The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

We can clarify and codify the body’s messages by keeping an “interoceptive journal”—a record of the choices we make, and how we felt when we made them. Each journal entry has three parts. First, a brief account of the decision we’re facing. Second, a description—as detailed and precise as possible—of the internal sensations we experience as we contemplate the various options available. An interoceptive journal asks us to consider the paths that lie before us, one by one, and take note of how we feel as we imagine choosing one path over another. The third section of the journal entry is a notation of the choice on which we ultimately settle, and a description of any further sensations that arise upon our making this final selection. Once you know how a particular decision turned out—Did the investment make money? Did the new hire work out? Was the out-of-town trip a good idea?—you can return to the record of the moment when you made that choice. Over time, you may perceive that these moments arrange themselves into a pattern.

The continual small movements we make when standing as opposed to sitting—shifting our weight from one leg to another, allowing our arms to move more freely—constitute what researchers call “low-intensity” activity. As slight as these movements appear, they have a marked effect on our physiology: an experiment carried out by researchers at the Mayo Clinic determined that simply by standing rather than sitting, study participants expended 13 percent more energy. The impact on our cognitive functioning is also significant. Research has found that the use of a standing desk is associated with an enhancement in students’ executive function—that crucial capacity for planning and decision making—and with an increase in “on-task engagement.”

When we’re charged with learning and remembering new material, our tendency is to lean heavily on visual and auditory modes: reading it over, saying it aloud. This approach has its limits; in particular, research demonstrates that our memory for what we have heard is remarkably weak. Our memory for what we have done, however—for physical actions we have undertaken—is much more robust.

Gestures are especially useful in the effort to understand concepts that words will always fail to capture fully—concepts that are visual and image-rich, that pertain to the relation between objects or ideas, or that concern entities beyond direct perception (those things tiny as an atom or vast as the solar system).

The takeaway: 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.

Wolff-Michael Roth is a cognitive scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada. His research on the role of gesture in the development of scientific literacy has led him to change the way he conducts his courses as a professor. Rather than presenting lectures in which he does most of the talking, Roth finds as many opportunities as he can to ask individual students to describe and explain the topics being covered in that day’s class. Lacking a fully developed understanding, or even the relevant technical vocabulary, his students lean heavily on gesture to convey their budding knowledge—and this is just what their professor wants to see. “It is from the attempt of expressing themselves that understanding evolves, rather than the other way around,” he maintains. Roth is also a practitioner of another kind of occasion creation: he has observed, and research has confirmed, that people are more likely to gesture when they have something to gesture at. Providing what Roth calls “visual artifacts”—charts, diagrams, maps, models, photographs—induces speakers to gesture more, thus generating all the benefits for understanding that such hand motions confer. With his colleagues in the University of Victoria physics department, he has developed a set of visual depictions and concrete models that the physics professors now use to encourage gesture production in class. When standing next to such objects, students can simply point to parts or processes that they can’t yet fully desc...

Working memory—our ability to hold in mind information relevant to the problem we’re currently solving—also benefits from time spent in a natural setting. In a study led by Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, participants who walked through an arboretum for just under an hour scored 20 percent higher on a test of working memory compared to those who spent the same amount of time navigating busy city streets.

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.

And, in fact, it is the case that people who work near one another are more likely to communicate and collaborate. This finding was first demonstrated more than forty years ago by Thomas Allen, a professor at MIT who drew what has come to be known as the “Allen curve.” The curve describes a consistent relationship between physical distance and frequency of communication: the rate of people’s interactions declines exponentially with the distance between the spaces where they work. This would mean, for example, that people sitting six feet apart are four times more likely to talk regularly than people seated sixty-five feet apart. Allen found that fifty meters (about 165 feet) was the cutoff point for regular information exchange; beyond that distance, routine communication effectively ceased.

More recent research has confirmed Allen’s original findings; in the age of texting, email, and Slack, the Allen curve still applies. Online communication, it seems, is no substitute for the offhand conversation, the casual exchange carried out in person.

In a 2014 study conducted by researchers from the University of Gävle in Sweden, participants were asked to write short essays under five different acoustic conditions. Background noise in the five conditions ranged from 0.08 to 0.71 on a measure called the Speech Transmission Index—that is, from completely unintelligible speech, to somewhat intelligible speech, to crystal-clear speech. The participants’ writing fluency, the investigators reported, dropped “drastically” at Speech Transmission Index values above 0.23—levels that, they note, “would not be at all uncommon” in an open-plan office.

In an experiment she conducted while still a graduate student, Cheryan commandeered space in Stanford’s Gates Computer Science Building, creating what she called a “stereotypical” classroom and a “non-stereotypical” classroom. The stereotypical classroom was filled with soda cans, books of science-fiction fantasy, and Star Trek and Star Wars posters. The non-stereotypical classroom featured accoutrements like nature posters, literary novels, and bottles of water. After spending time in each room, undergraduates were surveyed about how interested they were in computer science and how well they thought they would perform in that discipline. Following a few minutes in the stereotypical room, male students reported a high level of interest in pursuing computer science; female students indicated much less interest than their male counterparts. But after they spent time in the non-stereotypical room, women’s interest in computer science increased markedly—actually exceeding that of the men. Subsequent research by Cheryan has found that women exposed to a non-stereotypical classroom are more likely to predict that they will perform well in computer science courses, whereas men tend to predict that they will succeed regardless of which room they encounter. That’s important, says Cheryan, because “we know from past work in psychology that how well you expect to do in a certain environment can determine how you actually perform.” Cheryan called the phenomenon documented in her study...

For decades, educator Ron Berger towed around a rolling suitcase filled with hundreds of such models: sketches, poems, and essays created by children, which he would pull out and share with teachers and students at schools around the country. Among his favorite examples is a picture he calls “Austin’s Butterfly,” drawn by a first-grader in Boise, Idaho. When he displays the drawing—which depicts a tiger swallowtail butterfly in graceful detail—students often murmur in awe. Berger’s aim is to inspire his audience with examples of excellent work by their peers, but also to demonstrate to them how such work is made. One by one he shows them the six drafts Austin produced on the way to his finished drawing, and tells them about the constructive critiques Austin received from his classmates at each stage. The contents of Berger’s rolling suitcase are now available in an online archive—but he has found that 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, says Berger, who spent twenty-eight years as a classroom teacher before becoming chief academic officer of the nonprofit organization EL Education. Seeing examples of outstanding work motivates students by giving them a vision of the possible.

experts can generate empathy for the beginner through acts of the imagination, changing the way they present information accordingly. An example: 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. A math teacher may speed through an explanation of long division, not remembering or recognizing that the procedures that now seem so obvious were once utterly inscrutable. Math education expert John Mighton has a suggestion: break it down into steps, then break it down again—into micro-steps, if necessary.

We would probably put down a novel or switch off a movie that didn’t introduce conflict early on—whether that conflict centers on a resolute hero battling the odds, two lovers separated by fate, or a looming disaster that might yet be averted. The drama inherent in conflict is what keeps us reading or watching. Yet we expect students and employees to attend to information that’s been drained of conflict, blandly presented as the established account or consensus view. In fact, almost every topic can be cast in terms that highlight opposing perspectives—and should be, 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.” Johnson has spent decades investigating the uses of what he calls “constructive controversy,” or the open-minded exploration of diverging ideas and beliefs.

ALL OF THE seventh- and eighth-grade students enrolled in a 2012 study of educational methods were learning about the science of radioactive elements. The manner in which they encountered the subject, however, was strikingly different. One group was given an account written in the soporifically dull style of a textbook: “Elements are individual pieces of matter that combine with each other and make up everything we see around us. Most of what we see and use in the world, like air and water, is not made up of one single element. For example, sodium and chlorine are two different elements that make up the salt that we use for cooking . . .”—and on it droned, adding, “We now know of 92 elements that are a natural part of the Earth.” A second group of students learned the same material, but with a twist. Their version of the account picked up the thread this way: “By the late 1800s, scientists had already found most of these elements, but some were yet to be discovered. At this time, Polish-born Marie Curie and her French husband, Pierre, were two chemists living in France, trying to find all of Earth’s natural elements. Although it was very hard detective work, Marie and Pierre loved solving the mysteries of elements. One day, a fellow scientist named Henri Becquerel showed Marie and Pierre a special kind of rock called pitchblende. When Henri took this pitchblende rock into a dark room, Marie could see that it gave off a light blue glow.” This second account continued: “Henr...

A HOST OF LABORATORY experiments, as well as countless instances of real-world rituals, show that it’s possible to activate the group mind—to flip the hive switch, as it were—by “hacking” behavioral synchrony and physiological arousal. The key lies in creating a certain kind of group experience: real-time encounters in which people act and feel together in close physical proximity. Yet our schools and companies are increasingly doing just the opposite. Aided by technology, we are creating individual, asynchronous, atomized experiences for students and employees—from personalized “playlists” of academic lessons to go-at-your-own-pace online training modules. Then we wonder why our groups don’t cohere, why group work is often frustrating and disappointing, and why thinking with groups doesn’t extend our intelligence.