It’s all in the hands of a lazy projector
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine
With Lazy Projector, singer-songwriter/violinist Andrew Bird turns his insightful, poetic and more-than-a-little-heartbreaking lens to the topic of our brains. When we look back on a fractured relationship, all we can rely on is a version our minds create, and our mind’s eye is not known for its objectivity. I’ve always thought of him as a classically influenced multi-instrumentalist Leonard Cohen with a silkier voice (and much more whistling), but this one struck me even more strongly than most.
It struck me because break-ups aren’t nearly the only time our brains act like lazy projectors. That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine is at work every moment of the day, including where we’re trying to understand new ideas in science. It’s become a ubiquitous, almost to the point of cliché, idea to encourage science teachers to think about learning as constructivist. Despite a few sketchy methods that have taken this name (no, students will not discover the underlying mechanisms of photosynthesis on their own*), the core idea is hard to deny: each and every one of us learns not by absorbing things verbatim that we read or hear but by constructing an understanding of the world out of the experiences that we have it. This includes how we interpret the things we’re taught and that we read about science.
We always do this interpretation within the context of what we already think and know about the world though. And it turns out that our minds can do some funny things during that process.
Think about a child learning about electric circuits for the first time. Most kids begin by thinking that you need only one wire to connect a battery to a light bulb (because this is what it looks like when you plug in any electric lamp). The underlying understanding they often have is that there is something in the battery that needs to be delivered to the light bulb to make it light up.
It only takes a few minutes of playing around with a battery, bulb and wires for them to realize that this doesn’t work. Kids of all ages (adults too) will quickly figure out that you need at least two wires: you need to create a complete circuit from one end of the battery, through the bulb, and back again to the other end.
But what do they understand now about how circuits work?
Think of our minds as being a bit like a room filled with furniture. Let’s say you go out one day to visit a friend and she gives you a killer new lamp. No matter how much you love the lamp, you’ve got two choices when you get home. You can make some subtle changes to the room to make a place for the lamp, such as moving the reclining chair over a little bit and shifting the rug slightly to the left. The other choice is to move everything out of the room and completely rearrange with the new lamp in mind. Which are you going to choose?
Almost always we go with the first option: finding a way to make some subtle changes to make the room work with the new addition. We are (or at least I am) lazy decorators.
Kids are the same when trying to understand circuits. Realizing that you need at least two wires doesn’t usually lead to throwing out their idea of delivering something from the battery to the bulb to make it light up. Students will come up with a variety of ways to explain this new idea of a complete circuit in a way that preserves their previous understanding. One example is the clashing current model, where they’ll say that the battery actually delivers two substances to the bulb, one from each end.** The bulb lights up when the two substances crash together inside. No one has told them anything incorrect, in fact their teacher has helped the learn about complete circuits, but they end up with a misunderstanding because that’s the way our lazy projectors work. Even when presented with good evidence, we try desperately sometimes to engage in only minimal rearrangement to make the new ideas fit. And it’s all the projector lets us see.
That’s why I love this song so much, it’s about so much more than relationships.
Lazy Projector can be found on Andrew Bird’s Break It Yourself released this year on Mom+Pop Records.
Some further reading:
*Smith, E. L., & Anderson, C. W. (1984). Plants as producers: A case study of elementary science teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 21, 685-698.
**Perkins, D.N., & Grotzer, T.A. (2005). Dimensions of causal understanding: The role of complex causal models in students’ understanding of science. Studies in Science Education, 41, 117-165.
A related conference paper is available free as a pdf: http://pzweb.harvard.edu/Research/UCPpapers/elecNARST.pdf
Duit, R., & Treagust, D.F. (2005). Conceptual change: A powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning. International Journal of Science Education, 25, 671-688.
The Finch and Pea 