The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

First, there is the study of embodied cognition, which explores the role of the body in our thinking: for example, how making hand gestures increases the fluency of our speech and deepens our understanding of abstract concepts.

Second, there is the study of situated cognition, which examines the influence of place on our thinking: for instance, how environmental cues that convey a sense of belonging, or a sense of personal control, enhance our performance in that space.

distributed cognition, which probes the effects of thinking with others—such as how people working in groups can coordinate their individual areas of expertise (a process called “transactive memory”), and how groups can work together to produce results that exceed their members’ i...

Elements of the world outside may effectively act as mental “extensions,” allowing us to think in ways our brains could not manage on their own.

The notion of the extended mind seized my imagination and has not yet released its grip. During my many years of reporting, I had never before encountered an idea that changed so much about how I think, how I work, how I parent, how I navigate everyday life.

As long as we settle for thinking inside the brain, we’ll remain bound by the limits of that organ. But when we reach outside it with intention and skill, our thinking can be transformed. It can become as dynamic as our bodies, as airy as our spaces, as rich as our relationships—as capacious as the whole wide world.

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.

It’s true that we’re more accustomed to thinking about our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships. But we can also think with and through them—by

The human brain is limited in its ability to pay attention, limited in its capacity to remember, limited in its facility with abstract concepts, and limited in its power to persist at a challenging task.

Scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould once included in his list of “the oldest issues and errors of our philosophical traditions” our persistent inclination “to order items by ranking them in a linear series of increasing worth.”

The belief that some core quantity of intelligence resides within each of our heads fits with a pattern of thought, apparently universal in humans, that psychologists call “essentialism”—that is, the conviction that each entity we encounter possesses an inner essence that makes it what it is.

Our brains, it might be said, are like magpies, fashioning their finished products from the materials around them, weaving the bits and pieces they find into their trains of thought.

thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. For another: the kinds of materials available to “think with” affect the nature and quality of the thought that can be produced. And last: the capacity to think well—that is, to be intelligent—is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them.

David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, makes a useful distinction between “biologically primary” and “biologically secondary” abilities.

we dwell in a world where such biologically secondary capacities hold the key to advancement, even survival. The demands of the modern environment have now met, and exceeded, the limits of the biological brain.

The mind does not stop at the standard “demarcations of skin and skull,” they argued. Rather, it is more accurately viewed as “an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources.”

experts are those who have learned how best to marshal and apply extra-neural resources to the task before them. This alternative perspective has real implications for how we understand and cultivate superior performance.

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.

Interoception is, simply stated, an awareness of the inner state of the body.

when a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information.

The body not only grants us access to information that is more complex than what our conscious minds can accommodate. It also marshals this information at a pace that is far quicker than our conscious minds can handle.

Research shows that the simple act of giving a name to what we’re feeling has a profound effect on the nervous system, immediately dialing down the body’s stress response.

it works the other way around: we feel fear because our heart is racing, because our palms are sweating, because our legs are propelling us forward. As he put it: “Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.” But, he went on, “this order of sequence is incorrect.” It would be more accurate, wrote James, to say that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.”

equipped with interoceptive awareness, we can get in on the ground floor of emotion construction; we can participate in creating the type of emotion we experience.

the act of reappraisal allowed students to redirect the mental resources that previously were consumed by anxiety, applying them to the math problems instead.

reappraisal works best for those who are interoceptively aware: we have to be able to identify our internal sensations, after all, before we can begin to modify the way we think about them.

the sensations we’re actually feeling have to be congruent with the emotion we’re aiming to construct.

When people can’t engage in such mimicking, they have a harder time figuring out what others are feeling. A striking example: people injected with the wrinkle reducer Botox, which works by inducing mild paralysis of the muscles used to generate facial expressions, are less accurate in their perceptions of others’ emotions—presumably because they can’t simulate others’ feelings within themselves.

the capacity to regulate our attention and our behavior is a limited resource, and some of it is used up by suppressing the very natural urge to move.

The brains of kids with ADHD appear to be chronically under-aroused; in order to muster the mental resources needed to tackle a difficult assignment, they may tap their fingers, jiggle their legs, or bounce in their seats.

Though we imagine that we can manage our mental activity from within our heads, it’s often more effective to employ the movements of our bodies for that purpose—to engage in what she calls “embodied self-regulation.”

It’s as if we use fidgeting to remind ourselves that we are more than just a brain—that we have a body, too, replete with rich capacities for feeling and acting. Thinking while moving brings the full range of our faculties into play.

“As I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”

Scientists have a term for the “void” Murakami describes: “transient hypofrontality.” Hypo means low or diminished, and frontality refers to the frontal region of the brain—the part that plans, analyzes, and critiques, and that usually maintains firm control over our thoughts and behavior. When all of our resources are devoted to managing the demands of intense physical activity, however, the influence of the prefrontal cortex is temporarily reduced. In this loose hypofrontal mode, ideas and impressions mingle more freely; unusual and unexpected thoughts arise.

Linking movement to the material to be recalled creates a richer and therefore more indelible “memory trace” in the brain. In addition, movements engage a process called procedural memory (memory of how to do something, such as how to ride a bike) that is distinct from declarative memory (memory of informational content, such as the text of a speech).

information is better remembered when we’re moving as we learn it.

information that has become associated with a movement is better remembered when we can reproduce that same movement later, when we’re calling it up from memory.

The research on using movement to enhance thinking identifies four types of helpful motion: congruent movements, novel movements, self-referential movements, and metaphorical movements.

Congruent movements are an effective way to reinforce still tentative or emerging knowledge by introducing a corporeal component into the process of understanding and remembering. A familiar example is moving the body along a number line: children who are learning about math benefit from taking steps on an oversized number line placed on the floor as they count or as they carry out procedures like addition and subtraction.

Yet the fact is that—very unlike computers—humans solve problems most effectively by imagining themselves into a given scenario, a project that is made easier if the human in question has had a previous physical encounter on which to base her mental projections.

Research has found that the act of self-reference—connecting new knowledge to our own identity or experience—functions as a kind of “integrative glue,” imparting a stickiness that the same information lacks when it is encountered as separate and unrelated to the self.

The language we use is full of metaphors that borrow from our experience as embodied creatures; metaphorical movements reverse-engineer this process, putting the body through the motions as a way of prodding the mind into the state the metaphor describes.

Such experiments suggest we can activate a particular cognitive process by embodying the metaphor that has come to be associated with it.

Researchers who study embodied cognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and convey their thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of the hands and the rest of the body. Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch.

gesture generates the sense that an as yet immaterial enterprise is a palpable reality in the present moment.

Such adept use of movement includes the presentation of “symbolic gestures”—movements that capture the overall meaning of the speaker’s message—along with what are called “beat gestures”: hand motions that serve to punctuate a particular point.

Research shows that we all engage in such “gestural foreshadowing,” in which our hands anticipate what we’re about to say.

Indeed, researchers have documented a link between a child’s rate of gesturing at fourteen months and the size of that same child’s vocabulary at four and a half years of age.

While moving our hands around, we may find that our gestures summon insights of which we had previously been unaware; psychologist Barbara Tversky has likened gesturing to a “virtual diagram” we draw in the air, one we can use to stabilize and advance our emerging understanding.

people who gesture as they teach on video, it’s been found, speak more fluently and articulately, make fewer mistakes, and present information in a more logical and intelligible fashion.