The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

we think best when we think with our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships.

research in the vein of the extended mind finds that experts actually do more experimenting, more testing, and more backtracking than beginners.

asking each one to identify the successive moments when he felt his heart beat—a measure of the individual’s sensitivity to bodily signals.

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

HERE, THEN, is a reason to hone our interoceptive sense: people who are more aware of their bodily sensations are better able to make use of their non-conscious knowledge. Mindfulness meditation is one way of enhancing such awareness.

further evidence of the calming effect of affect labeling: simply naming what is felt reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain structure involved in processing fear and other strong emotions. Meanwhile, thinking in a more involved way about feelings and the experiences that evoked them actually produces greater activity in the amygdala.

“interoceptive learning.” This is a process of learning, first, how to sense, label, and regulate our internal signals—and second, how to draw connections between the particular sensations we feel within and the pattern of events we encounter in the world.

When we feel our heart leap at the thought of one option before us, and our heart sink at the mention of another, what does that portend for the choice we ultimately make?

Scientists have long known that overall physical fitness supports cognitive function; people who have fitter bodies generally have keener minds.

simply by standing rather than sitting, study participants expended 13 percent more energy.

working at a standing desk has been shown to boost productivity.

“Learning is moving in new ways.”

“Walking opens up the free flow of ideas,”

tap into the mobile intelligence of “the mind at three miles per hour,” as the contemporary writer Rebecca Solnit has called the mental state induced by walking.

When selecting instructional videos for ourselves or for our children or our students, we should look for those in which the teacher’s hands are visible and active. And if we ourselves are called upon to teach online—or even just to communicate via Zoom or another video-conferencing platform—we should make sure that others can see our moving hands. Research suggests that making these motions will improve our own performance: 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.

the brain’s very particular evolved history—the “ghosts of environments past,” in the phrase of biologist Gordon Orians.

a twenty-minute walk in a park improved children’s concentration and impulse control as much as a dose of an ADHD drug like Ritalin. “ ‘Doses of nature’ might serve as a safe, inexpensive, widely accessible new tool in the tool kit for managing ADHD symptoms,” the researchers concluded.

a smartphone while outside “substantially counteracts the attention enhancement effects” of being in nature.

Restoring Through Urban Nature Experience.) ReTUNE is like a conventional GPS system, but programmed with a different set of values: instead of providing its users with the speediest route, it offers them the path with the greatest number of trees, the largest proportion of flowers, the highest frequency of birdsong.

1984, the Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson advanced what he called the “biophilia hypothesis”: the notion that humans have an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes,” an “urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”

The time we spend scrutinizing our small screens leads us to think small, even as it enlarges and aggrandizes our sense of self. Nature’s vastness—the unfathomable scale of the ocean, of the mountains, of the night sky—has the opposite effect. It makes us feel tiny, even as it opens wide our sense of the possible.

awe. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has led much of the recent research on awe; he calls it an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.”

the sublime!

reams of evidence that the spaces in which we spend our time powerfully shape the way we think and act.

“we must reserve a back room, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat,” wrote Montaigne in his essay “Of Solitude.” Montaigne’s term for this room—arrière-boutique, or literally “behind the shop”—speaks to the close relationship between busy engagement and quiet withdrawal. In this room, Montaigne added, “we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves.”

(The act of self-presentation may be particularly draining for members of certain groups. One recent study, conducted in a British government agency that switched from enclosed offices to an open-plan workspace, found that the heightened imperative to engage in self-presentation in such settings fell most heavily on women, for whom appearance is considered especially important.)

Being subject to oversight at all times is a disempowering experience, and feeling powerless discourages exploration and creativity. Conversely, a number of studies have found that a sense of privacy leads to feelings of empowerment, which in turn lead to greater creativity.

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.”

large high-resolution displays increase by more than tenfold the average speed at which basic visualization tasks are completed. On more challenging tasks, such as pattern finding, study participants improved their performance by 200 to 300 percent when using large displays.

“One of the main things I wanted to get across is that one of the hardest parts of science is coming up with new questions,” says Greene. “Where do fresh new ideas come from? Careful observations of nature are a great place to start.”

As Greene’s students discovered, the very act of noticing and selecting points of interest to put down on paper initiates a more profound level of mental processing. Things really get interesting, however, when we pause and look back at what we’ve written. Representations in the mind and representations on the page may seem roughly equivalent, when in fact they differ significantly in terms of what psychologists call their “affordances”—that is, what we’re able to do with them. External representations, for example, are more definite than internal ones. Picture a tiger, suggests philosopher Daniel Dennett in a classic thought experiment; imagine in detail its eyes, its nose, its paws, its tail. Following a few moments of conjuring, we may feel we’ve summoned up a fairly complete image. Now, says Dennett, answer this question: How many stripes does the tiger have? Suddenly the mental picture that had seemed so solid becomes maddeningly slippery. If we had drawn the tiger on paper, of course, counting its stripes would be a straightforward task.

fully 80 percent of his new ideas came from reinterpreting his old drawings. Expert architects are also less likely than beginners to get stuck perseverating on a single unproductive concept; they are proficient at recombining disparate elements found in their sketches into new and auspicious forms.

intentionally imitating someone’s accent allows us to comprehend more easily the words the person is speaking (a

The students would memorize the text and recite it from memory. Then they would embark on a succession of exercises designed to make them intimately familiar with the work in question. They would paraphrase the model text, putting it in their own words. They would translate the text from Greek to Latin or Latin to Greek. They would turn the text from Latin prose into Latin verse, or even from Latin prose into Greek verse. They would compress the model into fewer words, or elaborate it at greater length; they would alter its tone from plainspoken to grandiloquent, or the other way around. Finally, they would write their own pieces—but in the style of the admired author. Having imitated the model from every angle, students would begin the sequence anew, moving on to a more challenging text.

Far better than being first, Tellis and Golder concluded, is being what some have called a “fast second”: an agile imitator. Companies that capitalize on others’ innovations have “a minimal failure rate” and “an average market share almost three times that of market pioneers,” they found. In this category they include Timex, Gillette, and Ford, firms that are often recalled—wrongly—as being first in their field.

many teachers and parents object to the use of models, afraid that it will suppress students’ creativity and originality.

In fact the opposite is true,

Seeing examples of outstanding work motivates students by giving them a vision of the possible.

Students were being asked to employ a whole new vocabulary and a whole new suite of concepts, even as they were attempting to write in an unaccustomed style and an unaccustomed form. It was too much, and they had too few mental resources left over to actually learn.

that experts are able to articulate only about 30 percent of what they know.

“Eye contact opens the gate between the perceptual systems of two individuals, and information flows,” says Joy Hirsch, the Yale neuroscientist who led the study. Another factor that seems to “gate,” or initiate, the process of learning is contingent communication: social exchanges in which the utterances of one partner are directly responsive to what the other has said. When contingent communication is absent, learning may simply fail to occur. A particularly striking example: toddlers under the age of two and a half readily learn new words and actions from a responsive adult but pick up almost nothing from prerecorded instruction delivered on a screen—a phenomenon that researchers call the “video deficit.”

“Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved,” he wrote. “A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.”

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,”