The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

3. predict the effects of actions.” He has observed cooks leaving a knife or other utensil next to the ingredient to be used next, servin...

Experts make things easier for themselves by “partially jigging or informationally structuring the environment as they go along.”1

High-level performance is then to some degree a matter of being well situated, let us say. When we watch a cook who is hitting his flow, we see someone inhabiting the kitchen—a space for action that has in some sense become an extension of himself.

He spins on his heel, does a little I, Robot dance move, and seamlessly hits upon a task that fits into the extra, unanticipated forty-five seconds

it takes to get those peppers soft enough to add to the omelet that is just now skinning over. “I’m a machine!” He lets the servers know it. The busier it gets, the more “on” he is.

frontiers of cognitive science, in the (still somewhat dissident) movement toward a picture of human beings as having “extended” or “embedded” cognition. Andy Clark, one of the leading figures in the extended-mind literature, writes that “advanced cognition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political and institutional constraints.”2 Such constraints might be called cultural jigs.

A number of metaphors have been suggested: we “offload” some of our thinking onto our surroundings, or we incorporate objects in such a way that they come to act like prosthetics. The point is that to understand human cognition, it is a mistake to focus only on what goes on inside the skull, because our abilities are highly “scaffolded” by environmental props—by technologies and cultural practices, which become an integral part of our cognitive system.4

there is no clean division to be made between the narrowly “cognitive” capacity for mental concentration and the moral capacity for self-regulation.

We are not so much rational optimizers as creatures who rely on biases and crude heuristics for making important decisions.

Getting people to save money through administrative nudges such as the opt-out 401(k) plan is best seen not as a remedy for our failure to be rational as individuals, but as an attempt to compensate for the dismantling of those cultural jigs we once relied on to act (and think and feel) in ways that support thrift. The norms that cultural jigs express and reinforce tend to be reiterated, fractal-like, along different axes of social life; they are robust in that way. Together they make up a more or less coherent form of ethical life, for example Protestant republicanism. By contrast, administrative nudges are a thin attempt to get us to act as if we were virtuous, without any reference to character traits like self-control.

The studies that inform behavioral economics investigate an individual in the artificial setting of a university psychology lab, where the whole point is to isolate and control every variable. But this means she has been denuded of any environmental props she may rely on in everyday life. From the perspective of the extended-mind literature, it is not surprising that these studies show that we are poor reasoners in isolation. The fact that this artificial person has so little skill in practical reasoning is what authorizes the nudgers’ spirit of supervision.

Looking around in stunned silence, left and right eventually discovered common ground: a neoliberal consensus in which we have agreed to let the market quietly work its solvent action on all impediments to the natural chooser within.

Another way to put this is that the left’s project of liberation led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever “choice architect” brings the most energy to the task—usually because it sees the profit potential.

The combined effect of these liberating and deregulating efforts of the right and left has been to ratchet up the burden of self-regulation.7 Some indication of how well we are bearing this burden can be found in the fact that we a...

The effects of this have not been evenly distributed. To gain admission to the svelte, solvent middle class, and stay there, now requires extraordinary self-discipline. Such discipline is generally inculcated in families. Two self-disciplined people meet in graduate school, mate, and pass their disciplined ways on to their children. But ...

The point is that staying out of jail is much easier with money. The daunting complexity of the demands we have to comply with, and the opportunities for diversion that abound, add up to a pretty compelling case for just staying on the couch in a state of overstimulated avoidance. If you have ever sat in a municipal court waiting your turn to go before the judge, listening to other people’s woes, you know that “failure to appear” is the most common rap, and people are led off in handcuffs for this every day, the last step in a concatenation of fuckups that may have begun with their failure to complete some bureaucratic task.

The benefit was mostly one of providing a jig for hire that helped relieve students of the burden of self-regulation. It also helped to relieve parents of the burden of discipline. Parental authority was a central target of the sixties counterculture. Now we want to be our children’s best friends, and this is easier if you can outsource the discipline. Disciplining children is one of the most thankless tasks in a marriage, and a persistent source of resentment between many spouses. Thank God for professional help—especially if the legal and cultural barriers to divorce are low.

What is being reproduced is social capital—all those capacities, habits, relationships, and institutional certifications that a person needs to thrive. Such social capital seems to be more

tightly correlated with money capital than ever before. Maybe one reason for this is that the cultural jigs once relied on by the middle class have been widely dismantled, in the name of personal autonomy. (For example, the marital jig was weakened by the advent of no-fault divorce in the 1970s.) The costs and benefits of such autonomy don’t always accrue to the same parts of society, and I think that is because the disciplinary functions of culture have in fact not been dissolved so much as privatized. They are located less in a shared order of meaning such as Protestant thrift, parental authority, or injunctions against gluttony, and more in the professional nagging services provided by financial planners, tutors, and personal trainers.

2 EMBODIED PERCEPTION

The philosopher Michael Polanyi analyzed this moment when we achieve competence with a probe, and in doing so found that he had to use the word “attend” in a new formulation: you are now “attending from” the sensations in your hand to the objects at the probe’s tip; the sensations themselves you are only “subsidiarily aware of.” In this way “an interpretive effort transposes meaningless feelings into meaningful ones, and places these at some distance [i.e., the length of the probe] from the original ones. We become aware of the feelings in our hands in terms of their meaning … to which we are attending.” This meaning is located at the tip of the probe. The probe itself becomes transparent; it disappears. You are no longer engaged in an interpretive effort. The crucial fact that makes this integration of a prosthetic possible is that there is a closed loop between action and perception: what you perceive is determined by what you do, just as when we make use of our own hands. Let us go a little deeper into the mutual entanglement of action and perception.

These facts of experience present something of a puzzle if we understand perception simply as the brain’s response to stimulation. To preserve that view, one has to posit some mechanism by which the discrete perceptual profiles of the tree somehow get integrated into a whole by the brain; there must be some kind of “processing” that leads to a “representation” of the tree in the mind.3 The basic supposition in this, the standard view, is that vision may be understood by analogy with a still

photograph. The more rounded-out sense we have of the world is then taken to be the product of a dynamic 3-D modeling that our brains do, just like the software used by animation studios.

According to a school of thought that has been gaining traction in the last fifteen years, these facts—our embodiment, and the possibility of movement that our bodies provide—are no mere accessory to perception, but rather constitutive of the way we perceive. As one researcher puts it, “Perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.”4

James J. Gibson

Over the course of several decades’ research on visual perception, he began to chafe against the fundamental assumption that “sensory inputs are converted into perceptions by operations of the mind.” His 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception announced a subtle but important reconception of vision, not as the purely mental processing of sensory inputs, but rather as an activity in which we use

our body to “extract invariants from the stimulus flux.” In other words, one has to be able to explore a scene from different perspectives to perceive what remains the same about it—its nature and structure, regardless of perspective—and locomotion is an indispensable part of this process.5

Further, there is evidence that only self-motion accomplishes this; the visual system cannot develop if one is merely transported around, passively. In one of the earliest experiments in what would come to be called embodied cognition, ten pairs of kittens were reared in the dark, except for three hours per day that they spent in a carousel apparatus that allowed one twin to move freely, while the other was carried passively by the movements of the first. The active kitten could move up, down, away from, or toward the center of the carousel, as well as rotate in epicycles at the periphery of the carousel’s radius. The kittens could not see each other, and the surrounding environment was contrived so that both kittens received identical visual stimulation as they moved around; the only difference was that one moved itself, the other was passively carried. Th...

The still photograph turns out to be a poor metaphor for understanding visual perception, for the simple reason that the world is not still, nor are we in relation to it.6 This has far-reaching consequences, because some foundational concepts of standard cognitive psychology are predicated on the assumption that we can understand the eye by analogy with a camera, in isolation from the rest of the body. Nor is this a mere intramural fight between...

In the domain of visual perception, cognitive psychology set out to solve a certain puzzle: an indefinite variety of three-dimensional objects can project identical two-dimensional shapes on the retina of an observer. If static optical information is all that is available to the subject, then because such information underspecifies the shapes of surfaces, it follows that it must be supplemented with something else; something going on inside the head of the subject—namely, assumptions about the structure of the world. This is the motivation for thinking that perception involves an inferential process in the brain. This inference is taken to be computational. That is, “cognition consists in the manipulation of symbols, where these manipulations often involve the application of rules for the p...

A single retinal image is certainly not adequate to the task of specifying the world, but the visual stimulus received over time by an observer in motion is adequate, Gibson argues, and so on his account the whole motivation for conceiving perception as involving inference and computation collapses. This is completely revolutionary.8 The brain does not have to construct a representation of the world. The world is known to us because we live and act in it, and accumulate experience.

In his now-classic article “Intelligence Without Representation,” published in the journal Artificial Intelligence in 1991, Rodney Brooks wrote that “the world is its own best model.” Roboticists are learning a lesson that evolution learned long ago, namely, that the task of solving problems needn’t be accomplished solely by the brain, but can be distributed among the brain, the body, and the world.

The Gibsonian approach suggests we don’t need to do any such thing, whether consciously or subconsciously. And in fact what we do, it turns out, is run in such a way that the image of the ball appears to move in a straight line, at constant speed, against the visual background.9 It so happens that finding and exploiting this invariant, which is available in the optic flow if you run just right, puts you in the right spot to catch the ball. (The same strategy appears to be used by dogs who catch Frisbees, even on windy days.) You don’t need an inner model of the pseudo-parabolic trajectories that baseballs follow, with corrections for air resistance at different altitudes and so forth.

We think through the body. The fundamental contribution of this school of psychological research is that it puts the mind back in the world, where it belongs, after several centuries of being locked within our heads. The boundary of our cognitive processes cannot be cleanly drawn at the outer surface of our skulls, or indeed of our bodies more generally. They are, in a sense, distributed in the world that we act in.

This is an instance of “ecological control,” or “morphological computation,” in which “goals are not achieved by micromanaging every detail of the desired action or response but by making the most of robust, reliable sources of relevant order in the bodily or worldly environment of the controller,” as Clark writes. The “processing,” as it were, is partially taken over by the dynamics that are inherent in the interaction between the robot and its environment.

Friedrich Nietzsche said that joy is the feeling of one’s power increasing.

When we become competent in some skilled action, the very elements of the world that were initially sources of frustration become elements of a self that has expanded, by analogy with the way a toddler expands into his own body and comes to inhabit it comfortably. And this feels good.

Turning the handlebars briefly to the right makes the bike lean to the left because of gyroscopic precession, and it is the leaning that accomplishes the turning. (The reader may recall a classroom demonstration of gyroscopic precession involving a spinning bicycle wheel that one holds by its axle, while seated on a chair that is free to swivel. Tilting the axle—that is, trying to rotate it on a horizontal axis perpendicular to the axle itself—is hard to do, and makes the chair you are sitting in swivel on a vertical axis. It is a very weird experience; there seem to be demonic forces at work.)

The next time you see such a photo, look for the rider’s eyes. If they are visible

through the helmet’s visor, you will see them directed nearly perpendicular to the bike’s direction of travel, as the rider looks all the way through the corner.

This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it. This is not a superstitious motorcyclist’s version of Murphy’s Law; it is a reliable fact, and it reveals something deep ab...

Gibson’s work sheds light on all this. He suggested that the concept of an “ecological niche” is necessary to properly understand perception. A niche is not quite the same as a habitat. A niche “refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives.”12 It is not simply the physical surroundings, but the aspects of those surroundings that are meaningful for an animal given its way of life.13 When you live on two wheels, gyroscopic precession is as important a feature of your ecological niche as gravity.

Gibson’s most interesting and controversial point is that what we perceive, in everyday life, is not pure objects of the sort a disinterested observer would perceive, but rather “affordances.” The affordances of the environment are “what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.” Affordances elicit and guide action; Gibson suggests they also organize perception. Things in our environment show up in the vivid colors of good (for a motorcyclist: a median strip with a curb that is low enough that it could serve as an escape

route if things get hairy in front of you) and bad (the oily patches that are usually present in the center of a lane at an intersection, where cars drip fluids while idling). As Alva Noë puts it, “When we perceive,...

Our perception of these possibilities depends not only on the environmental situation, but also on a person’s skill set. A martial artist faced with a belligerent man at a bar sees the way the man is standing, and his distance, as affording certain strikes and foreclosing others, should it become necessary.15 Because of long practice and habituation, when he looks at the man’s stance, this is what he sees. He may also perceive the furniture nearby, and the objects lying within reach on the bar, i...

Affordances lie in the fit between an actor and his o...

(in this situation traction, not horsepower, is the limiting factor; in general, traction is “conserved” and must be judiciously allocated among lean angle, acceleration, and braking).

The philosopher Adrian Cussins writes about two different ways of knowing about speed.16 He relates the experience of riding his motorcycle around London, adjusting his speed in response to various weather and traffic conditions, and contrasts this with the way one knows one’s speed when one reads it off a dial or digital readout. In that case, speed is rendered as a number, and to learn the significance of this number one has to compare it with another number: the posted speed limit.

Cussins writes that “the great advantage of experiential content is that its links to action are direct, and do not need to be mediated by time-consuming—and activity-distancing—inferential work.”

Crucially, unlike the ecological experience, the symbolic representation of speed is “affect-neutral” (it isn’t scary), so it doesn’t prime the action programs (here, evasive maneuvers) that for an experienced rider have become integrated with his threat perception and have achieved a certain level of automaticity.