The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Designed gestures offer another benefit as well: they are especially effective at reinforcing our memory.

studies show that when people are given challenging problems to solve but are prohibited from using pencil and paper, they gesture more to compensate.)

We like the capacity to see long distances in many directions from a protected perch, aspects that geographer Jay Appleton memorably named “prospect” and “refuge.”

“Rumination” is psychologists’ term for the way we may fruitlessly visit and revisit the same negative thoughts. On our own, we can find it difficult to pull ourselves out of this cycle—but exposure to nature can extend our ability to adopt more productive thought patterns.

Nature is complex, it’s true, but its complexity is of a kind that our brains are readily able to process. When we’re surrounded by nature, we experience a high degree of “perceptual fluency,” notes Yannick Joye, a senior researcher at the ISM University of Management and Economics in Lithuania. Basking in such ease gives our brains a rest, Joye explains, and also makes us feel good; we react with positive emotion when information from our environment can be absorbed with little effort.

“Natural environments are characterized by a deep degree of perceptual predictability and redundancy, whereas urban scenes tend to consist of perceptually divergent objects,”

workers in the district’s main office were found to score 10 to 25 percent higher on tests of mental function and memory recall when they had the best possible view versus having no view.

For adults as well, spending time in nature can promote innovative thinking. Scientists theorize that the “soft fascination” evoked by natural scenes engages what’s known as the brain’s “default mode network.” When this network is activated, we enter a loose associative state in which we’re not focused on any one particular task but are receptive to unexpected connections and insights.

In behavioral terms, people act more prosocially and more altruistically following an experience of awe.

To attend for hours at a time to words, numbers, and other symbolic content is a tall order for our brains. Maintaining this intensely narrow focus is a highly unnatural activity, and our minds require external structure in order to pull it off.

In an effort to master our interpersonal world, we’re constantly making predictions about what will unfold in the social exchanges that go on around us. Our habit of projecting forward makes it especially hard for us to tune out one-sided conversations, such as those we hear when others near us are talking on the phone.

When we’re on our home turf, Meagher has found, our mental and perceptual processes operate more efficiently, with less need for effortful self-control. The mind works better because it doesn’t do all the work on its own; it gets an assist from the structure embedded in its environment, structure that marshals useful information, supports effective habits and routines, and restrains unproductive impulses.

The size of such effects is large enough to make any employer sit up and take notice: three people working in empowered offices accomplished almost as much as four people in lean offices.

It’s certainly the case that the nature of today’s work demands frequent consultation and cooperation with others. What we may not realize is that good work also requires periods of abstention from such exchanges—a phenomenon that organizational psychologists call “intermittent collaboration.”

As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written, we keep certain objects in view because “they tell us things about ourselves that we need to hear in order to keep our selves from falling apart.”

Cheryan called the phenomenon documented in her study “ambient belonging,” defined as individuals’ sense of fit with a physical environment, “along with a sense of fit with the people who are imagined to occupy that environment.”

Research has revealed that the act of creating a concept map, on its own, generates a number of cognitive benefits. It forces us to reflect on what we know, and to organize it into a coherent structure. As we construct the concept map, the process may reveal gaps in our understanding of which we were previously unaware. And, having gone through the process of concept mapping, we remember the material better—because we have thought deeply about its meaning.

Smaller displays, meanwhile, encourage a narrower visual focus, and consequently more limited thinking.

So external representations are more definite than internal ones—and yet, in another sense, they are also more usefully ambiguous.

“It is because we are so prone to think that the mental action is all, or nearly all, on the inside, that we have developed sciences and images of the mind that are, in a fundamental sense, inadequate.”

Collins and his coauthors identified four features of apprenticeship that could be adapted to the demands of knowledge work: modeling, or demonstrating the task while explaining it aloud; scaffolding, or structuring an opportunity for the learner to try the task herself; fading, or gradually withdrawing guidance as the learner becomes more proficient; and coaching, or helping the learner through difficulties along the way.

experts habitually engage in “chunking,” or compressing several tasks into one mental unit. This frees up space in the expert’s working memory, but it often baffles the novice, for whom each step is new and still imperfectly understood.

We are, that is, continually expected to think about abstract symbols for the benefit of an abstract audience, an expectation that overlooks our actual strength. Humans are not especially good at thinking about concepts; our ability to think about people, however, is superlative.

Explaining oneself while being recorded, he notes, measurably increases the explainers’ physiological arousal—a state that is associated with enhanced memory, attention, and alertness.

Far from being frivolous or unserious, social interaction is a vital complement to intellectual activity, activating aptitudes and capabilities that might otherwise remain unused. But because the brainbound approach to cognition regards information as information, no matter how it is encountered, the social element of thinking is often sacrificed in the name of efficiency and convenience. The spread of technology into education and the workplace has reinforced this tendency, as students are asked to learn mathematical operations from Khan Academy videos and employees are expected to train themselves using online resources. But technology could be used in another fashion: to promote the kind of in-person social exchanges that do so much to extend our mental capacities.

We have every incentive to closely examine the arguments of others—who might be out to exploit or manipulate us for their own ends—but few inducements to scrutinize the arguments we make ourselves.

according to David Johnson, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. It is “a general rule of teaching,” he has written, “that if an instructor does not create an intellectual conflict within the first few minutes of class, students won’t engage with the lesson.”

Conflict creates uncertainty—who’s wrong? who’s right?—an ambiguity that we feel compelled to resolve by acquiring more facts.

This “depersonalized” approach, as other educational psychologists have called it, fails to take advantage of the distinctive power wielded by narrative. Cognitive scientists refer to stories as “psychologically privileged,” meaning they are granted special treatment by our brains. Compared to other informational formats, we attend to stories more closely.

Synchronized movement acts as an invitation to work together, along with an assurance that such work will be productive.

Synchronization sweeps us up into what one researcher calls a “social eddy,” in which the press of our individual interests is diminished and the performance of the group becomes paramount. When we are carried along by the social eddy, cooperation with others feels smooth, almost effortless.

By one year of age, a baby will reliably look in the direction of an adult’s gaze, even absent the turning of the adult’s head. Such gaze-following is made easier by the fact that people have visible whites of the eyes. Humans are the only primates so outfitted, an exceptional status that has led scientists to propose the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—the theory that our eyes evolved to support cooperative social interactions. “Our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen,” notes science writer Ker Than.

researchers recommend that we implement a specific sequence of actions in response to our teammates’ contributions: we should acknowledge, repeat, rephrase, and elaborate on what other group members say. Studies show that engaging in this kind of communication elicits more complete and comprehensive information.

Over the past few decades, psychologists have confirmed Wegner’s claim that a robust transactive memory system effectively multiplies the amount of information each group member has. Members of such groups are able to work on deepening their own areas of expertise while still remaining in contact, through their colleagues, with a broader range of relevant information.

Students learned the material faster and performed better on exams when they participated in the jigsaw exercise; they also developed greater empathy and respect for their classmates. In the Austin-area schools where the jigsaw classroom was implemented, racial tensions diminished, absenteeism declined, and students reported more favorable attitudes toward school.

whenever possible, we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world.

whenever possible, we should endeavor to transform information into an artifact, to make data into something real—and then proceed to interact with it, labeling it, mapping it, feeling it, tweaking it, showing it to others.

whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor.

whenever possible, we should take measures to re-embody the information we think about.

whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about.

whenever possible, we should take measures to re-socialize the information we think about.

whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.

we are “intrinsically loopy creatures,” as Clark likes to say.

whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by creating cognitively congenial situations.

We’ll elicit improved performance from the brain when we approach it with the aim not of issuing orders but of creating situations that draw out the desired result.

whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments.

“People are applying an underappreciated wealth of strategies to solve problems—underappreciated, in part, because people are not good at describing their own thought processes. They often don’t have conscious access to their strategies—but they are using them nonetheless. We’re interested in studying people over time to see if they can develop more sophisticated strategies.”

“Much more than we usually recognize, humans use their environment to solve problems—an environment that is both material and social,” says Bocanegra. “When you see things that way, it starts to seem very silly to think that we can measure intelligence as some internal, intrinsic, individual quality.”