{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age","title":"Episode 33 | Schema Theory","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1135,"description":"AI-generated audio: the two voices and their conversation in this episode are created by AI. The hosts are not real people.\nHow we make it: our team chooses each topic and edits the audio. The research and these notes are drafted with AI and read by us before publishing.\nWhy AI? It lets us bring peer-reviewed science to you for free, in English and German. Sources are below.\n\nEpisode Summary\n\nIn 1932, a Cambridge psychologist asked English readers to retell a Native American folk tale from memory. They did not simply lose details. They rebuilt the story into one that made sense to them, and then remembered that version, confidently, as though it were the original. Canoes became boats, seal hunting became fishing, and the ghosts, in every single case, quietly disappeared.\nHere is the part almost nobody mentions. Thirty-one years earlier, the anthropologist who collected that tale had already had it told to him twice by the same speaker, three and a half years apart, and printed both versions four pages apart in the same volume. Read them side by side and the same thing is happening. The gist holds. Almost every detail moves, down to the name of the village.\nThis episode is a biography of an idea. Frederic Bartlett named it schema, said in print that he disliked the word, proposed a better one that nobody adopted, and lived to see his own students write the theory off. In the same years his successor at Cambridge declared it best forgotten, artificial intelligence researchers trying to make a program understand a two sentence story about a restaurant discovered they needed exactly the thing he had described, and cited him by name. We follow the idea from the experiment as it really was, through the revival, into the physics laboratory where experts and novices sorted the same twenty-four index cards into two different worlds, and finally into the last four years, in which the mechanistic story has been taken apart largely by the people who built it. That is not a...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/FqjMDaQUSm1bYfkwwD6aDUnSGdwLjCiheWhxBb00zow/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84YjIz/YzkwMzlmNGM5YmEw/NTJkOGYyMTk0YTMw/ZWM0Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}