Steve Thomas: Troy, welcome back to the show.
Troy Swanson: Thanks, Steve. It’s always good to be back.
Steve Thomas: For longtime listeners, you’ve heard Troy’s name many times. Over the past 10 years, this is actually, I went back to look, this is your fifth time in the guest chair, counting a time that we sat together at ALA and just had a quick chat. Do you know even how many times you have guest hosted this show over the last 10 years?
Troy Swanson: No, I have no idea. 10?
Steve Thomas: 16 times. So this is your 21st time on the podcast!
Troy Swanson: Record setting.
Steve Thomas: So, I guess my first question with all that has to be, as much as I love having you as guest host and being on here, why are you not just hosting your own podcast, Troy Swanson?
Troy Swanson: Yeah, right. I’ll tell you why, Steve. It’s because I’m lazy and I’m more than happy to let you build the audience and me to dip into that audience and say hi, and then step away cuz I know how much work it takes to actually make it work. So I appreciate the podcast and I should say, especially with this book that we’re gonna talk about, this podcast has been instrumental in building my ideas that ended up into this book.
So I’m really grateful for that, but I also recognize what it takes to really make it run. That’s why I am happy to guest host a few times a year, and then the rest of the time I’m happy to listen to your excellent interviews.
Steve Thomas: Well, thank you. Before we get into this new book, what do you see as your area of research, what’s the broad thing that brought to you where you are today?
Troy Swanson: Well, in, in some ways this book is a culmination of a lot of things I’ve been working on over my whole career. You and I, I think, are in the same generation of librarians in some ways. I entered the field in the late ’90s, early 2000s, really just as Google hit and we had this kind of identity crisis, I think as librarians to say, “Hey, are we gonna vanish because of the impact of the internet?”
And at the same time, my main role is as an instruction librarian. I’m in the classroom with students and I can see how much stronger, in general, the information that we offered was than a lot of the stuff, especially at that time, there’s a lot of real sketchy stuff that you could find out through, you know, GeoCities and all kinds of places across the internet, that were coming up in college research papers. And that really was the spark for me to say, why do we trust what we trust? What is authority? What is credibility? And I’ve gone down many paths to explore those ideas. And I think that’s kind of the underlying idea behind how I got here. And then this new book is maybe the end point in that journey. We’ll see. There’s always a new project down the road.
Steve Thomas: The previous book that you did with Heather, you edited, and this one you wrote, and I know you said, you mentioned in the book that sort of like how I did this podcast, you looked around, were hoping someone else had done this, so that you could just enjoy it and you learn from it, but nobody else did, so you had to do it. You couldn’t just edit another book on this topic cuz there was nobody else really getting into this too deep, so you had to do it. So, right. What was that process like, when did you realize that, okay, well I just gotta do this?
Troy Swanson: Yeah, for over 20 years, in some ways I’ve been trying not to write this book. Maybe that’s the better way to say it. When we edited that book, I really wanted someone to look at how the brain processes information. There’s some people that have addressed it and I’ve tried to pull them together in this book, but I don’t think that library and information science and education in general, education literature, we don’t do the greatest job of really recognizing how the brain does that processing.
So I really couldn’t find anyone in that last collection of essays, and I love the authors that we had, the ideas that are in that book, that book was, I think, really well received. And the people did such a fantastic job, the contributors, but there wasn’t anyone that looked at how do we actually process information. As a follow up to that, I was kinda reading around and then a friend of mine, Lori Townsend at University of New Mexico Libraries, invited me to give a talk about some of the stuff I was interested in, about what happens once the information goes through our eyes or into our ears, what happens to this stuff? And so many times, I think we treat that as if it’s books on a shelf. I think that’s our common metaphor, especially in libraries. We’re gonna take this information, we’re just gonna stick it on the shelf in our head, and it doesn’t work that way.
I was reading what the psychologists were teaching us, what the neuroscientists were teaching us. I went and did a bunch of reading for this talk I gave at University of New Mexico, and that was in 2017, and basically, I just didn’t stop and I went straight through. The pandemic was a helpful tool, for this at least. I was able to lock myself away. My kids are swimmers as I know you know, Steve, and so there was a time during the pandemic they could have swim practices, but parents weren’t allowed in the building. So I was sitting in a parking lot in my car for two hours at a time, and that was quite productive, so I would get a lot of reading done, a lot of note taking done.
It took me really six years to get to this book, and really, like I said, it’s longer than that. I’ve been pulling some of these ideas together over my whole career. But that was the real push into it, and I think the fact that we couldn’t find anyone to write a chapter for the previous book also was an indication on some of the work we need to do in librarianship, in information science, and in education to pull in these new ideas that the neuroscientists and psychology folks are, are really working on right now.
Steve Thomas: Right, and Lori did end up writing the forward to your book.
Troy Swanson: I said, Lori, you’re the one that has to write this forward because you’ve been suffering along, getting text messages with me about every new thing that I’ve discovered, so she is very gracious to do that.
Steve Thomas: And Lori was actually on a previous episode of the podcast talking about her book.
Troy Swanson: Yep. She’s one of my idols for sure.
Steve Thomas: One of the quotes that you have in the book that I thought was good and I think catalyzes some of what you were just saying is that you’ve say that this is for librarians: “After a source enters the brain, we don’t seem to really know how to talk about it.” We know how to get sources, we know how to get information, but once it comes in, then all of a sudden, it’s just there, I guess, and we leave it there, but that’s not the end of the process, and that’s what you figured out through a lot of your research.
Troy Swanson: Right, yeah. And I think there’s a lot of implications for that. First off, we as a profession should want to be precise, especially as we’re building theory, right? We should wanna look at what other disciplines are doing and incorporate that so that we’re not off in our own little pocket, cuz that’s where bad theory comes from.
But also, I think there’s practical implications for how we think about, especially in our polarized information world, the polarized political world that we live in, it’s quite apparent that just giving everyone quote unquote good information and expecting good outcomes or similar outcomes or reaching the same conclusions, that’s not at all how it works. I think for the most part, when you look around how information actually works in the information ecosystem around us, I don’t think the neuroscientists and psychologists are surprised.
They’re not one bit surprised. They understand like, “yeah, this is what happens,” but the rest of us are like in shock, like, “well, we have good information. Why can’t we work together? Why can’t we agree?” And so I think they are kind of leading the way and that’s the stuff that we need to pull in as we understand what is information, what is knowledge, how do I help people learn? Like when a student interacts with a new source, you’re given a new piece of information. What does that really look like within the mind? So those are some of the questions I’ve tried to knock down. And, you know, in my ultimate, I don’t wanna jump ahead of your questions, but that’s what brought me to this idea of knowledge as a feeling or the feeling of knowing as it is put in a lot of the neuroscience literature.
Steve Thomas: You start the book where I think it’s probably a good basis, on the biology of the brain and how it’s physically working. How much research did you have to do on that one? Did you know any of this before you started doing the research? And how much did learning about this stuff affect your research and affect the direction that you were going?
Troy Swanson: Yeah. Well, I mean, I knew almost zero, right? Like many of us, I was a humanities person, I was history and a political science undergrad. And so I should say always with a disclaimer, I do definitely cite my sources. You should not pick up my book and think that there’s gonna be like anatomy lessons within that book, right? That’s not where you want to go. If you want real neuroanatomy, there’s many other great, great sources, but you can’t talk about the brain without building up some of those basic ideas.
The first part of the book, I have tried to section it off cuz I do think understanding what the neuroscientists and psychologists say is useful beyond just librarianship, so the first half of the book is really aimed at a broader audience, general educators, librarians of course, and then the second half of the book, I do try to focus in more on information science, information literacy, and some of the things that folks in our field are talking about, so my hope is that there may be value, people can read the first section of the book, and then if they aren’t really into librarianship, they can let that go, and that’s okay.
Steve Thomas: Well, I mean, I would say the first three sections are more general. You definitely are using librarianship as examples a lot of times, but I mean, it’s pretty general information there.
As you said, you learned a lot of stuff in your interviews and I know from some of the ones that I heard on the podcast that you did, I know you did more research outside the podcast, but the ones here, and we’ll link to all of them in the show notes and everything, so you can go back and listen to all those, but I know especially the one that blew my mind the most was Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who’s a neuroscientist, like cutting edge research, and what she blew my mind a lot of is that there’s all this quote unquote common knowledge about the brain, and it’s simply not true.
Troy Swanson: Right? Yeah. When you read in the education literature and the librarianship literature especially, you’ll see the brain kind of talked about as having two segments. There’s cognition and there’s affect. Affect often means emotion and feeling. Cognition means the computer in our head, how we process information. That metaphor is really a leftover of how traditional western philosophy has viewed human thought, and that’s this animal brain wrapped in this logical, reasoned cognition, and what neuroscience is showing us is it’s way more complicated than that, which isn’t a surprise, you know, shocking, right?
Things like rationality, things like critical thinking are important to human thought, and they’re probably the reason that we have escaped our home environment in sub-Saharan Africa, that we live literally on every continent now of the planet, one of the few species to do that, and that’s because of our rationality, cuz we can share information, we can make this work, but in some ways we aren’t that different than animals in that the brain isn’t just this rational computer, but it’s modular information processing, right? That rationality is just one piece of these other processes that happen and these other ways that we process our world and other ways that we know our world. And so when you really read into it, I think it helps us understand how we can define information in new ways, how we can define knowledge in new ways, by recognizing these differences.
I think in some ways we’re so imprecise in how we use the terminology that neuroscientists use and there’s a value in recognizing a difference between cognition, emotion, affect, and the different feelings that those all generate and how they interact with each other. And that was where my reading took me in the kind of “a-ha” moments I had that I think we can find ways to apply in the jobs that we do.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, like you said, the lizard brain, the right brain, left brain and all that stuff, like, that probably physically is how it worked, that the brain grew layers and stuff onto it. I don’t think she would ever say this, I don’t think you ever said in an interview with her, but it’s almost like, the brain is lazy a lot of times. Cause it’s kinda like, “Oh, I’ve seen something like that. It’s just that.” It really wants to just compare things to each other. And that’s good and bad for us, but you can see that in behavior, things like pattern recognition. That just drives so much of us.
Troy Swanson: Well, the goal of the brain is survival, right? And once you recognize that evolutionarily, a lot of the things that a lot of our thinking, a lot of the reasons for how our brain operates make sense. And I don’t wanna go too far down into the many rabbit holes that I’ve explored with this, but I think we have to recognize that our brains are the result of literally millions of years of evolution, number one. As humans, we’ve been around roughly 250,000 years, give or take, those are rough numbers. Primates go a lot further back. Now we’ve only left Africa about 80,000 years ago. So that’s a fraction of the time. Our written history goes back 5,000 years, just to put some things in perspective.
The goal that we have is that we have so much information coming in, we can’t process it all at the same time, whether it’s feeling or visual, audio, all the different ways that we bring in information, and the brain doesn’t directly interface with the world. The brain’s locked away in our heads. The brain can only make sense of what comes into it. And as you said, it makes sense by noticing patterns, but the way that you notice patterns, you have to recognize previous patterns, so if there’s a change in the pattern…
In some ways the biological root of confirmation bias is that we’re made for confirmation bias. We’re made to recognize things that are important cuz that’s what has kept us alive for literally millions of years. So those of us in our species that ignored the rustling in the grass and didn’t think, “Oh, that could be a tiger,” they got eaten by the tiger. The rest of us, our genes carried on and we recognize those patterns and we run for it. But what does that mean? Things that we might not be familiar with, we don’t notice as patterns. If it doesn’t break through into that information processing of like what’s happening around us, things get ignored. The things that in our past that were important to us, we capture those, not because we wanna lock down the past and be a recording device for the past. The goal of memory is to keep us alive in the future. So if this thing almost killed us in the past, I’m not gonna do that again the next time I see it, but what it means is, the goal of memory isn’t fidelity. The goal of memory isn’t to reproduce exactly the exact thing that was said. The goal of memory is to capture the important things that will preserve my life down the road, and a lot of times that’s connected with emotion.
So I don’t maybe remember the last thing I said to my old roommate who I got in a fight with. I didn’t really get in a fight, but I don’t remember the exact words that were said, but I remember that he wasn’t happy with me. Why? Because the next time I see him, that could be a threat to me, or the last time I saw someone, we had a great time and that I’m so happy to see you. Those are things that we catch onto.
That’s one of the goals of emotion. We think of emotion as these hardwired animalistic reactions sometimes, but emotion really is a cognitive function that recognizes value. It’s an interpretation of a moment: if I was happy, if I was sad, if I had fear, and that is locked away in our brain for the next time that instance comes up and we fall into this kind of trap because of computers, because of cameras, because of all the ways that we have our external processing devices that help us out, that we think the mind is just there to record our lives and our biographical memory is this recording that we carry with us, and that’s not really what the neuroscientists are teaching us.
Steve Thomas: Right. You keep what you need. Like, I was just thinking, the first time that we met in person was at an ALA and we had a meal together, like in the cafeteria thing at the convention center. I think like, they have a little food court, but I have just vague pictures that of it in my head, but I was like, it’s a nice memory, and it’s like something I wanna repeat cuz it’s a good thing.
Troy Swanson: I would say two more things about memory. And so when you now access that memory, the first time, it was in Chicago, when you accessed that, you automatically are making changes to it. And so our interpretation now will influence how you reprocess and store that information for the future, and if you think about why, because again, it’s not to capture what actually happened in the past, it’s to prepare us for the future. So if you have a new context around that memory that causes us to change that memory or your view of the world changes, that memory necessarily changes so that it’s more useful to you down the road and that’s the thing that we have to understand.
Another thing I would say about memory is that we can build memories. A lot of the research shows we don’t build memories before the age of four and five. So if you have memories of you being younger before the age of four, especially, those memories are probably constructed by talking to parents, by looking at photos, and so having these external tools, external cognition as the psychologists would call it, actually absolutely impacts how we remember things going back and looking it up and recall. Like, that’s super useful and it does make our memories in terms of recording the things that happened not necessarily interpretations, but those moments, it does make it more accurate. So those are useful tools. I mean, writing and language is probably the first of those tools that I don’t have to remember every single thing. I can write it down, I can talk about it, you can tell me about it. I don’t have to experience everything. I can let you experience and tell me, “Hey, don’t eat this plant. I got really sick.” Like that’s the value of doing that, that I think is in some ways not entirely unique to humans. Many animals communicate in different ways, but our ability to capture those ideas and store them for the future over generations is our competitive advantage.
Steve Thomas: Well, as Sean Connery said, in Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, “I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to remember!”
Troy Swanson: That’s right.
Steve Thomas: There’s my Sean Connery.
We talked about common knowledge a little bit, but the next section of your book is where you sort of get into knowledge outside of the biology of what is knowledge, what does it mean to know something? And this is where you get into the title of your book, the Feeling of Knowing. So what is knowing, Troy?
Troy Swanson: Yeah. So to do this, let me ask you a couple questions. This comes up in the book, so this may ruin it, but, so let me ask you, ” Who is the eighth president of the United States?” You don’t even actually have to really answer, but even for the listeners, this is what I want you to do, is to think about, you make a judgment, a reflection on the confidence in your ability to say who the eighth president of the United States was, and I picked it on purpose because this is more obscure, Martin Van Buren. So he’s someone that we always forget, and the thing that’s interesting with that, right, is generally if you know who the eighth president of the United States is, and you can say Martin Van Buren, you know. There tends to be a group, two groups of people around Martin Van Buren, the knowers and the not knowers, but in those kinda situations, like recalling a fact, there’s kind of three things that I think we need to pull out. There’s consciousness, there’s the memory, which we could think of as the information, but really, neuroscientists don’t really talk about information, they talk about different types of memory, and that’s how we capture our world.
But then related to that is then a feeling, and that’s what I want to get at with this question. Like we can judge how confident we are in that answer. And that confidence comes to us as a feeling. We can feel it, you can feel like, I kind of know it, and there’s many instances where you know that you know the thing, and you can’t get it outta your head. Right? But you know that you know it. That’s that same feeling, and there’s sometimes where you look at it and you’re like, I have no idea. I don’t know what that is. And that also is a feeling and that is from the neuroscientists, the feeling of knowing, and it’s a judgment and where that comes from.
Just another example, if I ask you what should be the United States federal minimum wage? There’s a big push to make $15 an hour of the minimum wage, and I think right now it’s like seven something or eight something an hour. It’s very low for the federal, different states, different municipalities around the country have different levels of minimum wage, but there isn’t really an answer to what should be the minimum wage. The minimum wage, you could say to someone, do you think $30 an hour is right for the minimum wage? And how do you answer that? You’re like, kind of like that gut, like, you know, may not really, that feels a little high. How about $17 an hour? I don’t know, but to answer that question, there’s a lot of things that come into play. So it comes into play as like how much is the value of work? Who is doing these minimum wage jobs, which then introduces potential of like bias, right?
There’s different things that come in when you picture those people in your head, did you have a minimum wage job? And what did you make when you’re a minimum wage, what do you make now if you don’t make a minimum wage? What does it take to run a business? Like those are all things like what, what, how do we keep our economy going?
All of these different ideas are at play….
Steve Thomas: Well, I think people remember from when they were back, like I think of what I paid for rent for an apartment, but that was 23 years ago, the last time I had an apartment. Right? So yeah, rent costs more now.
Troy Swanson: Right? Right. How do we understand inflation? All these different pieces come together. This was just one example, but the answer to what should the minimum wage be really is a feeling, right? There’s ways to calculate it and there’s economists that can make arguments, but ultimately the bottom line is this just feels right, and that’s the thing that I want to get after with this idea of the feeling of knowing is that around a piece of knowledge, there is a metacognitive layer that our body brings, about our brain, brings about, and that metacognitive layer is this feeling and the current thinking is really comes from our unconscious processing that’s happening behind the scenes.
Consciousness is very complicated, but understanding what consciousness is, there’s a lot of debates. I don’t think the neuroscientists really have it quite down, what is consciousness? There’s some really great books out there related to that. I would suggest Joseph LeDoux’s book, it’s really fantastic.
The thing that we have to recognize is that we feel like a unified self. Our consciousness fools us into thinking we are a person, but really our brain is a modular kind of thing, and our brain operates almost like a big committee meeting or a democracy where everyone’s voting, everyone’s arguing, different processes that were intended for survival are at work in any kind of decision-making instance. And so, I might get up in the morning, and I get ready to come to work and I get on the scale in the bathroom and I say, “Oof, I need to not stop for that Frappuccino on the way home from work!” My rational brain is like, “No way. I gotta do better.” I go through my day at work and I’ve had a hard day and I’m tired and I’m driving home. And all of a sudden, those instincts that want those calories, the resistance, the desire for that sugar rush. Now you’re starting to have that battle within yourself. I always use that as an example, cause that’s one of the ways, anytime you’re indecisive and you have to argue with yourself, that’s your modular brain at work, where you have to override these other feelings.
We do that all the time. There’s all these different pieces that come together that help us make decisions, whether it’s survival instincts, whether it’s rationality is just one of them. All these other pieces that have to be assembled, but how do we understand all of those different pieces? We often understand them as a feeling. They come to us as a feeling because we don’t have access directly to them within our consciousness. And that’s a really hard thing for us to juggle around, is to recognize that consciousness is only one piece, even though it gives us the illusion of being a unified whole. That’s something that I think we have to wrestle around with as a profession to understand.
To translate this a little bit more into the work we do, if I’m working with a student in a classroom or there’s a student in your library or a patron comes in and they need to answer a question, when they interface with that information, that feeling of knowledge, that feeling of knowing is part of that process that helps us make those decisions. It’s the unconscious processing, interfacing with consciousness that comes together, that helps push us into different directions.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you talk about especially a couple of particular areas of source monitoring and conflict monitoring. Do you wanna talk about those a little bit?
Troy Swanson: There’s a whole deep area of research on this, and so I’ve touched on it in the book. There’s a lot of different pieces to pull together, but conflict monitoring is really noticing that moment of conflict. So when you come to a decision and you’re like, trying and it just doesn’t quite feel right.
One of our instinctive things as humans, we’ve evolved to work in groups. we grew up in small tribes and that’s how our brain understands each other. And that’s all primates in general are social and work together, but one of the protections that our brain has is to not be fooled by other people. So you have to trust other people. That’s how we live and how we survive. But also within a group you don’t wanna be taken advantage of, and there’s a lot of different ways this happens, but if you look at a piece of information and you can feel that conflict, you’re telling me this is true, and I’m like, it just doesn’t feel right. Again, that’s the feeling of knowing. But those are moments that we can reflect back and try to see like, where does that conflict come from? So conflict monitoring is one area.
Source monitoring is an area of memory research basically. When they say source monitoring in psychology, it’s not sources as we often think of sources, they’re kind of similar but not quite. Source monitoring is just being able to remember the source of a memory. How did I build that memory? Did I build it because I was there? Do I have that memory because someone told me about it? Can I point to a direct experience? And there’s a lot of ways that our sources get confounded, like if you look at the research on eyewitnesses, it’ll make you not want to have eyewitnesses when you go to court cuz it’s really sketchy how some of that comes together, and I think there’s some really good research on how to use witnesses correctly, how to ask the right kinds of questions. Anyway, that’s a little bit of a digression, but source monitoring is just our ability to keep track of where those memories, where that quote unquote knowledge comes from.
Steve Thomas: The next area you cover in the book is reality. Some of it’s related to what we talked about before of how the brain processes memories, but how do we figure out what’s real? How do we figure out what’s true? How does the brain do that?
Troy Swanson: Yeah. Well, and that’s a big question. And many people have tried to tackle, especially the capital -T truth, right? What is that? So I won’t pretend that I’ve got it all figured out. But one thing that the research really shows is how our brains are like The Matrix, right? Like, they are building a world around us, and in some ways, they are anticipating what’s happening, before we even take actions, they’re anticipating what’s gonna come because any fraction of a second that you can act could save your life in our evolutionary history, and so the brains that were able to predict what was about to happen are the brains that survived. That fraction of a second is the difference between life and death.
There’s a lot of research that will do like a series of flashing images and then notice like when a part of the brain, like the amygdala lights up. And the amygdala has a few different goals and purposes in the brain, but one of them is fear, anxiety, things like that.
And they will do flashes faster than the eye can recognize it, but they will put up sometimes there’s also a way to explore, like bias where they’ll do like racial bias, things like that, and they’ll see activation, even though you don’t know that you’re being activated. We can only possibly process a small portion of the information that comes to us, and it feels like we have this complete picture of the world around us. A lot of that complete picture is actually constructed by the mind.
And so therefore, if you talk about reality, you are really talking about a construction. One metaphor for it is, like, when we use a computer, we don’t really need to understand how the motherboard works. We really are using an interface with the mouse and the screen and the keyboard and all of that. We don’t understand how the interface works, and in so many ways, that’s a great metaphor for like how our brain works. We don’t really know what reality is, but all we know is the construction our mind makes of the reality around us, of the incoming information that it pulls together.
What that means is, we build that on our experiences and sometimes our experiences miss things. There’s things in the environment that we emphasize because of past experiences. We ignore other things. Most of the information that comes in we are ignoring. That could be problematic, and that could be a source of bias, it could be a source of error, it could be a lot of different problems that we have to try to account for and understand. There’s no way around it. That’s just how it has to work. And so recognizing that reality, I think, is important for us. The reality around reality.
Steve Thomas: It’s almost like, you know, they say sometimes that we agree colors are the same, but are we actually seeing the same thing? I don’t know, like behind you there’s a picture of a baby that has like a red dress on. Does that look the same to you as it does to me? I don’t know. I know what red is, you know what red is. We agree that’s red, but it could look completely different to the two of us.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. Can I say that’s also one of the challenges of studying brains in general, or other minds, is that ultimately, you’re using a subjective tool to talk about another subjective tool. There’s always going to be, I think for the history of us, there’s always gonna be a barrier that we’re not gonna be able to break through, until AI takes us over and then it doesn’t matter.
Steve Thomas: Well, I was gonna ask about that because now these AI that we have can seemingly answer all these questions, but they also have what they call hallucinations, which is where they just completely make up answers, so that’s just another wrinkle in everything. They’re probably not gonna turn into Skynet robots and kill us all, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be damaging, misinformation and disinformation, even if it’s not doing it intentionally. Like those chatbots, they’re not intentionally telling you the wrong thing. That’s what they think is the correct answer. It’s even more important that we have these information seeking skills.
Troy Swanson: It presents so many challenges, and I do think there’s so much potential for misuse and the economic impact, and I think we should be careful that I don’t think that AI is gonna make our brains. Our brains are bodily, but in terms of processing information and doing things that we thought only humans could do, I think clearly, I we’re all recognizing where the brave new world is at hand and how far does it go.
Also, I think you and I’ve been through the hyperbole around new information technology and how it’s gonna change the whole world. And it does in some ways, and it doesn’t in other ways. I think about when I was an undergrad, using a library and doing research is vastly different, but in some ways not that different. There’s still a lot that’s the same. And so, I think we should take caution and I think we as a profession need to be aware of what this technology brings. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of overhype, but we also should be prepared for sure.
Steve Thomas: In the next section you talk about Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process, Dervin’s Sense-Making, and Nall’s Affective Load. How do you tie those in with the overall concept and why did you feel like they needed to be included?
Troy Swanson: You know, within one book you can only cover so much. But I did wanna try to connect some of these ideas or the feeling of knowing into some of the foundational theorists that we are talking about. In some of your Intro to Library Science textbooks, some of these folks get touched on. Carol Kuhlthau is especially noteworthy for those of us that focus on information literacy because some of her research really opened up our eyes to what she would call affect, which I might call more emotion, connects in with how we use information and discover information, and I think also noteworthy for her and some of these others is really the attempt to use solid data to try to build theory. And so I appreciate that and I tried with these three especially Dervin and Nahl, trying to look at how the feeling of knowing can talk to those levels of theory for people that aren’t really into theory, that’s probably a section of the book you can easily skip over.
Maybe the other way to put it is if you haven’t touched theory for a while, being reminded of some of this is probably good for all of us to understand kind of the foundations of some of our work. Dervin’s Sense-Making is really interesting, comes out of like communications theory, but an approach where part of our information processing is just this idea of understanding the world around us, that idea of making sense. The final chapter of that book pulls together a conglomeration of different theories, that I think that this talks to.
The big takeaway for me is that using this idea of the feeling of knowing helps us reflect some of the things we’re already talking about. A lot of the pieces that I think are really important for how our profession works are there, but the feeling of knowing helps us see them differently. It sheds a new light, it offers a new lens, whatever metaphor you wanna use, to recognize the stuff that we already do. So I felt kind of an obligation to just acknowledge their good work because I think they were going down useful trails and so that’s the goals in that part of the book.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I mean it was a good reminder to me. Number one I read, I was reading that part and I’m like, “Oh yeah, I have a master’s degree in this!” but yeah, you connected all that together. It’s sort of a bringing everything together. The last two parts of the book are bringing what you just learned in the first three parts into librarianship and how it all applies.
In your last section, knowing what we know now in part through parts one through four, how does this change what we do in the profession as, especially as it comes to seeking out information. You especially call out and I remember you mentioned this earlier, you worked on the ACRL Framework. For people who don’t know what that is, and go back and listen to one of the previous episodes where Troy talked about it in more detail, but what is it basically, and did your research and all of this stuff change? Like, would you have gone mentioned different things in the planning of all that, of how that should be? How does it change the Framework on your mind?
Troy Swanson: So first off, the Framework for Information Literacy is from the Association of College and Research Libraries. It is a guiding philosophical document that campuses can use. And I do think there’s some views of it being used in other areas of librarianship, like in public libraries, but it’s mainly targeted at higher ed to take these ideas and be able to synthesize them down into learning objectives to use for assessment and things like that. But it’s kind of a philosophical statement of here’s the things that we believe, and I was part of a committee that helped put that together, and it replaced the previous information literacy standard, so it’s kind of a standard type document. It’s not exactly the same thing as standards.
I think there’s a lot of things to say about the Framework and a lot of updates that are probably needed with the Framework and as a living, ongoing document, but there’s a lot of great things about the Framework. I don’t know that we really connected the Framework into this “How does the brain process?”. I suggested at the end of the book a Missing Frame, which of course is called Knowledge as a Feeling. Shocking, right? The title of the book, but that if we’re going to understand how we use information and if we’re going to teach the skills that are required to be effective information users, information literate citizens, if we’re gonna teach people to be that, there is a need to teach these kinds of reflective skills to understand that knowledge comes about by the interface of consciousness with the unconscious, with a piece of information and the complexities that come from that.
So a valuable thing for me is just even to define what is knowledge. And I’ve kind of touched on this maybe a little earlier, but just to kind of put this down, is that idea that knowledge has to be an interaction between consciousness, the feeling of knowing, and some kind of memory schema, which we would call information, the memory. The important thing of that, that consciousness has to be in there and we have to understand what consciousness means. Consciousness means then the reflection of self, so our identities, our experiences are automatically pushed into that. Along with that consciousness is a momentary thing. A lot of the research around memory shows us that the context of the moment impacts how memories are recalled. So memory is not recalled in this whole, like, again, like it’s not pulling the book off the shelf. Memory is reconstructed based on the things that are happening around you at the moment, which is logical if the goal of memory is to keep you alive in the future, right? So it only pulls out the things that actually matter, but that means when we are thinking about what we know, thinking about knowing, thinking about that moment of knowledge, then that context that you’re standing in and the self, how we see ourselves, who we are at that moment, along with that feeling, that’s the interface with the unconscious processing that’s happening.
With that information, with that schema, that’s what it means to know. That’s to me, what knowledge is, and I don’t think that our definitions of knowledge in a lot of places in information science literature, we use information and knowledge interchangeably. I think we have some decent definitions of information. Donald Case, who’s a longtime theorist in information literacy, really great. His definition is that any difference, that pattern idea, any difference that you can see in the reality around you, that’s information. I think that that actually works really well with what the neuroscientists are teaching us. That makes a lot of sense, as we talked about earlier, about what is reality.
But our definitions in differentiating information from knowledge is something we don’t really do. So I’ve tried to then add this idea of knowledge as a feeling, as an additional frame to the Framework of information literacy to help us kind of ferret out that difference between information versus knowledge and how we might operationalize that, whether it’s in the classroom, in the library or wherever.
I see this book as, I’m hoping, an opening of a conversation. I surely don’t have this all figured out. I mean, I spent six years plus delving into this, but there’s so much more out there and I know there’s things that I’ve probably messed up, things I’ve misinterpreted, a lot of room for conversation. I hope people read this book, have your libraries buy this book, it’s great, this is the sales pitch, but when I got to the end of it, as I’ve written it and built this theory, I haven’t yet been able to figure out how do we take this into the classroom. I have some ideas; I have some thoughts and there’s some faculty members I’m talking with about how we might do this. And so, what do you do when you write a book over six years and you don’t have the course outlined? Well, you add to the information literacy framework. At least I’m hoping if that’s a guiding document for the profession, that that would be at least a starting point for that conversation until the lesson plans, the actual assessments of learning, can be put in place and we can see where we end up.
I think so often we wanna think about critical thinking as this goal of, you take some information, you sprinkle on some logic, and you get critical thinking. We may say “no, we know that’s not how it works!” But so many times when we see how people teach it, that’s still sort of what we’re talking about, and I think what we need to get to is recognizing that critical thinking or rationality is one component of how the brain processes information, but we need to build our skills of reflection. We need to build the skills of like, how do I get to this knowledge? Why do I believe this? If you can’t see your own beliefs in the knowledge, I don’t know how we actually get to real critical thinking if we’re not reflective, and so I think those are things that we need to think about in terms of how do we apply what the scientists are saying and get us to real change and shifting our focus as teachers.
Steve Thomas: Well, if people wanna continue that conversation and have it with you, how would they reach out to you to learn more about you or contact you or learn about the book?
Troy Swanson: Well always, you know, keep an eye out for episodes of Circulating Ideas, I think. Secondly, I am on Twitter. It’s just @t_swanson. I’m not on as much as I used to be on and off, but if you message me, I’ll see it. I’m Googleable you can find my email address that’s just swanson@morainevalley.edu. I’m happy to have folks drop me a line.
Steve Thomas: Well, however my brain has processed those memories, my memories of you are positive, Troy.
Troy Swanson: It’s always great to be here, Steve. And thanks, you know, I love the podcast, of course, and I think you deserve whatever awards we can give you. You provide a great service to all of us, so thank you.
Steve Thomas: I’m very happy to have you as guest host regularly and I’m sure, or I guess, cross my fingers, hope that listeners will hear more from Troy in the future as he continues his research. So again, the book is Knowledge as a Feeling, How Neuroscience and Psychology Impact Human Information Behavior, and it is available now, so go out and grab the copy. Maybe you can get it in a hard cover or as an ebook, and there’ll be links in the show notes to get that.
Troy Swanson: Thanks, Steve.
Circulating Ideas 