The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

For adults as well, spending time in nature can promote innovative thinking. Scientists theorize that the “soft fascination” evoked by natural scenes engages what’s known as the brain’s “default mode network.” When this network is activated, we enter a loose associative state in which we’re not focused on any one particular task but are receptive to unexpected connections and insights. In nature, few decisions and choices are demanded of us, granting our minds the freedom to follow our thoughts wherever they lead. At the same time, nature is pleasantly diverting, in a fashion that lifts our mood without occupying all our mental powers; such positive emotion in turn leads us to think more expansively and open-mindedly. In the space that is thus made available, currently active thoughts can mingle with the deep stores of memories, emotions, and ideas already present in the brain, generating inspired collisions.

Our electronics are deliberately engineered to grab our attention and not let it go; our devices work against the diffuse mental processes that generate creativity, and escaping into nature is one of the only ways we can leave them behind.

There’s another way in which the digital respite we get in nature could enhance our creativity. The time we spend scrutinizing our small screens leads us to think small, even as it enlarges and aggrandizes our sense of self. Nature’s vastness—the unfathomable scale of the ocean, of the mountains, of the night sky—has the opposite effect. It makes us feel tiny, even as it opens wide our sense of the possible. It does all this through an emotion that we confront most commonly in nature: awe. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has led much of the recent research on awe; he calls it an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.”

The experience of awe, Keltner and other researchers have found, prompts a predictable series of psychological changes. We become less reliant on preconceived notions and stereotypes. We become more curious and open-minded. And we become more willing to revise and update our mental “schemas”: the templates we use to understand ourselves and the world. The experience of awe has been called “a reset button” for the human brain.

“The wall was designed to protect us from the cognitive load of having to keep track of the activities of strangers,” observes Colin Ellard, an environmental psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “This became increasingly important as we moved from tiny agrarian settlements to larger villages and, eventually, to cities—where it was too difficult to keep track of who was doing what to whom.” The privacy afforded by walls represented a truly revolutionary extension of the mind, maintains John Locke, professor of linguistics at Lehman College of the City University of New York. “Our distant ancestors could see each other at all times, which kept them safe but also imposed a huge cognitive cost,” he notes.

First: humans are especially attuned to the presence of novelty, to whatever appears new and different. The pull of the novel on our attention is an efficient evolved strategy; it would be a waste of our time and energy to keep noticing the many things around us that don’t change from day to day. But our selective attraction to the fresh and new becomes a problem when we operate in environments that are hubs of constant activity and change.

Second: we are especially attuned to the sound of speech, especially when the words are distinct enough to make out. Any ambient noise can grab our attention, but intelligible speech is particularly distracting, because its semantic meaning is processed by our brains whether or not we want to be listening.

Involuntarily auditing speech, and trying to complete tasks involving words or other symbols, means drawing on the same limited resource, with the result that we have “less brain” to devote to each.

Once we spot others’ eyes on us, the processing of eye contact takes precedence over whatever else our brains were working on. An awareness of being looked at even increases our physiological arousal, as revealed by a spike in skin conductance.

WALLS, AND the protected spaces they create, shield us from distraction. But they do more: they also provide us with privacy, a state that bears a surprising relationship to creativity.

A similar dynamic prevails in white-collar work, says Bernstein, where the surveillance that employees experience may be digital in nature. Professionals are less likely to play around with new ideas or approaches when they know that an all-seeing electronic eye is tracking their every keystroke. It’s not simply that staffers fear their bosses will think they’re goofing off or breaking the rules. Being subject to oversight at all times is a disempowering experience, and feeling powerless discourages exploration and creativity. Conversely, a number of studies have found that a sense of privacy leads to feelings of empowerment, which in turn lead to greater creativity.

The open-plan office seems to discourage exactly the kind of behavior it was intended to promote.

But the home advantage is not limited to sports. Researchers have identified a more general effect as well: when people occupy spaces that they consider their own, they experience themselves as more confident and capable. They are more efficient and productive. They are more focused and less distractible. And they advance their own interests more forcefully and effectively.

Perhaps the most important form of control over one’s space is authority over who comes in and out—a point missed by those who believe that our workspaces should resemble a bustling coffeehouse. The informal exchanges facilitated by proximity are indeed generative. But the value of such interactions can be extracted only if it is also possible, when necessary, to avoid interacting at all.

Research on intermittent collaboration is based on the understanding that complex problem solving proceeds in two stages, the first of which entails gathering the facts we need to clarify the nature of the problem and begin constructing a solution. In this stage, communication and collaboration are essential. But there is a second phase, equally vital: the process of generating and developing solutions, and figuring out which of these solutions is best. During this phase, studies find, excessive collaboration is actually detrimental.

Self-referential images and messages are not mere decorations—whether they’re built into the paneling of a duke’s splendidly outfitted retreat or tacked to the walls of an office worker’s cubicle. Research shows that in the presence of cues of identity and cues of affiliation, people perform better: they’re more motivated and more productive.

As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written, we keep certain objects in view because “they tell us things about ourselves that we need to hear in order to keep our selves from falling apart.”

It’s possible to see shades of the monastery and the studiolo in these modern-day workstations and cubicles—evidence of the persistent human need to imbue our spaces with meaning and significance.

Murphy and her colleagues have advanced a theory of “prejudiced places,” which they define as places that “unequally tax the emotions, physiology, cognitive function, and performance of some groups more than others.” When we regard prejudice as a property of people alone—as an entity that exists inside individuals’ heads—we fail to see the full picture of how bias operates within institutions, and we miss out on opportunities to push back against it.

Cheryan called the phenomenon documented in her study “ambient belonging,” defined as individuals’ sense of fit with a physical environment, “along with a sense of fit with the people who are imagined to occupy that environment.” Ambient belonging, she proposed, “can be ascertained rapidly, even from a cursory glance at a few objects.” In the research she has since produced, Cheryan has explored how ambient belonging can be enlarged and expanded—how a wider array of individuals can be induced to feel that crucial sense of “fit” in the environments in which they find themselves.

Though its insights are suggestive, neuroarchitecture is far from a mature discipline.

But perhaps more concerning than spaces that affect our thinking in problematic ways are spaces that decline to shape us at all. Richard Coyne, a professor of architectural computing at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, has lamented the “cognitive deficiency of non-places,” those spaces—all too common in the modern world—that are empty of cues or associations. Recall the major finding from Roger Barker’s “Midwest Study”: physical places influence our thinking and behavior far more than personality or other factors.

But such rich signification is missing from non-places. What meaning or message is inscribed on a featureless chain store, or a generic hotel lobby, or the bleak urban “plaza” that surrounds many a skyscraper? What thoughts are inspired, what emotions are stirred by a row of beige cubicles, or a classroom housed inside a windowless trailer? We are set adrift in such spaces, alienated and purposeless. This is not simply a question of aesthetics; it is a question of what we think, how we act, who we are.

Some researchers have even suggested that the way our sense of space helps organize mental content can explain the puzzling phenomenon of “infantile amnesia”—the fact that we can’t recall much about our earliest years. Because very young children are not able to move through space under their own locomotion, the theory goes, they may lack a mental scaffold on which to hang their memories. Children’s impressions of their own experiences may become well enough structured to be memorable only once kids are able to move about of their own volition. As adults, our memories continue to be tagged with a sense of the physical place where the original experience occurred.

Out of necessity, Caro found his way to a mode of thinking and working that would not have been possible had he tried to keep his voluminous material entirely in his head. “When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world,” psychologist Barbara Tversky has observed. Once we recognize this possibility, we can deliberately shape the material worlds in which we learn and work to facilitate mental extension—to enhance “the cognitive congeniality of a space,” in the words of David Kirsh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Other embodied resources engaged by large displays include proprioception, or our sense of how and where the body is moving at a given moment, and our experience of optical flow, or the continuous stream of information our eyes receive as we move about in real-life environments.

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world—and researchers have reported some intriguing findings about why this use of the (physical, spatial) world is so beneficial for our thinking.

When we simply watch or listen, we take it all in, imposing few distinctions on the stimuli streaming past our eyes and ears. As soon as we begin making notes, however, we are forced to discriminate, judge, and select. This more engaged mental activity leads us to process what we’re observing more deeply. It can also lead us to have new thoughts; our jottings build for us a series of ascending steps from which we can survey new vistas.

Here, then, is one of the unique affordances of an external representation: we can apply one or more of our physical senses to it. As the tiger example shows, “seeing” an image in our mind’s eye is not the same as seeing it on the page. Daniel Reisberg, a professor emeritus of psychology at Reed College in Oregon, calls this shift in perspective the “detachment gain”: the cognitive benefit we receive from putting a bit of distance between ourselves and the content of our minds. When we do so, we can see more clearly what that content is made of—how many stripes are on the tiger, so to speak. This measure of space also allows us to activate our powers of recognition. We leverage these powers whenever we write down two or more ways to spell a word, seeking the one that “looks right.”

Once we’ve placed it on the page, however, we can riff on it, play with it, take it in new directions; it can almost seem as if we ourselves didn’t make it. And indeed, researchers who have observed artists, architects, and designers as they create report that they often “discover” elements in their own work that they did not “put there,” at least not intentionally.

From these observations of expert draftsmen, some promising prescriptions can be drawn. When setting out to generate new ideas, we should begin with only the most general plan or goal; early on in the process, vagueness and ambiguity are more generative than explicitness or definition. Think of the task not in linear terms—tracing a direct line from point A to point B—but rather as a cycle: think, draw, look, rethink, redraw.

We also come to feel more positive about the people whose speech we mimic—an effect that holds true for imitation more generally. Emmanuel Roze has found that the experience of imitating patients makes the young doctors he trains more empathetic, as well as more comfortable with the signs of their patients’ disorders. Imitation permits us to extend to the other some of the familiar regard we feel for ourselves, as well as some of the insight we gain from inhabiting the role of dynamic actor in the world, rather than that of passive observer.

There’s just one problem: as a society we are suspicious of imitation, regarding it as juvenile, disreputable, even morally wrong.

In the Romans’ highly structured system of schooling, students would begin by reading and analyzing aloud a model text. Early in pupils’ education, this might be a simple fable by Aesop; later on, a complex speech by Cicero or Demosthenes. The students would memorize the text and recite it from memory. Then they would embark on a succession of exercises designed to make them intimately familiar with the work in question. They would paraphrase the model text, putting it in their own words. They would translate the text from Greek to Latin or Latin to Greek. They would turn the text from Latin prose into Latin verse, or even from Latin prose into Greek verse. They would compress the model into fewer words, or elaborate it at greater length; they would alter its tone from plainspoken to grandiloquent, or the other way around. Finally, they would write their own pieces—but in the style of the admired author. Having imitated the model from every angle, students would begin the sequence anew, moving on to a more challenging text.

Fourth, imitators are able to avoid being swayed by deception or secrecy: by working directly off of what others do, copiers get access to the best strategies in others’ repertoires. Competitors have no choice but to display what social scientists call “honest signals,” as they make decisions for themselves based on their own best interests.

But contrary to its reputation as a lazy cop-out, imitating well is not easy. It rarely entails automatic or mindless duplication. Rather, it requires cracking a sophisticated code—solving what social scientists call the “correspondence problem,” or the challenge of adapting an imitated solution to the particulars of a new situation. Tackling the correspondence problem involves breaking down an observed solution into its constituent parts, and then reassembling those parts in a different way; it demands a willingness to look past superficial features to the deeper reason why the original solution succeeded, and an ability to apply that underlying principle in a novel setting. It’s paradoxical but true: imitating well demands a considerable degree of creativity.

But as she investigated ways to address the medication error crisis, Pape didn’t rack her brain for an innovative fix. Instead she sought to imitate a solution that had been successfully applied in another industry. That industry was aviation—an enterprise, like health care, in which people’s lives depend on professionals’ precision and accuracy.

Pape also became aware that aviation experts had devised a solution to the problem of pilot interruption: the “sterile cockpit rule.” Instituted by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1981, the rule forbids pilots from engaging in conversation unrelated to the immediate business of flying when the plane is below ten thousand feet.

In her 2002 dissertation, and then in a series of articles published in medical journals, Pape made a case for imitating this practice. “The key to preventing medication errors lies with adopting protocols from other safety-focused industries,” Pape wrote in the journal MEDSURG Nursing in 2003. “The airline industry, for example, has methods in place that improve pilots’ focus and provide a milieu of safety when human life is at stake.” Such methods could be adapted to the hospital setting, she argued, by creating a “no-interruptions zone” around medication preparation areas, and by having nurses who are administering medication wear special vests or sashes signaling that they are not to be disturbed. Added Pape, pointedly, “Medication administration should be considered as critical as piloting a plane, because patients place their lives in the hands of healthcare professionals.”

Our brains evolved to think with people: to teach them, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought is exquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all is the presence of other people. As a consequence, when we think socially, we think differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.

After disconfirming several potential explanations, such as better nutrition or differential parental treatment, researchers concluded that firstborn children’s higher IQs stem from a simple fact of family life: older siblings engage in teaching younger ones. Outside the family, laboratory research and real-world programs consistently show that engaging students in tutoring their peers has benefits for all involved, and especially for the ones doing the teaching. Why would the act of teaching produce learning—for the teacher? The answer is that teaching is a deeply social act, one that initiates a set of powerful cognitive, attentional, and motivational processes that have the effect of changing the way the teacher thinks.

For social creatures like us, the prospect of engaging in an interpersonal interaction—with all of its potential for feeling admired or embarrassed—is far more motivating than the relatively anonymous activity of supplying written answers on an exam.

Actually seeing the fruits of one’s labor is especially gratifying; research finds that tutors learn more, and derive more motivation, from a tutoring session when they have the opportunity to watch their tutees answer questions about what they’ve learned.

Mercier’s and Sperber’s premise, which they advanced in their 2017 book The Enigma of Reason, makes coherent sense of the very aspects of human thought that have seemed so confounding: the fact that people are capable of stringently evaluating the validity of arguments, along with the fact that they so often fail to do so when the arguments are their own. Both tendencies are fully predicted by the authors’ “argumentative theory of reasoning.” We have every incentive to closely examine the arguments of others—who might be out to exploit or manipulate us for their own ends—but few inducements to scrutinize the arguments we make ourselves.

The argumentative theory also makes specific predictions about the conditions in which reason will function best, such as: the weaknesses of our reasoning faculty will be most evident when we use it outside the context in which it evolved. That context is raucously, noisily social. When we reason alone, inside our own heads, we will be dangerously vulnerable to confirmation bias—constructing the strongest case for our own point of view, and fooling ourselves in the process. Of course, in our brainbound culture, thinking alone is how thinking is usually done, with predictably disappointing results. Mercier and Sperber urge a different approach: arguing together, with the aim of arriving jointly at something close to the truth.

A psychologist on the lookout for “socially distributed cognition” could hardly have chanced upon a better example. Too often, however, we’re not alert to such instances of collective thought. Our culture and our institutions tend to fixate on the individual—on his uniqueness, his distinctiveness, his independence from others. In business and education, in public and private life, we emphasize individual competition over joint cooperation. We resist what we consider conformity (at least in its overt, organized form), and we look with suspicion on what we call “groupthink.” In some measure, this wariness may be justified. Uncritical group thinking can lead to foolish and even disastrous decisions. But the limitations of excessive “cognitive individualism” are becoming increasingly clear as well. Individual cognition is simply not sufficient to meet the challenges of a world in which information is so abundant, expertise is so specialized, and issues are so complex.

The findings suggest that “behavioral synchrony and shared physiological arousal in small groups independently increase social cohesion and cooperation,” the researchers write; they help us understand “why synchrony and arousal often co-occur in rituals around the world.”

The awareness that we are focusing on a particular stimulus along with other people leads our brains to endow that stimulus with special significance, tagging it as especially important. We then allocate more mental bandwidth to that material, processing it more deeply; in scientists’ terms, we award it “cognitive prioritization.”

By one year of age, a baby will reliably look in the direction of an adult’s gaze, even absent the turning of the adult’s head. Such gaze-following is made easier by the fact that people have visible whites of the eyes. Humans are the only primates so outfitted, an exceptional status that has led scientists to propose the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—the theory that our eyes evolved to support cooperative social interactions. “Our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen,” notes science writer Ker Than.

But effective collaborators aren’t always looking at the same place at the same time; rather, they cycle between looking on their own, then looking together.