The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

TO UNDERSTAND HOW interoception can act as such a rich repository, it’s important to recognize that the world is full of far more information than our conscious minds can process. Fortunately, we are also able to collect and store the volumes of information we encounter on a non-conscious basis. As we proceed through each day, we are continuously apprehending and storing regularities in our experience, tagging them for future reference. Through this information-gathering and pattern-identifying process, we come to know things—but we’re typically not able to articulate the content of such knowledge or to ascertain just how we came to know it. This trove of data remains mostly under the surface of consciousness, and that’s usually a good thing. Its submerged status preserves our limited stores of attention and working memory for other uses.