The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

First, there is the study of embodied cognition, which explores the role of the body in our thinking: for example, how making hand gestures increases the fluency of our speech and deepens our understanding of abstract concepts. Second, there is the study of situated cognition, which examines the influence of place on our thinking: for instance, how environmental cues that convey a sense of belonging, or a sense of personal control, enhance our performance in that space. And third, there is the study of distributed cognition, which probes the effects of thinking with others—such as how people working in groups can coordinate their individual areas of expertise (a process called “transactive memory”), and how groups can work together to produce results that exceed their members’ individual contributions (a phenomenon known as “collective intelligence”).

they also supply guidance on how to offload, externalize, and dynamically interact with our thoughts—a much more effective approach than doing it all “in our heads.”

The gap between what our biological brains are capable of, and what modern life demands, is large and getting larger each day.

There even appear to be hard-wired psychological factors underlying our embrace of these ideas about the brain. The belief that some core quantity of intelligence resides within each of our heads fits with a pattern of thought, apparently universal in humans, that psychologists call “essentialism”—that is, the conviction that each entity we encounter possesses an inner essence that makes it what it is. “Essentialism shows up in every society that has been studied,” notes Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom. “It appears to be a basic component of how we think about the world.” We think in terms of enduring essences—rather than shifting responses to external influences—because we find such essences easier to process mentally, as well as more satisfying emotionally. From the essentialist perspective, people simply “are” intelligent or they are not.

Together, the historical, cultural, and psychological bases of our assumptions about the mind—that its properties are individual, inherent, and readily ranked according to quality—give them a powerful punch. Such assumptions have profoundly shaped the views we hold on the nature of mental activity, on the conduct of education and work, and on the value we place on ourselves and others. It’s therefore startling to contemplate that the whole lot of it could be misconceived. To grasp the nature of this error, we need to consider another metaphor.

Set beside the brain-as-computer and brain-as-muscle metaphors, it’s apparent that the brain as magpie is a very different kind of analogy, with very different implications for how mental processes operate.

David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, makes a useful distinction between “biologically primary” and “biologically secondary” abilities. Human beings, he points out, are born ready to learn certain things: how to speak the language of the local community, how to find their way around a familiar landscape, how to negotiate the challenges of small-group living. We are not born to learn the intricacies of calculus or the counterintuitive rules of physics; we did not evolve to understand the workings of the financial markets or the complexities of global climate change. And yet we dwell in a world where such biologically secondary capacities hold the key to advancement, even survival. The demands of the modern environment have now met, and exceeded, the limits of the biological brain.

Efforts to wrest more intelligence from this organ, they add, “bump up against the hard limits of neurobiology.”

Embodied cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition: each of these takes up a particular aspect of the extended mind,

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.

Against all his assumptions, all his training, Coates was forced to arrive at an unconventional conclusion: “Good judgment may require the ability to listen carefully to feedback from the body.”

Coates and his new colleagues examined a group of financial traders working on a London trading floor, asking each one to identify the successive moments when he felt his heart beat—a measure of the individual’s sensitivity to bodily signals. The traders, they found, were much better at this task than were an age- and gender-matched group of controls who did not work in finance. What’s more, among the traders themselves, those who were the most accurate in detecting the timing of their heartbeats made more money, and tended to have longer tenures in what was a notably volatile line of work.

“Please tell me when your heart beats,” she would say to each patron who stepped forward. An elderly couple who stopped by the booth had very different reactions to Ainley’s request. “How on earth would I know what my heart is doing?” the woman asked incredulously. Her husband turned and stared at her, equally dumbfounded. “But of course you know,” he exclaimed. “Don’t be so stupid, everyone knows what their heartbeat is!” “He had always been able to hear his heart, and she had never been able to hear hers,” Ainley observed in an interview, smiling at the memory. “They had been married for decades, but they had never talked of or even recognized this difference between them.”

“Nonconscious information acquisition,” as Lewicki calls it, along with the ensuing application of such information, is happening in our lives all the time. As we navigate a new situation, we’re scrolling through our mental archive of stored patterns from the past, checking for ones that apply to our current circumstances. We’re not aware that these searches are under way; as Lewicki observes, “The human cognitive system is not equipped to handle such tasks on the consciously controlled level.” He adds, “Our conscious thinking needs to rely on notes and flowcharts and lists of ‘if-then’ statements—or on computers—to do the same job which our non-consciously operating processing algorithms can do without external help, and instantly.”

If we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose.

Mindfulness meditation is one way of enhancing such awareness. The practice has been found to increase sensitivity to internal signals, and even to alter the size and activity of that key brain structure, the insula.

“De-biasing approaches which rely primarily on shifting cognition from System 1 to System 2 are unlikely to succeed,” he maintains. “The human capacity for self-monitoring and effortful System 2 cognition is limited and is rapidly depleted. Attempts to reduce biases by learning about biases and engaging in self-monitoring rapidly come up against human cognitive limits.”

This approach suggests a novel way to support smart decision making: not through the application of painstaking deliberation and analysis, but through the cultivation of what we might call “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 a flutter in the stomach as we embark on a certain course of action, what consequences seem to follow? 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?

And just as some people are better than others at using bodily sensations to guide their decisions, some people are better than others at using interoceptive signals to monitor and manage their moment-by-moment expenditure of energy.

By remaining alert to these preliminary signals, she says, we can avoid being taken by surprise and then overreacting, entering a state of physiological arousal from which it is hard to come down. (Stanley notes ruefully that many of us take just the opposite approach, as she once did: pushing aside internal red flags in the hope that we can “power through” and get the job done.)

This perspective carries two important implications. First: the greater our awareness of interoceptive sensations, the richer and more intense our experience of emotion can be. And second: equipped with interoceptive awareness, we can get in on the ground floor of emotion construction; we can participate in creating the type of emotion we experience.

We associate stillness with steadiness, seriousness, and industriousness; we believe there’s something virtuous about controlling the impulse to move. At times and places where there’s work to be done, physical movement is regarded with disapproval, even suspicion. (Consider the way we associate fidgeting with a certain moral shiftiness.) What this attitude overlooks is that the capacity to regulate our attention and our behavior is a limited resource, and some of it is used up by suppressing the very natural urge to move.

The brains of kids with ADHD appear to be chronically under-aroused; in order to muster the mental resources needed to tackle a difficult assignment, they may tap their fingers, jiggle their legs, or bounce in their seats. They move as a means of increasing their arousal—not unlike the way adults down a cup of coffee in order feel more alert.

Parents and teachers often believe they have to get kids to stop moving around before they can focus and get down to work, Schweitzer notes; a more constructive approach would be to allow kids to move around so that they can focus.

Even among those without an ADHD diagnosis, the amount of stimulation required to maintain optimal alertness varies from person to person. Indeed, it may differ for the same individual over the course of a day. We have at our disposal a flexible and sensitive mechanism for making the necessary adjustments: fidgeting.

Lunch breaks, coffee breaks, downtime between tasks or meetings: all become occasions to use exercise to maneuver our brains into an optimally functioning state. For children, this is precisely the role played by recess;

the ability to attend to such work declines steadily over time, and is actually refreshed by a bout of bodily exertion. Parents, teachers, and administrators who want students to achieve academically should be advocating for an increase in physically active recess time.

Scientists speculate that the phenomenon of transient hypofrontality may underlie all kinds of altered states, from dreaming to drug trips—but intense exercise may be the most reliable way to induce it. Low- and moderate-intensity exercise does not generate this disinhibiting effect.

Achieving transient hypofrontality generally requires exercising at one’s “ventilatory threshold”—the point at which breathing becomes labored, corresponding to about 80 percent of the exerciser’s maximum heart rate—for forty minutes or more. It’s a daunting summit to scale, but when it is reached, observes Kathryn Schulz, another writer-runner, it can “provoke a kind of Cartesian collapse”: mind and body melding together in what she calls a “glorious collusion.”

The exciting implication of such findings is that we can intentionally enhance our mental functioning through an application of physical activity—that we can, for example, improve our memory not through working our brains ever harder, but by looping in the meaning-bearing movements of our limbs.

The research on using movement to enhance thinking identifies four types of helpful motion: congruent movements, novel movements, self-referential movements, and metaphorical movements.

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.

As education professor Dor Abrahamson puts it, “Learning is moving in new ways.”

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.

Research shows that we all engage in such “gestural foreshadowing,” in which our hands anticipate what we’re about to say. When we realize we’ve said something in error and we pause to go back to correct it, for example, we stop gesturing a couple of hundred milliseconds before we stop speaking. Such sequences suggest the startling notion that our hands “know” what we’re going to say before our conscious minds do, and in fact this is often the case.

Amazingly enough, as one researcher puts it, “Young children use their hands to tell their mothers what to say.”

Engage in frequent pointing with young children, and encourage the kids themselves to point. Incorporate this same gesture into the reading of picture books; point to particular words or illustrations, and ask children to point to what they see. Come up with simple gestures to pair with real-life referents—a clawing motion for cat, a wiggling index finger for a caterpillar—and be sure to say the word aloud as the gesture is demonstrated. Perhaps the most important fact to keep in mind, says Harvard education professor Meredith Rowe, is that a child’s language development is malleable, and that parents play an important role in shaping that development.

“Hand gestures appear to alert the auditory cortex that meaningful communication is occurring,” says Spencer Kelly, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Colgate University in New York.

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.

One more way to leverage the power of gesture: we can pay closer attention to the manner in which others move their hands. As we’ve discovered, people’s newest and most advanced ideas often show up first in their gestures; moreover, individuals signal their readiness to learn when their gestures begin to diverge from their speech. In our single-minded focus on spoken language, however, we may miss the clues conveyed in this other mode. Research finds that even experienced teachers pick up on less than a third of the information contained in students’ hand movements. But studies also demonstrate that we can train ourselves to attend more closely to gesture’s corporeal code.

They were then offered some basic information about gesture: that gestures often convey important information not found in speech, and that they could attend not only to what people say with their words but also to what they “say” with their hands. It was suggested that they could pay particular attention to the shape of a hand gesture, to the motion of a hand gesture, and to the placement of a hand gesture.

A familiar example of such offloading is the way young children count on their fingers when working out a math problem. Their fingers “hold” an intermediate sum so that their minds are free to think about the mathematical operation they must execute (addition, subtraction) to reach the final answer.

As Brendan Jeffreys’s students have discovered, our hands are impressively flexible tools. They can represent so many things: an entrepreneur’s vision for his product; an infant’s step toward spoken language; a teacher’s clue that a student is ready to learn. Hands can be a prompt, a window, a way station—but what they ought never have to be is still.

Why are so many drawn to these 840 acres? Its creator knew the reason. “Natural scenery,” wrote landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, “employs the mind without fatigue and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.”

What we imagine to be aesthetic preferences are really survival instincts honed over millennia, instincts that helped us find promising places to forage and to rest. When, today, we turn to nature when we’re stressed or burned out—when we take a walk through the woods or gaze out at the ocean’s rolling waves—we are engaging in what one researcher calls “environmental self-regulation,” a process of psychological renewal that our brains cannot accomplish on their own.

The obsessive cycling through negative thoughts that many depressed people experience consumes a significant portion of their mental resources, adversely affecting their ability to recall important information—a deficit that time in nature helps ameliorate.

Other researchers have identified additional features that distinguish natural tableaux from their artificial counterparts: natural settings incorporate dynamic and diffuse light; gentle, often rhythmic movement; and muted sounds that repeat with variations, such as ocean waves or birdsong.

We can seek out such “microrestorative opportunities” throughout the day, replenishing our mental resources with each glance out the window.

When we see or experience an urban setting, we are primed to feel competitive, to believe we need to grab what’s available. Nature, by contrast, inspires a feeling of abundance, a reassuring sense of permanence.

Our perception of time is malleable, subject to the influence of situational cues; by reducing our arousal and increasing our attentional capacity, exposure to nature grants us a more expansive sense of time, and a more generous attitude toward the future.