Benjamin Zinszer is currently a visiting assistant professor in the department of psychology and director of the CONE LAB (Cognitive Neuroscience of Language and Bilingualism). Before the interview, Zinszer reminisced on his time working with the campus newspaper during his college years, and how that experience would shape his areas of interest. Throughout the interview, he revealed the different routes and factors that eventually led him to his varied interests and his evolving meaning in research and teaching.
Shinz Jo Ooi: Your work spans different disciplines, including cognitive neuroscience and language learning. What inspired you to go into these areas in the first place and how did you combine these interests?
Benjamin Zinszer: I think there are a few latent factors, to borrow a statistical term, or a few underlying interests that have motivated many of the things that I’ve done, the topics I teach in cognitive neuroscience, and the work we do in the lab. It really is an example of the love I’ve always had for understanding how things work. Ever since I was very little, I liked taking things apart. While I was not so good at putting them back together, I tried understanding them from a mechanistic point of view. What is this complicated system that does something surprising, and what are the simple pieces and little things that go into making that happen?
Another side has been a fascination with language. I’ve always loved word games and enjoyed studying new languages in high school and college. I had some interest in journalism, so I spent a fair amount of time writing radio news.That was one of the places where I really got to explore the mechanisms of language, in the way that I was thinking about how these little chunks of words that I have worked together to make something really complicated, like a news story. I wanted to understand language in a deterministic way, which is in some sense, a bit optimistic or a bit naive. It was the perspective that I brought when I had a complicated task in front of me, like taking a huge news story or something with lots of content, nuance and emotion, then reducing it down to two sentences I can read out loud on the radio for someone driving their car, and have them get the gist of it without misleading them.
I also took a debate course in college, and I really enjoyed that. I wanted to think about argumentation and the way that we use language to build up a syllogism and to convey what we think is a necessary conclusion through this kind of messy, complicated system of language. That’s taken many shapes in all the research that I’ve done, but it’s always underlyingly been “Can I see how this thing works, especially in the context of communication and language?”
If you ask somebody to define a cup, you get all sorts of interesting definitions, but none of them really capture the way that the person makes decisions on a day-to-day basis. It’s hard for people to reflect on everything that the word cup elicits from you, so I got into neuroimaging in part as a way to get a measure. What is your biology doing under the hood? I use those two stories to inform each other and have been presented with opportunities to work on things in language and brain imaging that might have nothing to do with my initial question, but they look interesting. And how can you say no to a puzzle?
SJO: Personally, being interested in bilingualism, I was wondering about the underlying factors that brought you into researching this topic.
BZ: One of the things probably shared among many people in academics is that the work you end up doing is in part the things you intended to do, the things you planned out from the beginning, and then just the good luck of where you landed in a moment. My work in bilingualism is definitely the synthesis of those two things. Everything I’ve explained about trying to understand how to communicate an idea, and how to think of argument and meaning in a mechanistic way were what I aimed to do when going to graduate study. I was very lucky that I landed in a community of researchers who specialized in bilingualism.
If you speak more than one language, you have no shortage of examples of times when you knew the word that you wanted for something, and you could picture what it was, but then you jumped over to your other language and you couldn’t quite fit another word onto the template of the thing that you wanted to communicate. One language tells you you can think of these objects in one way, but here’s another language that presents these things in a totally different way that is equally natural and obvious to people who are in the situation of knowing both. It’s something that affects at least half of the world, depending on how you estimate or define bilingualism.
That’s an interesting problem in its own right. It’s like driving a wedge into a language machine and saying “Here’s a fun way we can jam up the machine in a way that many people experience in everyday life, and see how it works. What do the parts do when you give them conflicting input?”
SJO: Do you have any research or books or projects that you’re working on right now or plan to work on?
BZ: The project I’m most excited about is the work that I’m doing today, where we’re simulating this collision between two languages by working to understand someone’s language in a very deep and nuanced way. We ask them what certain things should be called, show them dozens of objects while varying tiny aspects of those objects, then build up probabilistic or distributional models of how we apply a label to different things you drink out of or different vehicles you ride. Then, we use that nuanced knowledge to build a language that is annoying and conflicting and could totally be real, which violates those existing sorts of biases. In a short learning experiment, we introduce this new language which, for example, uses some made-up word to label all cars, which is different from another word we use for trucks. We then see how that affects them. Can they learn and pivot quickly from that ambiguous situation and categorize that ambiguous item along with the group of objects?
This has actually been the closest I’ve ever come to doing the research I proposed to do when I was applying to graduate programs sixteen years ago. I was thinking about the kinds of research we as psychologists can do in the laboratory, and how I can use our understanding and our paradigms for studying learning to get at these communication-oriented and linguistic questions of how words convey meaning and change the internal state of a person. I’ve played with that idea on and off for a long time, but could never quite clinch it, and now we’re doing that work.
To be honest, I really did not expect it to work out. I just needed to answer the questions that have motivated me over the years, so when we started running these experiments last spring, I was shocked to see them working. I think we are starting to get at the mechanism and starting to see how these pieces of language play out in real-time for people, even in a contrived task. So that’s what I’m really, really excited about now.
SJO: On a related note, what has been one source or moment that’s been the greatest pride of your academic career?
BZ: It’s hard to pick a moment, but one of the things I’ve been experiencing regularly and is on the top of my mind now, just because of the season, is the feeling that I experience writing recommendation letters. It’s such a unique exercise in academics. I can’t speak for everybody necessarily, but many of us get into science because we love to do it. We’re just personally motivated by curiosity and questions and the joy we find in the process, but often the reality of doing that work can be onerous, and sometimes it can be very negative. We criticize each other’s work as a necessary step.
The recommendation letters are different. It’s an opportunity for me to think deeply about the people whom I’m working with, particularly students whom I’ve invested a lot of my time in. The same things that bring me to science bring me to teaching and mentoring, such as the curiosity to see what this person [will] do, and the joy of seeing them doing work and doing something that I maybe had never thought about. I love writing recommendation letters, and get so much pride in getting to reflect on the best things about a person. It’s one of the peripheral things about the job, but it’s one of the reliably joyful things. In the privacy of my own office, I can sit and be proud and take a little credit. I don’t have to say that in the letter, but writing these letters has been an enormous source of pride for me, and very motivating. It’s nice to have that moment to be explicit about it, and not just to feel grateful or proud on any given day, but to spend some time sitting down and focusing on that exact thing for a while.
SJO: Do you have a favorite class that you’ve taught at Swarthmore?
BZ: It’s tough to choose because the class I’m teaching on a given day or any given semester is the one that’s exciting to me right now.
I think it’s actually not a coincidence that what I study is the systematic way we build meaning, and communicate complex ideas, and that’s what I love about teaching. What makes me excited is to have some content that I feel brings me back to the studio, where I have a story I need to convey, and I have a limited amount of time to get it across. I know my audience doesn’t need everything, but they need the right amount of information. How do I distill information down to the useful parts that will be clear and still true after the simplification? This is what excites me about teaching in general.
So what am I teaching right now that I’m really excited about? Maybe this is also my favorite course. It’s my Computational Methods in Psychology and Neuroscience course, partly because behind the curtain is maybe the most complex material that I have to contend with. I have to know my audience, know the right words, and build up the pieces that’ll create a message. It’s a very personal course for me too, because it’s the story of my professional journey. I’ve had to learn all of these things in order to do my job, and that’s not always been easy. Some of the most difficult moments in my early career as an undergraduate student were in the quantitative courses and math courses, and I wish somebody was communicating those ideas in a language I understood. So this is my chance to do it in a way that is accessible and meaningful. Another really exciting aspect is taking the complex skills of signal processing and computational simulation and applying them to answer questions about biological systems in neuroscience, people and their behavior, perceptions, and real-life experiences.
SJO: Finally, do you have a fun fact you want to share?
BZ: I had an indirect route to what I’m doing now. I worked in emergency services as a telecommunicator, basically communicating information between people who are working in the field of delivering equipment to disasters and organizing information in an emergency operations center. None of these sound like fun facts, but it was really fun and fulfilling for me.
Doing this kind of work definitely influenced the way I think about my research. I still picture what I would say if I had five seconds on a walkie-talkie and I needed them to know the right place to go, and I couldn’t tolerate mistakes because safety is a factor. Maybe you, as a reader, are not going to do these things. You have your own experiences, or might not know where your next professional step will be, but you’re learning things, and getting experiences that can motivate your work. In my case, it happened to be about clear communication. I hope it’s made me a better teacher, and it shapes the way I think about these kinds of problems.
SJO: Before we wrap up, is there any additional information you want to share with the readers?
BZ: I would say to reflect on those opportunities to find motivation. I love the work of Cal Newport, who in addition to being a computer scientist, also writes about motivation and doing meaningful work. Something I’ve always taken away from his writing, which is also something that has proven true for me, is to not overly focus on intense passion.
We often come to or leave college searching for passion or something that’s so deeply moving, provocative, and emotional for us that we’re going to make our career doing this thing. In some ways, that can be true, but often that motivation is made, and there are many unexpected opportunities to do so. From writing news to giving instructions over the radio for how to find locations, I wasn’t thinking yet about being a cognitive neuroscientist. I was thinking about the problem at hand and how much I wanted to do a good job there. But in retrospect, I’ve learned the significance of those moments towards what I’m doing now. I’m sure if we talked in five years or ten years from now, I’d reflect on the things that I’m doing now in a completely different light, and how important they have been to the thing I’m doing then.
So often, when students come in for advising, we talk about interests and goals and I love to talk about the passion trap. Don’t get too caught up finding that thing that’s super important to you that’s going to shape the rest of your life. If you have that, of course, indulge it, use it, pursue it, but at the same time, you’re going to find that meaning is a moving target. You’re building that meaning and it’s transforming. So take opportunities to reflect on something that didn’t seem important to find it in a new light.
And lastly, back to something I said when we were talking about the things that I struggled with. At the moment, things like linear algebra were really difficult, but later, they became so core to what I was doing in my work. Suddenly, a course that made me question what I was pursuing in my education and career became so intuitive to me in a new context, when it was a tool that I was using in my work. Suddenly meaning could be found in the very same exercises that I was struggling to wrap my head around at the time. So take those good things with you, let them grow with you and transform you. But also take the bad things, the things that are discouraging right now. Keep them as tools, because you never know if you might find that it takes on a positive meaning for you in a new context.
