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Hello there, conversation designers!
My guest today is Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a renowned professor and founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. He's a leading expert on how our brains perceive beauty and art, and wrote an engaging book on this topic: “The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art"
Today, we're diving deep into the intersection of beauty, cutting-edge neuroscience and the art of conversation. We'll explore how our brains react to beautiful things and how this influences our interactions and dialogues. We'll uncover the hidden biases we have towards beauty, and how these can shape our perceptions in both positive and negative ways. One theme for this conversation could be “Old Brains in New Environments” - understanding how our brains evolved to help us survive in a very different kind of world from the one we live in today can help us adapt more effectively and work with AND against our evolved biases. Get ready to challenge your assumptions and expand your understanding of beauty's role in our lives.
Spoiler alert: beauty can be a double-edged sword. We'll discuss how making something more beautiful can enhance how others connect to it and appreciate it. But we'll also confront the darker side of this bias - our tendency to dismiss and undervalue things that we don't find beautiful.
Resist the beauty bias and be patient with complexity
Simple and Elegant ideas equals right and good. Messy, Complex theories are wrong - but why? Dr. Chatterjee encourages us to resist our bias and be patient and curious - complexity can be embraced rather than simplified.
Slow Looking and Slow Conversations
Dr. Chatterjee's research shows that people spend an average of 27 seconds with a piece of art. His experiments show that when people are invited to slow down and spend more time with a piece of art, their experiences deepen and they find more beauty in the work. Dr Chatterjee and I explore how the same can be true for dialogue - when we slow down to let everyone contribute and make sure we really hear everyone's thoughts and experiences we create more powerful and more beautiful connections.
Something that was an unexpected delight for me in this conversation was exploring how Dr. Chatterjee approaches leadership and cultivates psychological safety in his lab through inviting real connections and slow conversations.
Make sure you check out the the PBS News Hour featuring Dr. Chatterjee’s work and the recent ‘Brains and Beauty’ exhibit which explored how the mind processes art and aesthetic experiences.
Embracing Slow Listening to Create Psychological Safety as a Leadership Skill
The Art of Slow Looking and Slow Listening with Dr Anjan Chatterjee
AI Summary
In this conversation, Daniel Stillman and Anjan Chatterjee explore the intersection of beauty, conversation, and the human brain. They discuss how our biological evolution has left us in a world that often feels disconnected from our innate ways of communicating. The dialogue delves into the aesthetic qualities of conversations, the biases we hold towards beauty, and how cultural representations influence our perceptions. They emphasize the importance of awareness in mitigating biases and the need for complexity in understanding beauty in dialogue.
Takeaways
In-person conversations are inherently easier due to our biological evolution.
Our brains are adapted to a different environment than we currently live in.
Beauty in conversation can be analyzed through the aesthetic triad: sensory, emotional, and knowledge aspects.
The beauty bias affects how we perceive and treat others, especially in science.
Cultural depictions often associate beauty with goodness and ugliness with evil.
Awareness of biases is the first step in mitigating their effects.
Complexity in ideas should be embraced rather than simplified.
Beautiful conversations require both exploration and exploitation of ideas.
Openness to experience and curiosity enhance the quality of conversations.
Designing conversations intentionally can lead to more beautiful interactions. Slowing down is essential in a fast-paced world.
Chapters
00:00 The Nature of In-Person Conversations
01:05 Old Brains in New Environments
03:00 Exploring Beauty in Dialogue
06:04 The Beauty Bias in Science
10:00 Cultural Depictions of Beauty and Evil
12:54 Awareness and Mitigating Bias
16:03 Complexity vs. Simplicity in Conversations
19:02 Creating Beautiful Conversations
25:14 The Importance of Slowing Down
27:59 Creating Meaningful Scientific Dialogue
32:58 Building Collaborative Relationships
38:51 Conversations with Our Environment
46:10 The Aesthetic of Conversation
More About Dr. Anjan Chatterjee
Anjan Chatterjee is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture and the founding Director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. He wrote The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art and co-edited Neuroethics in Practice: Mind, Medicine, and Society and The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology. He has received the Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology and the Rudolph Arnheim Prize for contribution to Psychology and the Arts. He is a founding member of the Board of Governors of the Neuroethics Society, the past President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and the past President of the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Society. He currently serves on the Boards of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and has served on the boards of Haverford College, the Norris Square Neighborhood Project and the Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Full AI Transcript
Daniel Stillman (00:00.945)
We're already in a beautiful conversation. The best part of every episode is obviously the technical, the technical check and the like. This is why I think in-person conversations are just, I mean, they're just easier because we've been doing them for millions and millions of years. We know how to do them. And here we are in a place where a lot can go wrong before we can actually communicate, which is shocking to me.
Anjan Chatterjee (00:08.084)
Right.
Anjan Chatterjee (00:20.589)
Yes.
Anjan Chatterjee (00:29.312)
Yeah, well, it might be a little bit like talking about the weather before you get into a conversation.
Daniel Stillman (00:36.082)
I think it's a little different because when you're talking about the weather, still, you're still, you're still in it. So I feel like, I mean, this is maybe a fundamental place to start, Anjan , is that like, we are biological beings in, these bodies that have been kind of the way they are for a long time, millions of years. And we're living in a very different world. Oh, wait, hold on a second.
Anjan Chatterjee (00:39.054)
You're there.
Anjan Chatterjee (00:46.421)
He
Daniel Stillman (01:05.937)
like my internet is, oh, looks like my internet tweaked out. So I'm going to ask my question again. We are, our bodies have been the same for millions of years and we live in a very, very different world. And I feel like there's a, there's a big gap between what we've evolved for and the ways we've evolved and the context that we're living in these days. Is that, is that an understatement?
Anjan Chatterjee (01:10.83)
Hmm
Anjan Chatterjee (01:31.982)
I think that is an accurate, perhaps understatement. I sometimes give talks that are titled, or our main theme is, an old brain trapped in a new environment. So it's exactly that idea of how our brains evolved to deal with a certain environment, which is very, different than how we find ourselves living right now.
Daniel Stillman (01:58.8)
Yeah, yeah. Now your work...
In your book, which you wrote almost a decade ago now if that's which is crazy Congratulations We can talk about how you're celebrating it later You you limit the conversation to specific areas where you can where the research supports being able to talk about the the brain and its relationship to aesthetics and beauty and
Anjan Chatterjee (02:08.406)
Yeah, it's been 10 years.
Daniel Stillman (02:32.271)
I'm wondering what you've learned in the last 10 years that can help us think about beauty around dialogue and conversations. Like, how do we think about what we know about the brain as you as a scientist and us as people with this thing that we're doing talking to each other and how beauty plays a role in that? Where could we possibly safely start?
Anjan Chatterjee (03:00.534)
I think we can start with some of the points I was making in that book and we've subsequently used as a framework to think about beauty. So that applies to the sorts of things I talk about in the book, beauty of people, beauty of places, beauty of things, in this case art, which turns out to be quite a mysterious kind of object.
But then using a broader framework to ask the question, does this apply to other things like conversation? And so just to lay that out, we have been for some time using this framework that we call the aesthetic triad. And that has three components broadly. One is the kind of
sensory motor aspects of whatever you're engaging with, the sensuality of it. The second has to do with the emotions that are evoked in the encounter. And the third has to do with the kind of knowledge and meaning that you both bring to it and that you get out of it. So if we try to map
Daniel Stillman (04:18.363)
Hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (04:25.388)
that kind of thinking onto a conversation, I would think that there is a kind of rhythm and musicality to a conversation that would be akin to the sort of sensory qualities. You you could imagine with the kind of digital technology we have that you could keep all of the acoustic parameters and fuzz out the words so you can't.
you don't get the meaning, but you get a kind of get the sound and the musicality of a conversation and people might have opinions on was that a beautiful set of interactions or not. The emotions, which can be quite varied. But you know, most people would have an intuition if there's a sense of well being and a fondness in the conversation and those kinds of
Daniel Stillman (04:50.67)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Stillman (05:00.007)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (05:18.83)
positive affects, you it doesn't mean that the whole conversation needs to be saccharine and just with no tension, but overall there is a kind of appeal and a pleasure out of the conversation. And then the semantics piece I would think would be where both people are bringing as they have to their own background.
Daniel Stillman (05:25.841)
Mmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (05:46.84)
to the conversation, but they're also getting something. There's an exchange there of ideas. There's an exchange of information. And so I think that's one way that you can think of how to apply this triad that we applied to art, we applied to everything, could also apply to conversations as well.
Daniel Stillman (06:04.241)
Yeah. And I really appreciated that you talked about beauty in relationship to mathematics. So, my background, my first degree is in physics. And I remember when someone came out with an article about like the 10 most beautiful experiments in the history of physics. And it's a really interesting idea to think about, you know, the double slit experiment as like, that's just beautiful. And so there's this idea of elegance and
Anjan Chatterjee (06:31.854)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Stillman (06:32.23)
something that's parsimonious, like it's not there's nothing extraneous. There's a leanness to it. And. While it seems like it comes on the knowledge side of the aesthetic triangle, there's clearly also emotions that are that are triggered. And I feel like some of this has to do with what you talk around the the beauty bias. Like when we see beautiful people and beautiful things, we treat them differently.
than things that we think of as unbeautiful. And I imagine in science, could, that is just a messy proof. And like, I don't really know if I agree with your process, but it's an interesting idea. How do you think about this beauty bias? I mean, on one hand, I think we'd want to take advantage of it. On the other hand, we might want to try to mitigate it. How should we be thinking about that?
Anjan Chatterjee (07:06.648)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (07:29.708)
Yeah, so beauty is seductive.
for all that entails, both good and bad.
Daniel Stillman (07:36.762)
Hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (07:44.258)
Sometimes when I talk about this, talk about our brains are very good at discriminating between objects. You can tell this is a face, this is a tree. With faces where most of us are especially expert, you have what is sometimes referred to as one trial learning. You can see a person once and then you remember them. There are not a lot of things you just need to experience once.
Daniel Stillman (08:05.093)
Mmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (08:11.094)
So we're very good at discriminating between objects. We are not good at discriminating between our values. And so, you know, if you think about the Greeks talked about beauty, truth and goodness as core human values, we're not very good at separating those. We tend to conflate those all the time. And so when it comes to science,
Ostensibly, we're all in search of truth of some kind. And there is a way in which beauty can intersect with that seeking of truth, seeking of knowledge. And that can both be, it can be used, as you say. So every scientist I know, when we publish papers and we're making our figures, we want to make sure our figures are beautiful, right?
Daniel Stillman (09:03.887)
Hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (09:05.05)
And there's a kind of sense that if someone finds a figure attractive, that along with that will come a certain kind of acceptance of what the figure is supposed to be depicting. Now, physics to me is an interesting case because my understanding, and I'm not a physicist, but I've heard some of these conversations, is there's a bit of a controversy within physics, which is
is if a theory is beautiful and elegant, it must be true. And to me, it's not obvious that that's the case, right? It could be that the world is messier. And, you know, but we like something that is elegant and something that is beautiful. And so it becomes a matter of human psychology and not about the nature of the world outside of us that biases us to
Daniel Stillman (09:43.643)
Yeah.
Ha
Daniel Stillman (10:00.88)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (10:03.694)
prioritizing beautiful theories. It's just a possibility, but it's the kind of thing in another setting, which I think you alluded to, that we have fairly good evidence of how when we encounter people who are attractive, we tend to think they are good. And the converse of that, which is quite disturbing, and we've done a lot of work on this, is when people have facial anomalies. So things like
Daniel Stillman (10:22.001)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (10:33.108)
scars or burns or birth defects that there is an implicit bias where most people will think that they're less hardworking, less competent, less trustworthy and so on with clearly with no basis. And so that's a clear example where I think the conflation of beauty and in this case goodness rather than truth seems to be a common phenomena that we
we would like to reject as not having something to do with how the world actually is.
Daniel Stillman (11:09.777)
And so for someone who, I mean, is it really just about being aware of the bias? Is that the only way to mitigate it? It's on the side of the receiver, the experiencer, to just be aware that, and I've been aware of this, by the way, I know you talk about the peak shift rule and how there's so many things in our environment that are designed to take something that is already beautiful and attractive to us and just shove it way to the
Anjan Chatterjee (11:28.91)
Hehehe.
Daniel Stillman (11:39.184)
the edge of what wouldn't really occur in nature and it is deeply overstimulating to us. I'm already starting to have the dialogue with myself where I'm like, Dr. Chatterjee's told me about this. I'm aware that my brain's over-responding to something and I'm just gonna sort of co-regulate with myself on that. Is it really just being aware of our own bias in that sense?
Anjan Chatterjee (11:42.499)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (11:59.918)
I think being aware is certainly the first step. And the other thing I sometimes talk about is that this is the first reflexive reaction. But we have all of this brain machinery, our prefrontal cortex, and all of the other stuff that regulates our reactions that allows us to...
decide how to behave based on those actions. One of the things that we have gotten very interested in, particularly in this idea that people with facial anomalies are treated in such a way is, is that something that our culture then promotes? And this may go back to your peak shift idea. And we have been
Daniel Stillman (12:30.095)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (12:54.69)
finding and when I say this most people realize it that in our popular media particularly movies if you think about villains and how they're depicted in movies so the Bond villains the Marvel Universe you know any number of these that the villains are often depicted with facial disfigurements
And the idea behind that is that you don't have to develop a backstory. It's shown on the screen. The audience immediately understands the code. This is bad person. And we feed our kids this. So things like the Lion King, right? Scar, the only character that doesn't get a name. His name is his scar.
Daniel Stillman (13:33.296)
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman (13:40.817)
He also has a British accent that just telegraphs it I feel there's this whole thing about
Daniel Stillman (13:51.634)
I feel like a lot of bad, you know, the bad people have to have that. It's same thing in Star Wars. They all have these the all the people from the Empire have these like these British accents. I don't I'm not sure why But you're right and for Palpatine speaking of the Star Wars. It's like yes He becomes horribly disfigured when when you realize how evil he is 100 %
Anjan Chatterjee (14:01.528)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (14:07.83)
Right. And Darth Vader, that's the same story, same back story. You even in the recent things, you know, I think about the recent productions of Dune.
the Harkonnen, the sort of evil aliens all have alopecia universalis, right? There are people around that have this condition where they don't have hair. And, you know, there's this kind of message being sent out that, you know, evil aliens and we're surrounded by this. And so we looked at this. It's a paper under review right now. Last 50 years of Hollywood movies and we looked at last 20 years of Bollywood movies to have another cultural comparison and use IMDb.
Daniel Stillman (14:26.917)
Yes.
Anjan Chatterjee (14:52.832)
so we're not hand selecting the images to look at how these facial anomalies are depicted among heroes and villains. And we see that for both, it's actually gone up in this, but the nature of the scars and villains tend to be larger. They tend to really cover kind of.
midline structures where our attention typically is orient to when we're looking at faces, as opposed to kind of often the corner of the forehead, you know, like Harry Potter or Humphrey Bogart, for example, had a little scar there. You know, that makes you look tough in a way. So, you know, so so there are those kinds of cultural biases, I think. So going back to your question is what can we do about it? Part of it is to be both individually aware, but
Daniel Stillman (15:23.845)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Stillman (15:29.574)
Yeah.
Yeah
Anjan Chatterjee (15:45.742)
communally and socially aware. So there are these organizations, there's one in England that had a whole campaign called I Am Not Your Villain, where real people with facial anomalies do these ads with that as the campaign slogan, I Am Not Your Villain.
Daniel Stillman (16:03.759)
Yeah, it's so interesting. So when I think about the bias in science towards, you know, Occam's razor, we're going to the simplest explanation, the most elegant explanation is the most likely one. We have this bias towards an elegance and beauty, which tells us that it's true. mean, this is this is the poem. Truth, beauty is truth. Truth is beauty. That is all you need know on Earth.
Anjan Chatterjee (16:11.672)
Mm-hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (16:21.784)
Mm-hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (16:30.734)
you
Daniel Stillman (16:33.914)
It sounds like there's a there's there we need to remember to bring a willingness to wade through some complexity and to accept that complexity is not ugly. And complexity might be true in as much as simplicity could be true. And that's a real check on each one of us as we're gathering together and deliberating, having discussions, deciding things.
Anjan Chatterjee (16:46.638)
you
Daniel Stillman (17:03.195)
together that that that natural bias for for simplicity, just like to really look at it maybe once or twice more.
Anjan Chatterjee (17:12.482)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. One of the another idea that comes up a lot in aesthetics research is, is the notion of unity and diversity, right? That there is something unifies, trying to unify a whole bunch of diverse phenomena. And this can be in a painting, is there something that unifies all of this? These just
discrete elements. And I think that gets at both the simplifying looking for the unity, but at the same time, not discarding the complexity that it doesn't reduce to the center, right? It encompasses the center, but still reaches out to all of these peripheral, complicated, messy elements.
Daniel Stillman (17:52.817)
Hmm.
Daniel Stillman (18:02.821)
Yeah, so interesting. mean, I want to loop back around to where we were starting to point to is what are the elements of a of a beautiful conversation, especially when we're talking about the complexity of group dialogue and deliberation. We talked about the rhythm, the musicality that we can we can bring into our voices, right? We can all do work on our on our instrument. And I definitely have talked to some of my coaching clients about their awareness that they tend to speak in a monotone and
Anjan Chatterjee (18:25.474)
Thank
Daniel Stillman (18:32.658)
They don't create variety. there's things that we can do mechanically to to bring beauty into our voice. We've talked about being wary of of bias towards the elegance of ideas, but it also sounds like it's also a call to learn how to express our ideas, not just so that they literally sound beautiful, but that they are that they have beauty in terms of their emotional value or their
Anjan Chatterjee (18:36.28)
Sure.
Daniel Stillman (19:02.469)
their knowledge content. That is a much more subtle thing, what can you tell us about how to how to make people just we're going to harness the bias and just really use it, you know, obviously for good. How can we bring how can we harness what we know about the brain to to to bring more beauty into our group conversations, both in how we present and how we perceive?
Anjan Chatterjee (19:20.579)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (19:30.926)
So I was thinking about this in the context of conversations, knowing that we were going to have this conversation. there's an element, know, when we, at least in my world, when we think of aesthetics, we tend to think of the recipient of stimuli or information. You know, but the other side of that is the creator.
right, the person is creating something that is an aesthetic experience for the other person. And so in a conversation, it has this, to me, very interesting dynamic that we are both experience, are receivers of the beauty of the conversation and creating the conversation, right? We're playing both.
Daniel Stillman (20:23.323)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (20:26.542)
input and output into this thing that we're calling a conversation. And that creates to me a kind of interesting dynamic because you're switching back and forth. And so the sorts of questions that come up when we think about creativity, you know, they're the kind of constructs that are often talked about, which is, you know, there are exploration phases where you're loose.
Daniel Stillman (20:30.511)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (20:55.0)
people will talk about divergent thinking. You sort of meander around ideas and thoughts and then exploration is often contrasted with exploitation or divergent thinking with convergent thinking. At some point, you try to nail it down and this again is analogous to that complexity and then honing it down. So I think the...
Daniel Stillman (20:55.089)
Mm-hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (21:23.758)
one version of a beautiful conversation and you do this all the time so I want to check my intuitions about this with your own experience and your own thoughts about this but one version is that there is this kind of exploration that happens but then it also at times has to come down to this exploitation of like
to converging on what that exploration delivers. And on the other side, there's a kind of openness to receiving this. And there are two other fundamental constructs that we think of that people bring to the table when they're having an aesthetic experience or being creative. One is this
Daniel Stillman (21:54.225)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (22:15.618)
personality construct that's called openness to experience, which is some people are just more open to experiences and other people tend to be quite more restrained, conservative, whatever word you want to use. But people who tend to be open to experience tend to be much more willing to engage with art, engage with ambiguity in art. You know, there's a kind of tolerance for ambiguity.
And the other is curiosity. think curiosity is so important as a motivator. And I think both those things also, my intuition are also true for our beautiful conversations. You have to be open to where it's going to go and you have to be curious. And does that comport with your experience? that?
Daniel Stillman (23:02.159)
Yeah, yes. Very much so. And so there's a few things I just want to loop back around and highlight. One is just and I think this is a very fundamental and interesting insight. A conversation is an aesthetic experience merely because our brains are wired to seek and enjoy and delight in beauty and to move away from and reject from it. And the way that I have. I don't know.
framed this in my own work, because I came from the design world, is that you are creating an experience and you can either design it intentionally or let it go according to habit. And I think there's a lot of ways that we gather that are quite outmoded that are not creating what we really want them to create. I just had a client.
vent about, you know, everyone going to an offsite and them showing a bunch of slides and not having enough time for having dinner together and talking and exploring. just, she's like, we could have done this on Zoom. We just watched a bunch of slides and just assaulted our brain with information. It was not a very beautiful experience. No one presumably was at the wheel saying, what would make this delightful?
What would make this aesthetic? What would make this excellent? And one thing that, sorry, sorry, go for it. No, please.
Anjan Chatterjee (24:28.11)
Time, I was going to say, you know, as I think when we talk, there are certain trigger words that get us and you mentioned time. But I meant trigger not in a negative sense that it sort of it triggers a whole set of thoughts. So you.
Daniel Stillman (24:35.249)
What's your trigger word? Yes.
Daniel Stillman (24:43.75)
Yes. Wait, can I guess what you're going to say? Because the PDF you just sent me, there was a very interesting thing about most people spend 27 seconds on a piece of art. And if you say you spend 15 minutes with it, you find it more beautiful. And I think with conversations, there's so much going on and for some reason a big unwillingness to slow down. The more we slow down, the more we can lavish and languish in the beauty of it, the more we can experience it.
Anjan Chatterjee (24:55.0)
That exactly.
Daniel Stillman (25:14.437)
How do you get people to slow down?
Anjan Chatterjee (25:15.896)
That's exactly where I was going. So I'm so glad that that happened.
Daniel Stillman (25:20.143)
We're right, I'm right with you. I'm glad you sent me that PDF this morning.
Anjan Chatterjee (25:23.67)
Yeah, so you know, we've been doing this, this idea of slow looking and you know, we live in such a manic transactional world, which, you know, I mean, it is going back to the current environment we're in. But this idea of slowing down and I mean, you can imagine this, how hard it is for
students, undergraduate students at my university, University of Pennsylvania, to say you're gonna have to look at this one thing for 15 minutes, and you can't pull out your phone. I mean, it's, it's excruciating. You know, we don't know how to slow down. And correct me if I'm wrong, I listened to some of your podcasts, just to kind of get a sense of how these go. And somewhere there was an offhanded comment. And I hope I have this right, that you're also a chef.
Daniel Stillman (26:00.945)
Scrutiating.
Daniel Stillman (26:20.901)
Well, I wouldn't say I'm a professional chef. I'm more of a food lover that I like to both make it and enjoy it, generally in large quantities for my friends.
Anjan Chatterjee (26:21.153)
is sec.
Anjan Chatterjee (26:29.624)
Okay.
Yeah, well, I like to make it and enjoy it as well. But the analogy there is perfect, right? We can we run around with fast food or I know some years ago, I had an Italian postdoc in my lab, and she was horrified to her soul that we had brown bag lunches where you take a brown bag, eat your lunch and listen to someone lecture. And this idea that food was not the center of attention.
Daniel Stillman (26:56.422)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (27:03.008)
at lunch. And I think the same idea of savor, like the notion of savoring, I think is really critical for aesthetic experiences for food or art or conversation. This idea that you slow down, you savor it, and you're not in it as a transition state to the next thing, right? Your mind isn't already oriented to the future while you're in the moment.
Daniel Stillman (27:09.905)
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman (27:26.417)
Mm.
Daniel Stillman (27:30.225)
Yes, very much so. know, slow looking is a really, I mean, because we have a slow food movement and I love this idea of a slow, slow looking movement. And it really strikes me that science is a slow looking movement of its own, that there is this long arc of history that is about being deliberative and absorbing lots of information, maybe being in conversation with the environment, which I'd love for us to make sure we talk about.
Anjan Chatterjee (27:36.546)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Stillman (27:59.756)
How have you experienced in your long career as a scientist, what makes good scientific dialogue? Like how to actually architect that?
Anjan Chatterjee (28:10.904)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (28:15.416)
So I can tell you about my own, the way I run my lab and my, and then how that extends outward.
Daniel Stillman (28:19.184)
Hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (28:26.502)
I have people at different levels of training and because, especially because of the nature of the work I do, I also have people who are not necessarily trained in psychology and neuroscience. I have an artist in residence, a senior art historian. I have an anthropologist who also does a bunch of our technical stuff like AI and VR, but comes from an anthropology background.
undergraduates have postdocs, right? So that's the kind of mix. And the question is, how do you orchestrate a group like that? A curious thing to me is I was at a meeting in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, where there were people from the humanities, people from the science. And one thing that came through was many people in the humanities, whether they're philosophers, or historians, tend to work in isolation.
Daniel Stillman (29:05.425)
Mmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (29:27.066)
They kind of do their thing, you know, then they go out and talk to people or give presentations. We always work in groups, you know, this if there's a myth of the kind of mad scientist in this basement working alone, I've never met that person, right? Everybody works in groups. And so the question is, how do you orchestrate a group? And this is where food analogies also become very useful. And I use them all the time, which is how can you orchestrate it so that the
Daniel Stillman (29:49.681)
you
Anjan Chatterjee (29:55.416)
whole is greater than some of its parts. And so the way we do it is, so for example, I four undergraduates. Before lab meeting, I meet with them individually for an hour. And it used to be that I would think, okay, what are the ideas that I want them to have and kind of have that hour session?
oriented to that. And I since have completely abandoned that, which is rather than that, that whatever I happen to be thinking about or working on is going to be the topic when they come in. So they don't know what the topic is, I don't know what the topic is. And we use that mostly to help me clarify my ideas, but also it's a way for me to
to engage them in the conversation because they're just openness. They're not shackled by all the things that I know, right? So they can ask the good questions and they can be my, you know, I often, you know, especially when we're talking about aesthetics, like what kids like these days and you know, how like fashion works for them, all of like everything is on the table, right? So that's kind of a way.
Daniel Stillman (31:01.177)
Yes.
Anjan Chatterjee (31:18.562)
to have a conversation where it's not me teaching at them, but having a conversation in which I think both sides, in this case the students and I, we're both getting something out of this from each other. Then we move into my lab meeting and one of the things I've done for years is that everybody gives a report, but we start from the most junior person up.
Daniel Stillman (31:48.209)
Hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (31:48.502)
And the idea is that the most junior, you know, because otherwise you have someone who loves to hear them talk or themselves talk or someone who is a senior person, intimidates everybody. Start with the most junior person. When they're on, they have the table. Everybody's attention is on them. I don't allow phones, laptops, unless you're looking up a specific paper that had to do with what we're talking about. So you can't have your devices there.
Daniel Stillman (31:59.847)
Mmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (32:17.122)
The other piece that I've learned to do over the years is that people will do their work updates and then give a little piece of anything they wish to share about their personal life every week. It can be, went on this date, I went to this restaurant. It can be something like something serious that this person I really care about is very sick. It doesn't matter. You know, I don't prescribe what they say. I don't even prescribe that they do say something personal, but everybody's invited to do so and it's just become normative.
So what happens in this dynamic is that everybody has their turn. Everybody hears about everybody else. It humanizes everybody because you know something about their world. And that provides a vehicle in which then when we actually get down to talking about projects, there is a sort of shared sensibility that just is, it's sort of like.
Daniel Stillman (32:58.427)
Yes.
Anjan Chatterjee (33:15.598)
I don't know, again, use food analogy has always come up. It's like a good roux. You've worked on the roux and then it's like everything else really comes out. And so that's an example, I think, of why working in a group in science internally is very helpful. And one of our mantras is the question is always the question. You have to figure out what the question is you want to ask before you can do anything. And that can take a while.
Daniel Stillman (33:22.235)
Mm.
Daniel Stillman (33:45.414)
Yes.
Anjan Chatterjee (33:45.538)
right? Like, what is the question? Why if we're going to invest some time and energy, that's going to take weeks, months, maybe years, let's make sure let's not rush the first step, which is what is the question. And that's really critical. And so then that sensibility extends outside with my collaborations, have collaborations all over the world. And for me, unnecessary
but perhaps not sufficient, but a necessary condition is I have to like the people. And I don't want a transactional relationship. Like you have the skill that I need. I mean, sometimes you have to do that, but really I want to like the person. And my criteria for people I hired in my lab, people who I collaborate with is I want to feel like you're a person.
Daniel Stillman (34:19.504)
Mm.
Anjan Chatterjee (34:40.35)
I can go out and have a beer with or a cup of coffee if you don't drink whatever but like but have a social thing that has nothing to do with our science and if I can do that then I'm willing to play in the science sandbox with you.
Daniel Stillman (34:43.697)
Hmm.
Daniel Stillman (34:54.098)
Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense. mean, that's a really beautiful outline. Clearly slow conversation and intentional turn taking, I think is so important. But you said something right at the end, which I think speaks to a really interesting point that you discuss in your book, which is liking and wanting and how they can be different. And it seems like in a way that in order to collaborate with people, we need to see them as
Anjan Chatterjee (35:13.164)
Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Stillman (35:22.853)
you see a skill of theirs as beautiful, needed, wanted, desirable, aesthetic. There's an aesthetic experience where you need to respect and like this person, either because of presumably where they exist on the triangle. Some of the emotions that they evoke in you, some of the knowledge or ideas that they bring to the table, there needs to be an aesthetic harmony in order to collaborate.
Anjan Chatterjee (35:30.594)
Mm-hmm
Daniel Stillman (35:53.349)
with someone.
Anjan Chatterjee (35:53.454)
I agree. I think and I tell my students this all the time when they're kind of thinking about their career of how, you know, if having the long view that collaborations and friendships are going to go on for a while.
And it's worth investing in the same way that you invest on what's the question investing in people and people who you think are worth the investment and I and that's the kind of sense in which I think Conversations in small groups and larger groups and conversation with the larger scientific community makes for better science You know when you have that kind of
Daniel Stillman (36:18.661)
Yes.
Daniel Stillman (36:36.721)
Hmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (36:40.568)
there's a kind of safety, and this is, I think, also important. Once you have the safety built in because you like them and you have this relationship and everybody is recognized as a real human, not just a data point, then you can be critical of ideas without someone feeling threatened.
Daniel Stillman (37:02.309)
Yes.
Anjan Chatterjee (37:02.35)
And that's absolutely critical. You can't be a softie on the merits of the experiment and the merits of the ideas. That has to really be vetted as strongly as you can, but the way that can be done is that you already feel safe with the other people.
Daniel Stillman (37:28.901)
Yes. And you have to build that foundation. That's very similar, formulation in a way that the folks from the Harvard negotiation project, talk about being hard on the problem and, soft on the people. And often we feel like we have to be soft on the people. but, but that's if you haven't built the connective tissue to be able to be hard on the problem and have that trust and connective tissue already established.
Anjan Chatterjee (37:50.925)
right.
Anjan Chatterjee (37:54.499)
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman (37:57.99)
And there's another piece that you talked about, is seeing beauty in the long view, understanding that this is a process and that it's going to it's going to take time and seeing value in the denouement in a way, seeing slow looking as as beautiful in and of itself in a way. Because it is an aesthetic. I talk about it as like, you taking a bath.
Anjan Chatterjee (37:58.2)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (38:07.149)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (38:15.916)
Yeah. Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (38:21.548)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Stillman (38:23.057)
really luxuriating in it. It is shocking to me, by the way, that time has gone rather fast. One of the things I really appreciated when I reached out to you was, and this is something I kind of noticed in a conversation is whether there's an uptake. You know, there's there's a sense of like a one sided conversation versus both people pushing and pulling. It's a dance. There's dynamic tension. And I really appreciated
emails that came from you where you're like what about group conversations what about conversations with the environment all of these different things that you started to spark in your own brain around conversation we only have a little bit of time left like what should we talk about that we have not talked about what's important to make sure that this feels like the most beautiful conversation we could have had
Anjan Chatterjee (39:11.458)
Well, actually, what I feel bad about is in the balance, and I know that you're the podcast host on the guest, but I would want be wanting to ask you all these questions as well. So, so there's an imbalance that I am a little uncomfortable with. mean,
Daniel Stillman (39:18.363)
Yes.
Daniel Stillman (39:27.727)
I know I'm leading the the the I do I do swing dancing and we talk about how the leaders is the frame and the followers the picture. In this case, I am I'm leading you and we can have another I'd be very happy to have another conversation with you or we're equal partners. But for right now, I'm just going to squeeze all of the brain juice. I can't out of it.
Anjan Chatterjee (39:45.507)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (39:49.152)
All right. So fair enough. I think this you alluded to, I think it's worth the least touching on the idea that we also have a conversation with our environment. And I it makes it maybe a little abstract, but maybe not. So one of the things that became more explicit
during the early part of the pandemic, especially the lockdown period, which as separately, it blows my mind that perhaps for the first time in human history, everybody in the world had a version of this shared experience, right? I can't think of any other
Daniel Stillman (40:43.43)
Yes.
Anjan Chatterjee (40:46.894)
whether it's the plague in different parts of Europe or things that have happened in Asia, volcanoes, hurricanes, But everybody was stopped short with this. And the cultural differences in how it expressed itself, all so on and so forth, but it was a shared experience. And it already feels like that moment of openness is closing rapidly if it hasn't closed already, like we've forgotten about it. We've suppressed it.
Daniel Stillman (41:16.785)
Yeah, it was one of the rare moments in history where anyone I would talk to, I really wanted to know, how are you? It wasn't like, hey, how's it going? Let's get to, it was like, how the hell are you? Cause I don't know, cause you're going through, I just sort of, I assume everyone's actually kind of going through some stuff anyway now, but really then you're like, how are you? We really wanted to know. It was a very different vibe.
Anjan Chatterjee (41:17.174)
So.
Anjan Chatterjee (41:22.989)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (41:33.164)
Yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (41:36.515)
Yeah.
very different vibe. So the other piece about that was it made us very explicitly aware of our environment in a way that we typically don't, again, in that kind of transactional fast moving. So it's almost like a slow living of, you know, all of sudden, you know, I've had that painting on my wall for, you know, 30 years and I don't even notice it anymore, right? You know, I, during the time,
you know, what you can't see is to my right, there is a window and we have a little courtyard. I live in Center City, Philadelphia, so it's a very urban area. You know, I got like, you know, like many people, I got a bunch of plants and I also got a bird feeder, right? So I'm looking at this stuff, right? So this idea that we are in conversation with our environment all the time and going back to some...
say something we started before is that if we evolved our brains adapted to a certain version of nature over the 1.8 million years of the Pleistocene, it's only been in the last 10, maybe 12,000 years that we've all been sequestered in these indoor places and that this has increasingly got us more more removed from nature. know, where hermetically sealed environments, you
earlier in our conversation, there was a buzz that was the heater going on, right? That's already saying, no, keep the real world out there. Incandescent lights, all of a we're no longer tied to diurnal rhythms. 1872, I think, is when Thomas Edison first turned on the first light bulb in Menlo Park. There is a way in which that disrupted us. so...
Daniel Stillman (43:19.856)
Mmm.
Anjan Chatterjee (43:30.828)
All these questions now that emerge out of things like sustainability, the environmental concerns, I think all in a way can be framed as a disruption in the conversation we would be having with our environment. And so that was the piece and how architecture either helps or hurts in that. you've talked about design. How do you design?
Daniel Stillman (43:51.014)
Yes.
Daniel Stillman (43:55.639)
yeah.
Anjan Chatterjee (44:00.162)
your environment, and this is something I'm very preoccupied by right now, how do you design your environment, the built environment in a way that honors that conversation with the environment?
Daniel Stillman (44:13.241)
It's a really interesting point, and I'll link in the show notes. Many episodes ago, I interviewed Tyson Yonkaporta, who is an Aboriginal Australian, and he wrote a book called Sand Talk and really pointing to the fact that there's this, in science, there's this idea of embodied cognition. isn't this interesting? We think in spaces. And he was saying, yes, we've been sitting in circles.
Anjan Chatterjee (44:34.862)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Stillman (44:41.882)
drawing on the sand together for 1.8 million years. We've had conversations in places and spaces where we can point and gesture and use that as a way of describing what we where we want to go what we want to do. I personally believe that a conversation with a whiteboard is a it's a multimodal you know six dimensional conversation instead of
Anjan Chatterjee (44:47.875)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Stillman (45:11.985)
what another guest, Dave Gray, we would call an air conversation. You know, this is just an air conversation. And air is not, does not have much of a memory. The environment 100 % has a lot to do with what conversation is even possible. God, I've been in so many offices where you're not even allowed to put anything on the walls. And I feel hampered. It's like I can't use one of my hands because it's,
Anjan Chatterjee (45:19.617)
Thank
Anjan Chatterjee (45:28.056)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Daniel Stillman (45:41.414)
Because embodied cognition, think, is such an important component of how we can think together with multiple people is to use all the things around us. This rock represents this and this represents that. And to be able to use that as a dialogical aid, think, is so important. So I think your intuition and your experience is 100 % correct in the same way that having phones and laptops in the conversation.
Creates an environment that is irreparably non aesthetic In the sense of being able to actually host a beautiful conversation because nobody can focus
Anjan Chatterjee (46:18.89)
And, you know, just not to put too fine a point on this, as has been mentioned by the previous Surgeon General and others, we're an epidemic of loneliness. you know, loneliness is at least one version of this is the absence of good conversation.
Daniel Stillman (46:36.796)
Yeah. Well, I appreciate so much you taking the time out of your work to have what I hope is a good conversation with me, maybe even a beautiful one. And if people would like to learn more about your work, I definitely would direct them to reading your book. The Aesthetic Brain will link to that. Is there any other place where they should go to stay in the loop with your work?
Anjan Chatterjee (46:46.828)
Maybe even a beautiful one.
Anjan Chatterjee (47:06.924)
Yeah, our website, you know, we often we have updates of what's going on. We have little videos of things there. That's a good place. I have both a LinkedIn and a Blue Sky account where I mostly post sort of updates of things we've been doing.
So for example this interview when it comes out will show up there, but you know other things as well, so
Daniel Stillman (47:35.323)
Wonderful. And is the year in the review there on the website? I can put a link to that if it is.
Anjan Chatterjee (47:40.334)
I placed it on, I just last week put it on LinkedIn. Yes.
Daniel Stillman (47:46.469)
wonderful, because it's great stuff. It's like a gloss almost on everything around your work. I'm just going to thank you, officially thank you for coming on the show, and I'm really grateful for your time. It has been a beautiful conversation. For me, you've been very generous. So thank you very much.
Anjan Chatterjee (48:07.182)
Well, I very much appreciate your inviting me. And yeah, this was great.
Daniel Stillman (48:12.954)
Wonderful. Well, that means we can call scene And I can pause the conversation