The Things We Think With

"Evocative objects" can deepen our understanding and strengthen our memory.

Leah Price is a professor of English at Rutgers University who studies the history of reading. For years she has led her students through an unusual exercise: the class is directed to meet up in the university library, where students take turns wrapping a dish towel around their eyes.

“Each has a chance to stumble to the wall, blindman’s-bluff-like, to pull down a volume at random, and to take twenty questions from the rest of the class,” Price writes in her own book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading.

“How much friction does your hand encounter when it runs along the page? Which surfaces are slipperiest, which pages noisiest? (Plates sandwiched in the middle scream biography; the tissue paper that covers illustrations has a different ‘rattle,’ as the technical term goes, than printed paper.) Where in the book do the edges feel sharpest? (Monographs crisp progressively as readers lose interest, but students recognize reference books by the limp pages periodically punctuating unread neighbors.) Will the book stay open as you take notes, or are two hands needed to flatten the page spread? Does it seem to be bound for posterity or for the trash can?”

This activity, Price observes, “jolts students who love losing themselves in an imaginary universe back into an awareness of their own physical surroundings, beginning with the sight and sound and feel of the object in their hands.” Its aim, she told me, is to “induce students to slow down,” and to begin to appreciate books as material objects, not just as vehicles for text.

Her course on the history of the book is full of such hands-on activities: students take notes with a tongue depressor on a clay tablet, and with a piece of chalk on a slate; they typeset and hand-print a valentine; they “plunge their hands into a vat of pulp,” as Price gleefully describes it, on a field trip to a paper factory.

When the pandemic forced her course online, she found ways to keep material objects at the heart of a now-mostly-digital experience: students blindfolded themselves at home and took down a book from their own shelves, feeling it and describing it aloud for the benefit of their classmates on Zoom; they created zines at their kitchen tables and sent them to each other via snail mail.

Price’s class is back to meeting in person, but she frets about the lingering effects of the move to digital instruction. “A concern I have about remote education is that a lot of people seem to understand it as entirely visually focused. There’s an idea that learning online means staring at the screen all day—reading digitized text, or looking out at a grid of impassive faces,” she said in our interview.

“One of the things I mind the most about Zoom teaching is the feeling that everyone is always in full face. No one is in profile. There's this kind of Clockwork Orange looking-forward, as opposed to the kinds of movements in space that you get in a classroom if you encourage students to circulate around objects. I think that’s an unnecessary impoverishment of what remote learning could be, and my worry is that after this pandemic, that understanding of remote learning will remain.”

The notion that interacting with material objects enhances students’ learning is supported by a wide range of evidence showing that such encounters heighten attention, deepen understanding, and strengthen memory. Here are a few reasons why this is so:

Material objects seize attention. Students’ focused attention inevitably wanes over the course of a lesson—but change and novelty powers it up again. Introducing a material object, and allowing students to explore it with all their senses, can inject new energy into a class that is growing restless or drowsy. (See the first chapter of Daniel Willingham’s classic book Why Don’t Students Like School?—now in a new edition!)

Material objects relieve cognitive load. Students may be impeded in their efforts to understand or explain a new concept because the technical language they must use to describe it imposes too great a cognitive load. When referring to a material object, students can simply point to parts or processes that they can’t yet name, allowing them to engage in more mature discourse than would otherwise be possible at this early stage of their studies. (See this work by Wolff-Michael Roth.)

Material objects engage multiple senses. The human brain evolved to operate in environments in which many senses are stimulated at once: not just our visual sense, but also our senses of smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Multisensory encounters of the kind one can have with a material object support the creation of robust memories: The more sensory “hooks” our memory can sink into an experience, the easier it will be to reel in that memory later on. (See this work by Ladan Shams and Aaron Seitz.)

Material objects promote shared attention. The awareness that we are focusing on a particular stimulus along with other people leads our brains to endow that stimulus with special significance, tagging it as especially important. We then allocate more mental bandwidth to that material, processing it more deeply. (See this work by Garriy Shteynberg and Evan Apfelbaum.)

Material objects elicit gesture. Students are more likely to gesture when they have something to gesture at—a chart, a diagram, a map, a model, a photograph, or some other physical artifact. Gesturing, in turn, improves students’ ability to grasp abstract concepts, understand complex processes, and remember learned information. (See this work by Wolff-Michael Roth.)

Material objects generate interactivity. When students employ the physical manipulation of tactile objects as an aid to solving abstract problems, they bear less cognitive load and enjoy increased working memory. They learn more, and are better able to transfer their learning to new situations. They are more motivated and engaged, and experience less anxiety. They even arrive at correct answers more quickly. (See this work by Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau and Gaëlle Vallée-Tourangeau.)

The MIT professor Sherry Turkle offers one more reason to incorporate material objects into instruction: “Objects bring together thought and feelings,” she writes in the introduction to an edited volume published in 2007, titled Evocative Objects. The book collects passionate paeans to particular objects written by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers. Each essay is a testament to Turkle’s theme: “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.”

What kinds of evocative objects could kindle such love in our students, and in ourselves?