Russian Empire is just such an idea. We need a complex subject on which we will hone our own thinking.

On the other hand, in addition to working with a complex subject, we must acquire a huge number of skills and build behavior in an uncertain situation. In this regard, school curriculum there is a weak point. Because she offers typical tasks, that is, simple ones that do not require special mental efforts on the part of the students.

If there were more unconventional, unexpected tasks in school and university programs, with a large number of pitfalls, the effect would be stronger.

- What about the tasks on the exam?

In terms of social impact, Unified State Exam - an unconditional benefit. It allows graduates from different parts of our vast homeland to be, at least in some respects, on an equal footing. If you prepare well, you can pass the exam perfectly anywhere.

It should be understood that the exam is a measuring ruler. I am constantly amazed at conversations that this test does not show ability. Do you expect a ruler to measure your line length to help you assess your ability? Well, no, that's different. It is a tool that shows the readiness of children to solve certain types of problems. No more.

- Can you give an example of a problem that you use in research? If a person decides it correctly or incorrectly, then this can say something about him?

The tasks that psychologists use are an insane amount. One of my favorite research materials is the Danetki game. You are given a very vague problematic situation, and you need to figure out what happened by asking the leader questions, to which he can unambiguously answer - "yes" or "no". For example: a dead man is lying in the field, with a sack behind him. What happened?

But for a research psychologist, it is much more important not whether you solved the problem or not, but how you solved it. The subject of study is psychological mechanisms. That is, those "cars" in your head that help to come to an answer from a situation of uncertainty. It is much more important what prompts influenced you, what kind of reformulation of the problem you made, what obstacles turned out to be the most difficult for you.

- Can you learn to solve problems better? And if so, how?

Of course you can. There is a whole class of special techniques called heuristic strategies. With their help, you can help yourself to solve problems, for example, without having all the necessary information.

The heuristic allows you to navigate in an uncertain situation, charting your path to the intended goal (you do not know the exact goal). The heuristic reduces the time to solve and the number of options to iterate over. It is effective when a problem needs to be reformulated, changed, divided into parts, and pulled out what is known and unknown.

There are heuristic strategies that help you get into a creative state, and those that involve permanent effort to work. For example, the Russian writer Yuri Olesha, the author of the fairy tale "Three Fat Men", had a principle called "Not a day without a line." That is, you do not catch a brilliant idea by the tail, but understand that you need to work every day and then there will be a result.

There are also collective procedures, for example brainstormwhere you and the group try to find the necessary solutions.

At the same time, heuristic strategies do not guarantee success at all. These are risky procedures that may not lead to a positive result at all. This is the specificity of the work of human thinking: it is impossible to solve complex problems in a guaranteed way.

- For one person, solving problems is very easy, while for another, everything is bad. Can the second person reach the level of the first? Or is there an insurmountable barrier?

There are no insurmountable barriers here. It's a matter of ability.

Abilities are individual qualities that, no doubt, develop during life and distinguish one person from another. The simplest understanding of ability is the psychological cost per result. It takes very little time for one person to master chess, football or mathematics. Another, with less ability, will take many times more time and diligence to reach the same level.

The psychological cost is the amount of effort you have to spend. There are no insurmountable barriers, but whether you have enough perseverance and perseverance to achieve the desired goal is an open question. Alas, most often it is not enough.

- How does stress affect problem solving?

Not very strong stress it mobilizes us, and everything can be quite good. But if the nervous tension is long or strong, then it does not affect the best way. Our ability to cope with a problem situation diminishes as a lot of resources go into coping with stress.

- What else has a negative effect?

Fatigue, anxiety, frustration. And also emphasizing any difficulties in solving the problem, often unexpected.

I was told that in Soviet times, when athletes went to the Olympic Games, they were gathered in the Kremlin before they left. After the usual words - "You have a great responsibility", "We believe in you" and so on - they were asked sign the papers, where it was stated: "I undertake to take a place not lower than the third" or "I undertake to take the first a place". An already difficult task under such circumstances becomes very difficult. Personal pressure doesn't affect people very well.

Harmful effects on thinking more than useful. So making it work well is a great art.

- What can positively influence our thinking?

If you sleep well, are calm, and do not overeat, then your functional state will be good and you can achieve good results.

It is also useful to be able to use heuristic strategies. Having a good group that you know how to work with is also a great help. Such groups are characterized not only by the fact that they include people with high intelligence, but also by the fact that they are assigned work roles that help to effectively organize the process of solving problems.

Another very important thing is the desire to deal with uncertainty. Many years ago, I conducted an experiment in a good mathematical school. It was a pleasant surprise for me that the tasks for the students of this school were a challenge.

If some of the significant competitors managed to find a solution, for example, Petka from the eighth "A", then others said: "Give your puzzles! " Working with a difficult condition as a challenge, an occasion to demonstrate the strengths of your thinking is not a very common thing, but very important. In this case, the task is associated not with the fear of failure, but, on the contrary, with a surge of enthusiasm and a desire to cope with the difficulty.

- How do you feel about the so-called biohacking in the field of psychology, when people try to "hack" the capabilities of the brain to become super-intelligent? What can this be fraught with?

Most often it is not fraught with anything. There are no significant changes, including in relation to the efficiency of problem solving. But if you persist in your attempts, especially those related to any chemistry or with strong psychotechnical practices, the consequences can be unpleasant.

If we speak carefully, then, as prescribed by a doctor, you can take nootropics in small quantities, realizing and controlling the risks. But systematic application does not promise anything good.

- Is there any use of crosswords?

Crosswords are great if you have to keep your brain running. This is a perfectly normal, but not very difficult cognitive task. If you do it regularly, you will reach certain heights in this matter.

But, as measurements show, walks in the fresh air help the brain much better. Nothing better is known. You need to get enough sleep for the brain to work well, and walk. None Crosswords fall short of this.

- What do you think about logical problems in interviews? Can they really say something about the mind of the employee?

If you are selecting people who need to know mathematics and logic, then such tests can really give an idea of ​​what kind of logical procedures your applicants have developed.

But much of the challenge in interviews involves being challenged and watching how you behave in situations of uncertainty. And under pressure and stress. Here, in addition to thinking, many other qualities are tested. I take this completely calmly, realizing that this is a mass practice.

It is clear that experienced recruiter as an experienced psychologist sees a lot in this situation. But observation is often unstructured. It would be great if recruiters turned these kinds of tasks into sustainable cases. We would single out the observable indicators of such properties and qualities and the variables with which we can really compare people with each other. Most often, unfortunately, this is not the case.

- Can you tell us what insight is and how to achieve it?

Insight is a very fun process. It has been described as one of the stages of problem solving. Its first explanation was given by the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who was observing himself. This is one of the few interesting results that psychology has obtained through self-observation.

There are four stable stages in solving a problem. In the first one, you get to know the condition and apply the solutions you have mastered well. If you easily find the answer, then you immediately move to the fourth stage - verification.

If the problem is not solved immediately, you find yourself in a very long and important second stage. It is called incubation, or in Russian, maturation. You try to solve a problem, it is difficult, you put it off and come back to the solution later. This process can take a long time, from minutes and hours to months and years. In any case, when an unexpected flash comes to mind good idea, you go back to the task and try to deal with it again.

This flash, or insight, is insight - the third stage of work on a problem, associated with the appearance of an idea or solution. Then you move on to the fourth stage and check if you found the right answer.

Previously, psychologists thought that insight is a guarantee of the right decision. Later it turned out that this was not the case. Wrong ideas come to mind just as vividly and visibly.

Nowadays, insight is the subject of a very deep and perennial debate that rests on two completely different ideas about how we solve problems. One of them is popular in the area artificial intelligence and lies in the fact that we come to the necessary answers sequentially. Step by step, we move from a state of uncertainty to a solution.

The second idea is that we cannot deal with complex problems sequentially. Our psychological mechanisms work in such a way that at some moments sharp breaks, jumps, changes in representation occur.

Proponents of the second point of view just defend the thesis that insight is a necessary property of our thinking and that it fundamentally distinguishes us from computing devices.

- What have you learned about human thinking after many years of studying it? Share your main insight?

The main insight is that thinking is extremely diverse. In young age it seemed to me that in it one can find universal mechanisms that work in a variety of problem situations. Over the years, there is less and less hope for such universals.

A few years ago I came up with a metaphor that seems to me the best description of what thinking can do and how it works. Here is the handle of the tool, into which we insert different nozzles: a screwdriver, drill, chisel, chisel. It is the same with thinking: we have a common basis, and specific tips are applicable to specific tasks, and they are all different. Our thinking is tailored to specific subject areas, knowledge and situations.

When there are many nozzles, this is a very good case. But more often than not they are lacking, and therefore some tasks remain fundamentally unsolvable for us - there is nothing to solve them.

The second insight is that thinking is very tied to specific areas, objects, things that are of interest to you. It will work well where your real motivation is affected, where you really want to understand, invent or understand something.

And the third thing that I understood is that thinking can be developed, but it cannot be done “outside”. It develops only by your own efforts. If you are interested and want to, then you really can do a lot learn to or move somewhere. Alas, this cannot be done from under the domination.

- As a psychologist who has devoted most of his life to the study of thinking and problem solving, what advice can you give the reader?

Another heuristic strategy says the following: in order to solve problems, they need to be solved. Decide, don't be afraid. In the worst case, fail, and in the best, you will learn a lot about yourself and still master the task. The general recipe is very simple: go ahead and with the song.

Life hacking

Psychology books

The mathematician Gyorgy Polya has a book called How to Solve a Problem. Unfortunately, the examples are mostly mathematical. But if we abstract a little from mathematics, then there are wonderful heuristic strategies that can be used in various fields.

An equally nice book is Russell Ackoff's The Art of Problem Solving. He was a remarkable American scientist and worked in the fields of operations research, systems theory, and management. Russell Ackoff was good at communicating how to deal with problem situations. The book is full of his personal stories and some theoretical concepts.

It is also very useful to read about negative results. In Russian there is a work by the outstanding German psychologist Dietrich Derner "The Logic of Failure" - about how people do not know how to solve problems. The book is very sobering, and since it is written wonderfully, I want to study, study these things in order to prove to Derner that he is wrong.

Well, and, accordingly, there are some of my books, for example, "The Psychology of Thinking: Solving Problems and Problems." They are always written in the same way: half exploratory and half talk about practical advice.

Several years ago Maria Falikman and I compiled two anthologies - collections of author's texts written by major psychologists. One is about the history of cognitive psychology, and the second is about the present and trends in cognitive psychology. The anthologies contain many good texts, and many of them have been translated into Russian for the first time.

Art books

The psychologist is a professionally intelligent creature. This means that he knows a lot of things, read a lot and knows how to handle these complex matters. Therefore, it is very useful for a psychologist to read and understand complex texts. The books of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jorge Borges and Julio Cortazar fit this criterion well.

Movies

I recommend Italian neo-realism in the old fashioned way. For example, "Eight and a Half" by Federico Fellini and "Family Portrait in the Interior" by Luchino Visconti. Directors that generation is a miracle how good. And they make you understand what is happening in front of you, why the heroes behave this way and not otherwise. Fellini and Visconti give everything that is required for the development of the personality of a thinker and just a normal person.