The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

“Sitting quietly,” the researchers conclude, “is not necessarily the best condition for learning in school.”

Our culture conditions us to see mind and body as separate—and so we separate, in turn, our periods of thinking from our bouts of exercise. Consider how many of us make our visits to the gym only after work, for example, or on weekends. Instead, we should be figuring out how to incorporate bursts of physical activity into the work day and the school day—which means rethinking how we approach our breaks. Lunch breaks, coffee breaks, downtime between tasks or meetings: all become occasions to use exercise to maneuver our brains into an optimally functioning state.

information is better remembered when we’re moving as we learn it. This is the case even when the movement is not a literal enactment of the meaning of the information to be recalled but simply a movement of the body, meaningfully related to the information and made at the same time the information is absorbed. Second: information that has become associated with a movement is better remembered when we can reproduce that same movement later, when we’re calling it up from memory. This may be possible in some situations—for example, when giving a speech for which we have practiced accompanying gestures—but moving while learning is still beneficial even when those movements can’t be replicated at the point of recall (during an exam, for instance). Indeed, simply forming the intention to move in connection with a piece of information seems to tag that information with a mental marker of importance. Our natural egocentric bias leads us to preferentially attend to and remember that information that we have connected in some way to ourselves: my intention, my body, my movement. Concluded Helga and Tony Noice in one of their academic articles, “One might paraphrase Descartes and say, ‘I move, therefore I remember.’ ”

Some studies have found that students’ understanding of physics becomes less accurate after they have completed an introductory college physics course. The conventional, and widely ineffective, approach to teaching physics is based on a brainbound model of cognition: individuals are expected, like computers, to solve problems by applying a set of abstract rules. Yet the fact is that—very unlike computers—humans solve problems most effectively by imagining themselves into a given scenario, a project that is made easier if the human in question has had a previous physical encounter on which to base her mental projections.

When demonstrations are incorporated into science class, students should not be relegated to the role of observer. Only those who physically participate will gain the deeper, from-the-inside understanding that comes from physical action.

While students are often encouraged to adopt a detached, objective perspective on science, research shows that they can benefit from engaging the “embodied imagination”—just as scientists do. Thinking and learning with our bodies takes advantage of humans’ fundamentally egocentric mindset. We’ve evolved to understand events and ideas in terms of how they relate to us, not from some neutral or impartial perspective.

by moving our bodies, we activate a deeply ingrained and mostly unconscious metaphor connecting dynamic motion with dynamic thinking. Call to mind the words we use when we can’t seem to muster an original idea—we’re “stuck,” “in a rut”—and those we reach for when we feel visited by the muse. Then we’re “on a roll,” our thoughts are “flowing.” Research has demonstrated that people can be placed in a creative state of mind by physically acting out creativity-related figures of speech—like “thinking outside the box.”

“Walking opens up the free flow of ideas,” the authors conclude. Studies by other researchers have even suggested that following a meandering, free-form route—as opposed to a fixed and rigid one—may further enhance creative thought processes.

a stroll through the history of literature and philosophy finds ample evidence of a counter-message. Remember Friedrich Nietzsche, from earlier in our journey. “Only thoughts which come from walking have any value,” he maintained. Søren Kierkegaard felt similarly. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” remarked the Danish philosopher. Walking is “gymnastics for the mind,” observed the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am unable to reflect when I am not walking; the moment I stop, I think no more, and as soon as I am again in motion, my head resumes its workings,” averred the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne lamented that his thoughts often came to him when he was on the move, at moments when “I have nothing to jot them down on”; this was wont to happen “especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.” These great thinkers were clearly on to something. We ought to be finding ways to integrate movement into all our daily activities,

Thinking while walking would seem to be a natural fit for the world of academe. A few years ago, philosophy professor Douglas Anderson of the University of North Texas got to wondering why he and his students stayed put in a lecture hall while the texts they studied so often extolled the merits of movement. He began teaching one of his courses, “Philosophy of Self-Cultivation,” while on the move: professor and students walk about the campus as they discuss the week’s assigned reading. Anderson says he has noticed a difference in his students as soon as they leave the room where the class initially assembles: their voices and expressions become more animated, they have more to say, their minds seem to work at a faster clip.

The field of cognitive science commonly compares the human brain to a computer, but the influence of place reveals a major limitation of this analogy: while a laptop works the same way whether it’s being used at the office or while we’re sitting in a park, the brain is deeply affected by the setting in which it operates. And nature provides particularly rich and fertile surroundings with which to think.

The respite from insistent cognitive demands that nature provides gives our supply of mental resources an opportunity to renew and regenerate. As we’ve seen, these resources are finite and are soon exhausted—not only by the clamor of urban living, but also by the stringent requirements of academic and professional work. Just as our brains did not evolve to react with equanimity to speeding cars and wailing sirens, neither did they evolve to read, or to perform advanced math, or to carry out any of the highly abstract and complex tasks we ask of ourselves every day. Though we manage to meet these demands, our near-universal struggles with attention and focus (not to mention motivation and engagement) suggest that we ought to pay more heed to the supply side of our attentional economy—that is, not simply drawing down our mental resources but also ensuring their regular replenishment. We can do so by simply going outside. We don’t need to wait for perfect weather, or to find our way to some unspoiled wilderness; any form of nature, under any conditions, will do.

It’s not the case that nature is simpler or more elementary than man-made environments. Indeed, natural scenes tend to contain more visual information than do built ones—and this abundance of visual stimulation is a condition we humans crave. Roughly a third of the neurons in the brain’s cortex are dedicated to visual processing; it takes considerable visual novelty to satisfy our eyes’ voracious appetite. But balanced against this desire to explore is a desire to understand; we seek a sense of order as well as an impression of variety. Nature meets both these needs, while artificial settings often err on one side or the other.

our brains are optimized to process the fractal characteristics of natural scenes; hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have “tuned” our perceptual faculties to the way visual information is structured in natural environments. We may not take conscious note of fractal patterns, but at a level deeper than awareness, these patterns reverberate.

In a book published in 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.” This urge is powerful, Wilson argued, and our thinking (as well as our health and well-being) suffers when it is suppressed, as it must be when we spend most of our time surrounded by inorganic forms and materials. Fortunately, he adds, an alternative path has already been mapped out for us: nature itself provides a comprehensive guide to the conditions in which our minds and bodies work best.

for students, too, a “green wall” in the classroom, sprouting living plants, has been shown to enhance their ability to focus.

working and learning in buildings inspired by nature can grant some of the same benefits for cognition as actually being outdoors. In a study published in 2018, for example, a group of researchers from Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health asked participants to spend time in an indoor environment featuring biophilic elements (potted plants, a bamboo-wood floor, windows with a view of greenery and a river) as well as an indoor environment lacking such elements (a windowless, carpeted, fluorescent-lit space). Participants were outfitted with wearable sensors that monitored their blood pressure and their skin conductance; tests of mood and cognitive function were administered following each visit. After just five minutes in the biophilic surroundings, the subjects’ positive emotions increased, their blood pressure and skin conductance dropped, and their short-term memory improved by 14 percent over the level recorded following a visit to the non-biophilic environment.