What Happens in the Mind When We Explain

To explain successfully, we have to transform our knowledge into something that works in the real world.

This video (1m 22s) is a quick explainer on the big idea covered in the post below. The video is also on YouTube.

One of the fascinating aspects of the human brain is how fast it operates. It processes enormous amounts of information in milliseconds, long before we realize it.

Something similar happens when we explain an idea to another person. When a child asks a question like, “Why does the sun always rise in the east?” Our mind automatically accesses our knowledge, and we communicate an answer in the form of words or a diagram.

This happens so often that we don’t think about it. Our explanations just… happen. Sometimes they work, other times they don’t. To get to the bottom of what makes an explanation work, we need to understand what’s actually happening in the mind when we explain.

What We Know is Unique to Us

Explanations, if we’re careful, are based on what we know to be true. A lifetime of experience and education creates a foundation for our knowledge and understanding. And each of us has a different version of it that’s custom-made for our mind. It can’t be shared directly because knowledge is a living part of the mind that can’t be plucked out and given to someone. It’s just signals in the jelly of our mind.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman says trying to “see” knowledge is like looking at a city and trying to “see” the economy. It’s invisible, but everywhere.

Representing What We Know

Since we can’t read minds, there is no way for us to transfer knowledge directly. To explain an idea, we’re forced to create a version of our knowledge that can be shared.

This is the basis of explanation: representing our knowledge to others.

The idea of representation is foundational to the subject of explanation. When an explanation succeeds or fails, the culprit is not often our intelligence or knowledge, but how we represent that knowledge for others. The best explanations are carefully crafted representations.

What are representations? They are real-world artifacts of what we know, curated for other minds. They include what we write, say, or create, and can also include metaphors, examples, gestures, or emphasis that help us make a point.

When we explain the sun rising in the east, we create representations of our knowledge that we hope are useful for the child’s mind.

The big idea: We don’t share knowledge; we represent it for others.

The True Challenge

Explanations don’t happen in a vacuum. They are usually social activities that involve multiple brains, each with unique versions of knowledge and understanding. When we explain to a child, we try to account for the child’s existing knowledge and use language we expect to work for them.

For an explanation to be successful, it’s not enough to create a representation. That’s only half the battle. Explanation success depends on the potential for that representation to become knowledge in the mind of another person. This is the true challenge of explanation. I see it as a two-step process:

• We create a representation

• The audience attempts to turn that representation into knowledge

This process is well known in cognitive science and is something we’ll unravel in the future.

For now, the big idea remains: Explanations are not knowledge, but representations of knowledge that we curate for others. How we do that and why it works (or not) is essential for explainers to understand.

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