#1743 - Steven Pinker

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

So I was saying, I had, we were talking about phones and cameras and the fact that compact cameras are essentially dead. I had an Apple camera. I don't know if you remember them.

Steven Pinker (0:21)

No.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

But it was a, I think it was one megapixel, and it was about the size of this book, County of Monte Cristo book. That's it right there.

How many megapixels was that? There's two of them there. One's flat, like that. I didn't have that one. I had the one on the right. Yeah, that's the one I had. Quick take 200 Yeah. I think it used floppy disks, if I remember. I'm trying to remember what you put in there. This was in the 90s, I wanna say.

Yeah. And that was a big deal.

I mean, I don't know what the megapixels were, but I seem to remember it was like one.

Steven Pinker (1:04)

Could have been one, yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:06)

It was a big deal. Like you could take some good ass pictures with that one.

Okay, so it is some sort of an SD card. So are you an amateur photographer?

Steven Pinker (1:18)

I am, yes.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

Do you use actual photography? Do you develop your own photographs?

Steven Pinker (1:24)

No longer. So I am digital, as most photographers are these days, except for people into nostalgia and retro and hipster stuff.

But I do have a manual focus camera, so I am old school in that way. And I set my own aperture. I use a tripod when I can. So and I do take it seriously. I love the gadgets, but I also love thinking about visual experience. I started off as a psychologist studying visual cognition. And so I'm interested in how the brain perceives color and shape, what makes for an aesthetically pleasing image, what makes for a nice landscape, what makes for a nice portrait.

So it combines my love of gadgets with my love of visual cognition.

Joe Rogan (2:16)

There really is an art to it too.

The idea of just pressing a button and aiming a camera, people go, well, anyone can do that. But anyone doesn't have the sight of, the ability to frame it properly and figure out what angle to take and how to focus things and how to.

Steven Pinker (2:35)

Well, yeah, because you're taking a three-dimensional scene and a three-dimensional scene that changes as you move around, even as you shift your head from side to side, as you look at the scene through two eyes, so you get depth information from stereoscopic vision. You've got 180 degrees of visual angle, so you're always looking at a panorama. Then you're converting that into a two-dimensional rectangle. It's a restricted frame of what the world is. It's flat, unless you're into stereo photography, which I sometimes do as well, but generally it is flat.

It doesn't change when you move your head. So it's a two-dimensional object.

And so I think the art of photography is combining an appreciation of that part of the world that you are capturing with an aesthetically pleasing rectangle that has colors and shapes that would have to work if it was, even if it was just like an abstract rectangle of blobs of color, it's gotta work at that level. At the same time, it's a picture of something in the world. And combining those two different mindsets, like it's reality, but it's a flat rectangle. That's what the art of photography is.

Joe Rogan (3:48)

What is stereophotography?

Steven Pinker (3:50)

That's when you have two lenses, like we have two eyes. And so you take two photographs from slightly different vantage points, and then you view the pair of images through a viewer that allows your eyes to focus on the two, each eye to focus on its own image.

Joe Rogan (4:11)

Oh, so it's like a 3D movie type deal?

Steven Pinker (4:13)

Well, 3D movies, which were a fad, they were fad first in the 50s when Hollywood had to compete with TV. And of course, now they've been revived with IMAX. And they were huge in the 19th century. That was their equivalent of television. People would sit around with these wooden stereograph viewers, and they'd see side-by-side pictures that would pop into depth when they saw them through the viewer of the Eiffel Tower and the pyramids and the American West, the Grand Canyon.

And that was kind of the way the whole family or a bunch of friends coming over would amuse themselves in the 19th century.

Joe Rogan (4:52)

Is this supposed to be a visual, like a video representation of what that would look like, Jamie? Yeah, it's like taking a GIF and bouncing back and forth between the left and right photo, so you can sort of see it without the viewer.