5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wondering starts the process of learning., January 26, 2007
This review is from: The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent (Hardcover)
In the Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind, Roger Shank uses his love of great food to teach us about how human beings learn and think, primarily through the process of remembering and indexing. I think the best way to learn what a non-fiction book is about is through a series of quotes taken from the book.
If everything happens the way you expected it to happen, you may well be happy, but you won't learn a thing. To learn we need expectation failure. Further, we need expectation failure we can cope with. The failures have to be small rather than large. (p.153)
All important knowledge is in the form of expectations. (p.50)
Expectations come from prior generalizations. (p.155)
"We must evaluate our experiences in terms of what we can learn from them in order to learn from them. Remembering everything actually prevents you from concentrating on what can be learned...
We have a major problem, therefore, when we begin to learn something new. We must alter our knowledge base by adding what we are now processing to what we already know. But where exactly do we add the new information? Where does a new episode belong?
This question is not frivolous, although it is not one that any of us is prepared to answer consciously. To give you a sense of the problem imagine that I have been presented with a long-forgotten Minnesota establishment as a remembrance of the evening, and that, it so happened, I have a copy of the menu of every meal that I have ever eaten. Imagine that I live in a house full of menus. Where should I put the Minnesota menu?
I could choose to file all my menus by date. In that case, the filing would be easy, but the retrieval would be difficult. I would never be able to find this meal unless I knew the date, but I might want to remember a meal by some other more significant aspect associated with it. The food, for example. Suppose that I meet Jean-Francois, and he happens to mention the dessert we ate at Jamin. I immediately rush home to my file of menus to find the one from the particular night at Jamin to which he is referring. But where do I look? If I have filed all the menus by their dates, I will need to recall the date of the meal in question to retrieve the right menu. Well, it was in March of last year; perhaps I can find it this way. But, then he mentions that he thought that the dessert at Zur Trabe was better. Oh my, when was that? A couple of years ago, but I don't even know what time of year. It was on a business trip, and that could have taken place at anytime. I remember the weather was cool, but that just means it wasn't the dead of winter or the middle of summer. No this cannot be a good filing system, but what would be a better one be?
How about if I put all the menus from great meals in one cabinet, filed alphabetically by restaurant name? And how about if I put all the pretty good meals in another cabinet, but this time filed by location? This way, if someone asked me the name of a great restaurant in Florida, I could look it up in the great meal file - otherwise I look for it in the Florida file. But if these files were very big, I'd still have trouble finding anything. Having copies of menus would be better so that I could put the one from Bern's Steak House in the Florida file and in the great wine list file, while hedging on whether it belonged in the great meal file.
The problem here is that this model isn't of much use. We cannot be filing memories by date or by alphabet or by the greatness of the dessert. Particular episodes have to be torn apart and labeled in many different ways. One particular dessert at Jamin is wonderful, and I have had it three times. I remember each meal because they were all special. I remember who was there and what we ate. And, if you mention the names of certain people whom I ate with there and nowhere else, or you mention great restaurants or you mention the best lamb you ever ate, these items will cause Jamin to come to mind, too. Episodes in memory are not menus looking for filing cabinets. We remember something in many different ways by ripping an episode to shreds, putting it in a Xerox machine, and distributing the many copies of the many pieces to many different filing cabinets. (pages 74 & 75)
Language is telegraphic. People say as little as possible, as if they are sending a telegram and paying by the word. Your job as an understander is to figure out what else they would tell you if they had the time and the inclination. (p.59)
The critical thing here is background knowledge. The more you know about a situation, the more you can assume about events that occur within that situation. Scripts represent the default background knowledge that we have without ever having experienced something directly. (p.89)
Learning occurs when we cannot fill a slot with what has usually filled that slot, or when we cannot even determined what slots need to be filled, or when we cannot determined what mental structure should be available to provide slots to fill. (p.52)
Every time we are reminded of some experience by some other experience, the value is in the potential for learning. We cannot remember every experience that happens to us. Instead we remember the exceptions, the oddities, the events that did not conform to our expectations. (p.126)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting in Parts But Author's Food & Wine Snobbery is Big Turn-Off, December 31, 2010
This review is from: The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent (Hardcover)
One time when I mentioned to a fellow homeschooling mom that I had enjoyed Roger Schank's
Coloring Outside the Lines, she recommended this book. I finally got around to reading it, and I have to say that it was a disappointment. The premise sounded intriguing as I both love to cook and am interested in cognitive psychology. But while I really enjoyed certain chapters, I found the author's food & wine snobbery very tedious. He went on and on ad nauseum about how much of a gourmand he is, to the point where he insists on ordering for his dining companions because of his allegedly superior knowledge. I kept having the urge to smack him and tell him to get over himself. I got to the point after 4 chapters of this where I couldn't stomach wading through any more conceited anecdotes that I started skimming (something I hardly ever do) until I got to the final chapter, which I enjoyed.
Skip this one unless you have a high tolerance for hearing how great the author thinks he is.
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