Alan Kay presented at the Distinguished Lecture Series in 1987: "Doing with Images makes Symbols". The title of the talk comes from ideas from Piaget and Bruner which he doesn't get to until 50 min into the talk. (The 50 min before that are full of gems including Sketchpad, Englebart's demo, and footage from Xerox PARC): youtube 50:20 
YOUTUBE p2LZLYcu_JY Alan Kay, Distinguished Lecture Series 1987
Sketchpad
Englebart's Mother of All Demos
Footage from Xerox PARC of kids using Alto
# Multiple mentalities: Jean Piaget & Bruner
_used Youtube Audio Transcripts to capture some content_
Kay paraphrases Piaget and Bruner 50:07
said that the he thought children and 50:20 adults have a unitary mentality that 50:22 goes through stages as the child mature 50:24 so Piaget said first there is a doing 50:29 stage where the whole is to dig it and 50:33 an object is to grab it. Thinking is 50:36 action in that stage. The child doesn't think 50:39 ahead doesn't imagine the consequences 50:41 of his action he just does.
Later on is 50:45 the image stage. A child of five or six or 50:49 seven who for instance when given a 50:53 squat glass poured into a tall thin 50:55 glass will say there's more water in the 50:57 tall thin glass. I think everybody is 50:59 familiar with the with that experiment 51:02 of Piaget's. It's because the child is being 51:04 dominated by the visual image the the 51:07 looks like there's more water there and 51:09 so that what the visual logic says that 51:11 there is.
Then around 11 or 12 51:16 Piaget says that the child goes to a facts 51:20 and logic stage away from the immediacy 51:24 of the visual environment (or at least in 51:28 Swiss French children) who 11 and 12 51:30 (there are less less evidence that 51:32 American children ever get into the 51:33 facts and logic stage).
Now when we looked 51:39 at Piaget's theory it was interesting what 51:42 it seemed to say is that the child is 51:44 below the age of five say you should 51:46 only do muscular things and if the child 51:48 is in this age between say roughly 5 and 51:51 11 that you should do mostly visual 51:52 things and then above that you should do 51:55 sort of symbolic things and it just 51:57 didn't come through with any ideas for 51:59 us.
But while reading about Piaget we had 52:02 found the work of Bruner who is the 52:04 American psychologist who was one of the 52:08 person persons to bring Piaget to the 52:10 American public's attention.
Bruner 52:13 had a more interesting theory and it 52:16 came about from experiments that he did 52:18 to confirm what Piaget was talking about. 52:21
So, Bruner did the experiment where he took the 52:23 water in the squat class and poured it 52:25 into the tall thin one. The child said 52:27 yes there's more water than the tall 52:28 thin glass. Then Bruner did something 52:31 that Piaget hadn't thought to do. Bruner 52:33 then covered up the glass. and the child 52:36 said "oh, but wait. There must be the same 52:38 amount of water because we were would it go?" 52:40
and then Bruner revealed the tall thin glass 52:42 and the child said "oh wait. no look. 52:44 there's more water." Bruner covered it up 52:47 again and the child said "oh, there must 52:50 be the same amount of water because 52:51 where would it go?"
And from this we got a lot of ideas. 53:27 It suggested that there are ways of 53:29 using some of these other mentalities 53:30 and we got some confirmation from some 53:32 interesting work in the literature of 53:35 creativity one of them was by jacques 53:39 hadamard the famous french mathematician 53:41 who in the late stages of his life 53:43 decided to pull his 99 buddies the other 53:48 who made up together the 100 great 53:50 mathematicians and physicists on the 53:52 earth and he asked them how do you do 53:54 your thing and they were all personal 53:57 friends of his so they wrote back 53:58 depositions and only a few out of the 54:01 hundred claimed to use mathematical 54:03 symbology at all he was quite as 54:05 surprised all of them said they did it 54:07 mostly in imagery or figurative terms in 54:10 an amazing 30 percent or so including 54:14 Einstein were down here in the mud pies 54:16 Einstein's definition deposition said I 54:19 have sensations of a kinesthetic or 54:22 muscular type - I could feel the the 54:25 abstract spaces he was dealing with in 54:27 the muscles of his arms and his fingers 54:29 so one way of interpreting Hadamard 54:32 diagram here is the genius is the 54:35 ability to recapture childhood at will 54:37 that's sort of the pyogenic and way of 54:39 looking at it but a stronger way is to 54:41 look at it through brothers eyes and see 54:43 the what is actually going on is that 54:46 these very creative people are somehow 54:48 able to be in contact with other 54:51 mentalities that are going on all the 54:54 time now this is a better way of 54:56 thinking about this then simply 54:58 splitting things up into conscious and 55:00 subconscious or right brain and left 55:02 brain this notion that there are each 55:05 one of these things evolved for a 55:07 different reason and can do different 55:09 kinds of logics is very important we'll 55:11 see why in in a second now I'm going to 55:16 give you a the most graphic 55:17 demonstration I know of this principle 55:21 in action of what it means to actually 55:24 be able to teach directly to the 55:28 mentality that's going to learn rather 55:29 than trying to teach through an 55:31 inappropriate channel you see the sad 55:33 part of how to Mars diagram is that 55:35 every child in the United States is 55:37 taught math and physics 55:39 through this channel the channel that 55:42 know almost no adult creative 55:45 mathematician and physicist used uses to 55:48 do it that is really a shame they use 55:50 this channel to communicate but not to 55:53 do their thing and much of our education 55:55 is founded on those principles so just 55:59 because we can talk about something 56:00 there's a naive belief that we can teach 56:03 through talking and listening now this 56:06 example I'm going to show is taken from 56:08 a television show in 1975 on Harry 56:13 reasoner's Way television show in on ABC 56:20 and he had read a book that apparently 56:22 upset him called the inner game of 56:24 tennis which basically said almost 56:27 anybody can learn to play a decent game 56:29 of tennis in just a single afternoon if 56:31 you don't try too hard and that had made 56:34 him wonder because he'd been trying to
So if you have any 52:55 nine year olds you'd like to torment 52:56 this is a good way to do it because what 52:58 Brunner was doing was jumping the child 53:01 not from this mentality back to a 53:04 previous stage but he was showing, as he 53:06 did in many experiments, the existence of 53:08 multiple mentalities. So the child was 53:11 normally visually dominant here but if 53:15 you occluded the visual field then this 53:16 fledgling symbolic mentality that was 53:19 really going to be switched on in a 53:22 stronger way later on could actually 53:23 work.