Ignorance

Stuart Firestein examines why productive science depends on ignorance, unsuccessful experiments and uncertainty as well as established knowledge. The conversation considers research at the boundary of what is understood, the role of conjecture and testing, and the absence of a guaranteed method for making discoveries. It also asks how public understanding and science education can better represent the process of investigation.

…our mind's function to be aware of our ignorance is essential for abstract and conceptual reasoning. However, the biological mechanism to enable such a hierarchical thought, or meta-cognition, remained unknown. In the first part of the talk, I will demonstrate our studies on the neural mechanism for metacognition on memory in macaque monkeys. In reality, awareness of ignorance is essential not only for the retrospection of the past but also for the exploration of novel unfamiliar environments for the future. However, this proactive feature of