Judith Fan

A Stanford scientist on why the pencil might be humanity's most underrated technology.

Rigorous scientist with an artist's eye; warm and accessible. Making the invisible visible.

Judith Fan directs the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford, where she reverse-engineers the human cognitive toolkit — the drawings, diagrams, sketches and prototypes we think with rather than merely communicate with. She combines behavioral experiments with computational modeling, and holds appointments across psychology, education and computer science.

She is carrying forward the field Barbara Tversky — one of our long standing supporters and advisors at the Institute — built at Stanford: how action, gesture and sketching shape thought. That lineage is the most serious scientific account we have of the thinking that happens below the level of language, which is most of it.

Which makes this among the most consequential work we have at this year’s Summit. We are building machines to augment human thought while having only a partial account of how human thought works — particularly the part that happens when we do not experience ourselves as thinking at all. Fan is closing that gap with evidence, for humans and for machines at the same time.

You'll take away: a better understanding of your own mind, and a method. You will leave knowing why sketching a problem beats talking about it, and with a way to run that on your hardest question — this may be the most immediately usable science of the weekend.

ONE WATCH — her TEDAI talk: How the human mind will coevolve with AI.