The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Membership in a group can be a potent source of motivation—if we feel a genuine sense of belonging to the group, and if our personal identity feels firmly tied to the group and its success. When these conditions are met, group membership acts as a form of intrinsic motivation: that is, our behavior becomes driven by factors internal to the task, such as the satisfaction we get from contributing to a collective effort, rather than by external rewards such as money or public recognition. And as psychologists have amply documented, intrinsic motivation is more powerful, more enduring, and more easily maintained than the extrinsic sort; it leads us to experience the work as more enjoyable, and to perform it more capably.

Experiencing ourselves as part of a collective “we,” rather than as a singular “I,” changes the way we direct our focus and the way we allocate our energies—often in felicitous fashion. Yet so much in our every-man-for-himself society conspires against the creation of a robust sense of “we.” Our emphasis on individual achievement, and our neglect of group cohesion, means that we are failing to reap the rich benefits of shared attention and shared motivation. Even when groups do exist in name, they are often weak and dilute in their bonds.

For example: scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and elsewhere are experimenting with automatic “rapport detection” within groups. Sensors embedded in a conference room or in video-conferencing equipment unobtrusively monitor group members’ nonverbal behavior (their facial expressions, hand motions, gaze direction, and so on); these data are analyzed in real time to yield a measure of how well a group is cooperating. When rapport falls below a critical level, nudges can be applied to move the group toward greater cohesion: the system might alert the group’s leader that a shared coffee break is in order, or it might suggest to him, via a pop-up message, that he engage in more mirroring of his co-workers. Inside wired-up “smart meeting rooms,” it may even elect to raise the temperature by a few degrees, or introduce some soothing white noise.

Creeeeeepy

The struggle to cope with information overload has led many of us to turn to technological filters—smartphone alerts and email applications that offer to sort for us the information that must be attended to from the information that can be ignored. Research suggests, however, that other people can function as the most sensitive and discriminating filters of all—as long as we’re aware of what they know and can access their knowledge when we need it.

It’s important to establish from the outset not only who’s responsible for doing what but also who’s responsible for knowing what. Group members should be explicitly informed about their colleagues’ distinctive talents or spheres of specialization, and clear protocols should be established for directing questions and tasks to the appropriate individual.

Intelligence is not “a fixed lump of something that’s in our heads,” he explains. Rather, “it’s a transaction”: a fluid interaction among our brains, our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships. The capacity to think intelligently emerges from the skillful orchestration of these internal and external elements.

Using “cognitive reappraisal” to reinterpret bodily signals, as we learned to do in chapter 1, can head off the performance-suppressing effects of anxiety. Adding “cues of belonging” to the physical environment, of the kind we explored in chapter 5, can generate a sense of psychological ease that’s conducive to intelligent thought. And carefully structuring the expert feedback offered to a “cognitive apprentice,” as we learned about in chapter 7, can instill the confidence necessary to overcome self-doubt.

Knowing what we do about mental extensions and how they work, we are now able to assemble the conditions for intelligence, even brilliance. In this book we’ve looked intently at one extension at a time: interoceptive signals, movements, and gestures; natural spaces, built spaces, and the “space of ideas”; experts, peers, and groups. But evidence suggests that extensions are most powerful when they are employed in combination, incorporated into mental routines that draw on the full range of extra-neural resources we have at hand.

The first set of principles lays out some habits of mind we would do well to adopt, starting with this one: whenever possible, we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world. Throughout this book we’ve encountered many examples of offloading and have become familiar with its manifold benefits. It relieves us of the burden of keeping a host of details “in mind,” thereby freeing up mental resources for more demanding tasks, like problem solving and idea generation. It also produces for us the “detachment gain,” whereby we can inspect with our senses, and often perceive anew, an image or idea that once existed only in the imagination.

Onward to the second principle: whenever possible, we should endeavor to transform information into an artifact, to make data into something real—and then proceed to interact with it, labeling it, mapping it, feeling it, tweaking it, showing it to others. Humans evolved to handle the concrete, not to contemplate the abstract. We extend our intelligence when we give our minds something to grab onto: when we experience a concept from physics as a bicycle wheel spinning in our hands, for example, or when we turn a foreign language vocabulary word into a gesture we can see and sense and demonstrate to others. Vague impressions of what constitutes “excellent work” can usefully take form as a display of actual models to which to aspire (remember “Austin’s Butterfly”?); dry intellectual deliberations can acquire a rooted, embodied dimension when we closely attend to, and label and track, the internal signals that arise in our bodies. Our days are now spent processing an endless stream of symbols; with a bit of ingenuity, we can find ways to turn these abstract symbols into tangible objects and sensory experiences, and thereby think about them in new ways.

In a related vein, the third principle: whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor. We’ve repeatedly confronted the limits of the brain-as-computer analogy, and here we come up against perhaps its most conspicuous flaw. When fed a chunk of information, a computer processes it in the same way on each occasion—whether it’s been at work for five minutes or five hours, whether it’s located in a fluorescent-lit office or positioned next to a sunny window, whether it’s near other computers or is the only computer in the room. This is how computers operate, but the same doesn’t hold for human beings. The way we’re able to think about information is dramatically affected by the state we’re in when we encounter it.

We can begin to understand what this means by taking up the fourth principle: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-embody the information we think about. The pursuit of knowledge has frequently sought to disengage thinking from the body, to elevate ideas to a cerebral sphere separate from our grubby animal anatomy. Research on the extended mind counsels the opposite approach: we should be seeking to draw the body back into the thinking process.

The fifth principle emphasizes another human strength: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about. We inherited “a mind on the hoof,” as Andy Clark puts it: a brain that was built to pick a path through a landscape and to find the way back home. Neuroscientific research indicates that our brains process and store information—even, or especially, abstract information—in the form of mental maps.

The sixth principle rounds out the roster of our innate aptitudes: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-socialize the information we think about. We learned earlier in this book that the continual patter we carry on in our heads is in fact a kind of internalized conversation. Likewise, many of the written forms we encounter at school and at work—from exams and evaluations, to profiles and case studies, to essays and proposals—are really social exchanges (questions, stories, arguments) put on paper and addressed to some imagined listener or interlocutor. As we’ve seen, there are significant advantages to turning such interactions at a remove back into actual social encounters. Research we’ve reviewed demonstrates that the brain processes the “same” information differently, and often more effectively, when other human beings are involved—whether we’re imitating them, debating them, exchanging stories with them, synchronizing and cooperating with them, teaching or being taught by them. We are inherently social creatures, and our thinking benefits from bringing other people into our train of thought.

A clear-eyed acknowledgment of our quirks can lead us to create new kinds of mental routines, such as the one encapsulated in the seventh principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops. As Andy Clark has pointed out, when computer scientists develop artificial intelligence systems, they don’t design machines that compute for a while, print out the results, inspect what they have produced, add some marks in the margin, circulate copies among colleagues, and then start the process again. That’s not how computers work—but it is how we work; we are “intrinsically loopy creatures,” as Clark likes to say. Something about our biological intelligence benefits from being rotated in and out of internal and external modes of cognition, from being passed among brain, body, and world. This means we should resist the urge to shunt our thinking along the linear path appropriate to a computer—input, output, done—and instead allow it to take a more winding route. We can pass our thoughts through the portal of our bodies: seeking the verdict of our interoception, seeing what our gestures have to show us, acting out our ideas in movement, observing the inspirations that arise during or after vigorous exercise. We can spread out our thoughts in space, treating the contents of the mind as a territory to be mapped and navigated, surveyed and explored. And we can run our thoughts through the brains of the people we know, gathering from the lot of them t...

We are loopy creatures—and we are also situationally sensitive ones, responsive to the immediate conditions and circumstances in which we find ourselves. Hence, the eighth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by creating cognitively congenial situations.

The art of creating intelligence-extending situations is one that every parent, teacher, and manager needs to master.

we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments. Think of the cues of belonging and identity, for example, that bolster our motivation and improve our performance when displayed in our study and work spaces. Recall the transactive memory system we construct with a group of colleagues over time, in which the burden of attending to and remembering information is distributed across group members. Picture, even, the indoor plants and “green” walls and roofs that help restore our attention by providing regular glimpses of nature. Once securely embedded, such extensions can function as seamless adjuncts to our neural capacity, supporting and augmenting our ability to think intelligently.

Intriguing though it is to contemplate, Rawls’s scenario has always been hard to enter into fully—so closely are we identified with what we take to be our “natural assets and abilities,” our “intelligence” foremost among them. The theory of the extended mind is a tool with which we might begin to pry loose this instinctive identification. Unlike innate intelligence, which we imagine to be an inseparable part of who we “are,” access to mental extensions is more readily understood as a matter of chance or luck. This radically new conceptual theory harbors within it an old and humble moral sentiment: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Acknowledging the reality of the extended mind might well lead us to embrace the extended heart.