The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

WE CAN BETTER grasp the future of thinking outside the brain by taking a look back at the time when the idea first emerged. In 1997, Andy Clark—then a professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri—left his laptop behind on a train. The loss of his usually ever-present computer hit him, he later wrote, “like a sudden and somewhat vicious type of (hopefully transient) brain damage.” He was left “dazed, confused, and visibly enfeebled—the victim of the cyborg equivalent of a mild stroke.” The experience, distressing as it was, provided fodder for a notion he had been pondering for some time. His computer, he realized, had in a sense become a part of his mind, an integral element of his thinking processes. His mental capacities were effectively extended by the use of his laptop, allowing his brain to overachieve—to think more efficiently and effectively, more intelligently, than it could without the device. His brain plus his computer equaled his mind, extended.