Joe Rogan Experience #1743 - Stephen Pinker

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

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So I was saying, I had, uh, you, 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.

No.

But it was a, I think it was one megapixel, and it was about the size of this book, County Mon- Count of Monty Christo book. That's it right there.

Oh, okay, I don't remember that.

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.

This one?

Yeah, that's the one I had.

Okay. 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-

Mm-hmm.

... I wanna say. Yeah. And that was a big deal. (laughs) I mean, I don't know what the megapixels were, but I, I seem to remember it was, like, one.

Could've been one, yeah, I think that makes sense.

Yeah, 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, uh, an amateur photographer?

I am, yes.

Yeah.

(laughs)

Do you use actual pho- photography? Do you do, like, do you develop your own photographs?

No longer. So I am digital-

Ah.

... as most pe- most photographers are these days, except for, uh, people into nostalgia and, you know, retro and-

Yeah.

... and hipster stuff. Uh, but I, I do have a manual focus camera, so I am old school in, in that way.

Oh.

And, uh, I set my own aperture. I use a tripod when I can. So, uh, and I, I do take it seriously. I love the gadgets, but I also love thinking about visual experience. Uh, I started off as a psychologist studying visual cognition.

Ah.

And so I'm interested in how the brain perceives color and, uh, shape, what makes for an aesthetically-pleasing image, what makes for a nice landscape, what makes for a nice portrait. Uh, so it combines my love of gadgets with my love of visual cognition.

There really is an art to it, too. You know, the idea of just pressing a button and aiming a camera. People go, "Well, any one could do that." But anyone doesn't have the, the sight of... the ability to, like, frame it properly and figure out what angle to take and how to, how to focus things and how to...

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, you look at the scene through two eyes, so you get depth information from stereoscopic vision. You've got 180 degrees of, of visual angle, so you're always looking at a panorama. Then you're converting that into a, uh, two-dimensional rectangle that's a restricted, uh, uh, frame of what the world is. It's, uh, flat, unless you're into stereo photography, which I sometimes do as well. But, you know, generally, it, it is flat. Um, it doesn't change when you move your head. So it's a two-dimensional object, and so the, I think the art of photography is combining an appreciation of that part of the world that you are capturing with a, 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, 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, it's a flat rectangle.