Do you ever get frustrated with your own mind? Jonathan Flombaum, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, explores visual perception and cognition in order to understand the limitations of the human mind. How is it that we understand so little about the simplest tasks our minds do?
Flombaum, who grew up in the Bronx, majored in psychology and biology at Harvard University and obtained his Ph.D at Yale. During his time at Yale, Flombaum worked with Brian Scholl in Yale’s Perception and Cognition Laboratory where he made discoveries on object persistence and motion tracking. Today, he is the principle investigator at the Attention and Cognition Laboratory of Johns Hopkins where he studies visual perception in order to understand deep underlying mysteries of the mind.
Most students know him as an entertaining, enthusiastic and dedicated professor of Introduction of Cognitive Psychology and The Social Brain / The Visual Brain. Flombaum took a few moments to sit down with The News-Letter and discuss his interest in pyschology and his research.
The News-Letter (NL): What were your favorite subjects to study in high school?
Jonathan Flombaum (JF): In high school my favorite subjects were whatever science and math we were taking that year. I always really liked [history]. I liked all classes in school. Since I went to an Orthodox Jewish high school, we spent half the day in Jewish classes and my interests in those waned considerably. But I liked English literature, history and other classes.
N-L: Were you always interested in psychology?
JF: I didn’t really know anything about psychology for most of my life. In my high school there were no psychology classes. We went all day from eight to five with a good part of the day taken up with Jewish studies, so there was not a lot of atypical stuff. You learn science, math, history and English and then that’s it. But I really liked intellectual history and philosophy. In fact, I started a philosophy club and we’d read philosophy books and article. So I read some Freud at that time, but that’s not really psychology.
I liked those kinds of things. I liked questions about the mind, but I didn’t know what they were or who studied them. Certainly I didn’t know there was a science that could address the kinds of things I was interested in. When I got to college, I thought I would be a philosopher or a biologist so I took some philosophy, history classes, biology classes. Biology I really liked.
I was especially interested in animal behavior. It took a couple of semesters for me to find my way from animal behavior to psychology — to learn that there were critical scientists who were studying those things and had their cool methods and that I just didn’t know anything about them. That was psychology.
N-L: Are there any areas of psychology you are particularly interested in besides animal behavior?
JF: Like most psychologists I’ve always been interested in the brain and what it can tell us. Certainly I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the brain produces this amazing thing that I study, the mind. I think my interests have been remarkably similar since I’ve gotten going. The particular fields and methods I’ve used to study them have changed as I’ve found what total combination of things I was most interested in, but right now I study almost entirely vision.
The reason I study vision is because I find it a really accessible way to study the things I’m most interested in, not because I care about vision more than anything else, but because I think vision allows me to address some specific issues. I’m interested in the formats that we use to represent things.
The simpler way to think about that is just to realize that when we represent things in our minds, we don’t generally use things that have just pictures or sound like sounds; we can’t represent things that have the same properties as the things that we’re representing, Instead, what we do is we store descriptions of those things. If you’re going to tell somebody what you saw at the museum. You’re not going to go, ‘Oh I saw this beautiful Monet at the museum and here’s what it looked like: there was this purple dot at three comma two, a blue dot at three comma one, and a slightly different pink dot at three comma zero.’ That would be describing the image as an image. You would say, “There was this beautiful painting of lily pads and it was very very large. But most of the lily pads were sort of in the middle and at the sides there were changes in color.” So you’re using a vocabulary to describe a thing that is not a point by point description of say, the colors on that canvas. What I want to understand is the vocabulary our mind uses to describe the things that we experience in the world and the thoughts that we have. Since I was a sophomore in college, I was more or less interested in that, and I found vision as being a really good place to study those kinds of things.
N-L: What did you do once you graduated college?
JN: I always encourage people that it might be a good idea to take time off of college and work in a lab or be a lab technician and do some others things to help figure out [what] they want to do. But I didn’t do that. I think I was very unusual in being focused on what I was doing, and wanting to continue to do research. I was also very confident that that’s what I wanted to do; I really felt like I figured out what was going to make me happy in life. In fact, I knew exactly who I wanted to work with for my Ph.D. I was studying higher level cognition, number cognition and audition and I knew exactly who I wanted to work with. Senior year I got a fellowship to study birds in the field and I turned it down at the last minute when I realized, “Well I know who exactly I want to work with and do my Ph.D with, why don’t I just get started?” So I was very certain about what I wanted to do.
I went onto graduate school at Yale and I worked with a guy named Brian Scholl. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. He was a very smart guy. I knew about him because he was a post-doc when I was an undergraduate. I was his first student. He could have turned out to have been a terrible mentor, but it was a really great relationship. Our interests were similar, but he let me work on what I wanted to build towards.
So I spent six years in graduate school doing a case study about, how, if we knew the formats of some representations, then we could explain some funny aspects about memory, action and other kinds of activities that rely on those representations. I guess I did a good enough job that I was able to go directly from there to a faculty position. Usually people go into post-docs, but I had two job offers; one from University of California at San Diego and here.
Hopkins was really the best place I could imagine to do the work I wanted to do, because the department here is extremely focused. Not that everyone does the same thing, but everyone is interested in the same kinds of problems. It’s a great place for me to talk with other people about the kinds of things I care about, and I’m going to end up getting very different perspectives on the same kinds of things as opposed to other bigger departments where you get very different perspectives about completely differently things; you’re just talking about different things. I have a fantastic set of colleagues and couldn’t imagine a better place.
N-L: Can you describe some of the projects you work on in your Attention and Cognition Lab?
JF: One of the main things we do is study tracking. People will often tag me and say, ‘Oh, Jon, he studies tracking’ or ‘He studies this one paradigm that vision people call multiple object tracking’ and the truth is, I don’t really care about tracking in a specific sense. What I care about is tracking as an opportunity to study an instance we experience all the time — the fact that thinking is hard and thinking is limited. We study a lot about how we track multiple things at once.
Imagine you’re a mom watching a bunch of kids on the playground and you want to know where all of them are at the same time, or you’re driving in heavy traffic and monitoring cars in front of you and in your rear mirror, and you want to know something about where they are. We all know we can only remember so many of those things at once.
So we study tracking in my lab in order to understand why it’s limited. I like to think of it as understanding why thinking is hard, and tracking is an example of thinking. I think it’s surprising to a lot of people that our knowledge about where things are located is entirely imprecise. As a mathematical problem, it is impossible to know where things are, even when they’re in front of us.
To make it simple, just imagine an object that is very small and very close to you and one that is very very big and very far away from you. Those objects can project an image on your retina of exactly the same size. How do you know whether the object is small and far, big and close, or anything in between? It turns out to be mathematically impossible.
Our vision has all kinds of tricks to give us a good guess, but the answers are that — just guesses. So we don’t know where things are in an approximate sense. As a result, we can only track so many things at once because when we have a lot of things about which we only know something approximate, it can become confusable, and we start making errors. So we can try to understand how the limits of the problem that our visual system solves ends up limiting the things we can do.
N-L: What do you feel are the wider implications of this study?
JF: There are two kinds. One is more speculative. The more immediate kind of implication to the kind of work that I do is what people describe as human factors. How should we design things to account for the fact that humans are imperfect and that they’re going to make mistakes? If I’m going to build a huge radar monitor of all the planes that are going to land at JFK airport, how should I build that screen? What should I make the object on the screen look like? What’s too big and what’s too small for the person to use that information effectively? So I work to make contributions to things like that. How should we build airplane cockpits, how should we build cars, how should we tag the images that radiologists get in hospitals . . . That’s the general standard answer.
But I think there is a much deeper potential implication for the work that we do which is that in the end we still understand remarkably little about why we’re limited, which is what I think we study — why our cognitive abilities are limited. And moreover, why they’re different between people. We look to solutions to problems like Attention Deficit Disorder, dyslexia, Alzheimer’s, and things that are kind of shared where we assume where everyone’s mind is the same, or biological problems. I think the work that we do will, over time, give us a more accurate picture of why we’re limited in the first place and what’s different between people. I think it’s going to give us a better terminology for understanding what the true cognitive problems in disorders are.
I think we haven’t made great progress yet on understanding mental dysfunction, I think it’s a little while away. As I said, we know remarkably little about why we’re limited in the first place, so of course we can’t understand how people who have disorders are even more impaired than your average person, but I think that we’re all pretty impaired or pretty limited machines. And understanding that will help us understand a variety of things.
N-L: How do you feel your passions such as history and philosophy have affected the classes you’ve created for your students at Hopkins?
JF: I like to think that my classes are unusual. They certainly don’t look like other classes with the same title; my Introduction to Cognitive Psychology class has a very different structure and it doesn’t have a textbook, which is totally atypical for that kind of class. But even the topics that I choose are a different and the types of material I try to find are different. I think that probably my prior interest in philosophy or history has something to do with it.
I really enjoy reading a lot. I read widely so I still indulge my interests in history and philosophy pretty frequently. I come across things a lot of time that I want to use as an educator so I find ways of using things, even if they’re a little more peripheral.
I think also, there are different kinds of scientists. I’m not going to say that there are two kinds of scientists; there’s certainly more of a continuum, but some people tend to be more generalists and some people tend to be more focused. I’ve been kind of a generalist so that influences my classes too. I’m a generalist about topics, but I’m a real zealot about particular theoretical points of view.
I really enjoy doing both in my own work and my class and perhaps take too much advantage of being the boss, but what I really like doing is finding cases that fit those [certain] theoretical perspectives that people don’t think of as being part of that theoretical perspective. It drives me to reach wider for topics in the course where I try to show that the kinds of things that explain cognition in general apply even in the areas that are not traditionally part of cognitive psychology.
N-L: What do you like best about teaching, especially teaching Hopkins students?
JF: I love teaching in general because on any given day in the lab it’s very easy to feel like I’m not sure if anything I’m doing amounts to anything, experiments can fail, every paper you write gets reviewers who tell you that there’s something wrong with it, and they’re often right about what’s wrong with it. It takes lots of experiments and studies put together to really make a point, to tell a story, to discover something.
Whereas when I teach, I feel like I get to share information that I really believe is true, or at least, instructive. It helps us understand all kinds of important things that we want to understand about what it’s like to be human and what it’s like to live in this world so I think I get to share a point of view and some knowledge a lot of people are lacking, but should have.
I think psychology should be a more fundamental aspect of people’s educations and its exciting for me to get to share that. The hour-and-a-half twice a week that I lecture, I can feel like I’m doing something in terms of getting people to walk away with some meaningful information that is important and can affect their lives.
What I like about teaching at Hopkins is that the students are fantastic. I’ve met a lot of great students. Hopkins students are more appreciative of good teaching than other students I’ve encountered at other places. When I do a good job I often hear about it, when I do [a] not-so-good job I often hear about it too, but usually the students are right.
More importantly, whatever kind of job I’m doing, I feel like I end up with a good back-and-forth with the students in terms of us finding out a way of making sure that everybody understands. It lets me know the students really are engaged and care about what they’re learning. I’ve also managed to recruit lots of excellent students into my lab from teaching, and that’s been great too.
N-L: What advice would you like to give to your students?
JF: I’ll give two pieces of advice. The first one I’ll give is about classes in general here at Hopkins. I think students often don’t realize how the classes here at Hopkins are different from those they might take at somewhere else. The way they’re different from classes in many other places, certainly from classes they took in high school, is that they’re being taught by esteemed scholars in the field that they’re studying.
If it’s a science class, they’re taught by scientists, people who run labs and make discoveries. They’re here at Hopkins because they’ve proven excellent at making discoveries, and they’ve probably already made discoveries that other scientists find important. Now this doesn’t always mean they’re going to be extraordinary teachers.
In some sense, what you’re paying for is of course the hope that you’re going to have good teachers, but people’s strengths vary. What you’re getting when you come here is also the opportunity to ‘hear from the horses mouth,’ to get to learn from the people who actually do the things that you’re learning about.
Presumably there’s something useful to learn from those people, that you couldn’t learn otherwise. So my advice to Hopkins students, in all cases, especially in the cases when they feel like their classes are falling short in terms of the professor, stop and ask yourself, ‘What can I get out of this class and this person that is different from what I would get somewhere else? How can I take advantage of the fact that the person that I’m learning from is an expert and a producer of the very kinds of knowledge that they’re teaching me about?’ I think that helps one ultimately get more out of the class than they would otherwise.
The second advice for life that comes from my class is to understand that we’re all in some sense machines, that we respond to stimuli. This can be taken as a bleak view of life, but I think of it as the opposite. I think understanding that we’re all, at the end of the day, products of stimuli we’ve encountered in the past and our identities are to some extent just a description of how we would tend to respond to certain stimuli.
I think that’s useful as far as encouraging us to extend sympathy and empathy to another. None of us are any less a machine than anybody else. I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind when we try to understand other people and try to think about how the to make the world and other people better conform to our ideals.
