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.

Moderate-intensity exercise, practiced for a moderate length of time, improves our ability to think both during and immediately after the activity.

It seems that enacting the “story” told within the math problem helps students identify the information important for its solution: enacting made them 35 percent less likely to be distracted by irrelevant numbers or other details included in the problem.

Young children encounter new words in a rich sensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch the shiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh and smelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing from the second-language classroom.

“ ‘Doses of nature’ might serve as a safe, inexpensive, widely accessible new tool in the tool kit for managing ADHD symptoms,” the researchers concluded.

research has found that using a smartphone while outside “substantially counteracts the attention enhancement effects” of being in nature.

Several decades ago, he demonstrated that exposure to nature relieved pain and promoted healing in patients recovering from surgery.

Indeed, research shows that people who experience natural light during the day sleep better, feel more energetic, and are more physically active; one study found that employees exposed to daylight through windows in their offices sleep an average of forty-six minutes more per night than workers who labor in windowless spaces.

Allen found that fifty meters (about 165 feet) was the cutoff point for regular information exchange; beyond that distance, routine communication effectively ceased. People who are located close to one another are more likely to encounter one another, and it’s these encounters that spark informal exchanges, interdisciplinary ideas, and fruitful collaborations.

Online communication, it seems, is no substitute for the offhand conversation, the casual exchange carried out in person.

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.

Researchers have demonstrated, for instance, that intentionally imitating someone’s accent allows us to comprehend more easily the words the person is speaking (a finding that might readily be applied to second-language learning).

Emmanuel Roze has found that the experience of imitating patients makes the young doctors he trains more empathetic, as well as more comfortable with the signs of their patients’ disorders.

Although it can feel good to chart our own course, he says, we often perform better when we copy someone more experienced and more knowledgeable than ourselves.

Second: imitators can draw from a wide variety of solutions instead of being tied to just one. They can choose precisely the strategy that is most effective in the current moment, making quick adjustments to changing conditions.

The third advantage of imitation: copiers can evade mistakes by steering clear of the errors made by others who went before them, while innovators have no such guide to potential pitfalls.

Last, and perhaps most important, imitators save time, effort, and resources that would otherwise be invested in originating their own solutions. Research shows that the imitator’s costs are typically 60 to 75 percent of those borne by the innovator—and yet it is the imitator who consistently captures the lion’s share of financial returns.

Research has shown that, across disciplines, experts look in ways different from novices: they take in the big picture more rapidly and completely, while focusing on the most important aspects of the scene; they’re less distracted by visual “noise,” and they shift more easily among visual fields, avoiding getting stuck.

A major factor in the grad students’ transformation, he concluded, was their experience of intense social engagement around a body of knowledge—the hours they spent advising, debating with, and recounting anecdotes to one another.

Students no longer sat silently in rows; instead they huddled together in clusters, debating the solution to a challenging physics problem Wieman had posed. While the deliberations went on, Wieman and his teaching assistants circulated around the room, listening for misconceptions and offering feedback.

Playing against another human produced a richer experience, neurologically speaking, than playing against a computer. Other studies have found that areas of the brain involved in planning and anticipation, and in feeling empathy, are more active when we are playing against a human as compared to a computer.

students who learn information in preparation for teaching someone else review the material more intensively and organize it more thoroughly in their own minds than do students who are learning the same information in order to take a test.

Engaging in active debate puts us in the position of evaluating others’ arguments, not simply constructing (and promoting) our own. Such objective analysis, unclouded by self-interested confirmation bias, makes the most of humans’ discriminating intelligence.

A substantial body of research shows that behavioral synchrony—coordinating our actions, including our physical movements, so that they are like the actions of others—primes us for what we might call cognitive synchrony: multiple people thinking together efficiently and effectively.

Studies conducted with adults show the same: moving in sync makes us better collaborators.