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“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.”
We like the capacity to see long distances in many directions from a protected perch, aspects that geographer Jay Appleton memorably named “prospect” and “refuge.”
Passive attention, by contrast, is effortless: diffuse and unfocused, it floats from object to object, topic to topic. This is the kind of attention evoked by nature, with its murmuring sounds and fluid motions; psychologists working in the tradition of James call this state of mind “soft fascination.”
“The wall was designed to protect us from the cognitive load of having to keep track of the activities of strangers,”
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.
Privacy supports creativity in another way: it offers us the freedom to experiment unobserved. When our work is a performance put on for the benefit of others, we’re less likely to try new approaches that might fail or look messy.
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.
Research has revealed that the act of creating a concept map, on its own, generates a number of cognitive benefits. It forces us to reflect on what we know, and to organize it into a coherent structure.
Greek and Roman thinkers revered imitation as an art in its own right, one that was to be energetically pursued. Imitation occupied a central role in classical education, where it was treated not as lazy cheating but as a rigorous practice of striving for excellence by emulating the masters.
It’s paradoxical but true: imitating well demands a considerable degree of creativity.
We did not evolve to solve tricky logic puzzles on our own, they point out, and so we shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that we’re no good at it, any more than by the fact that we’re no good at breathing underwater. What we did evolve to do is persuade other people of our views, and to guard against being misled by others. Reasoning is a social activity, in other words, and should be practiced as such.
The drama inherent in conflict is what keeps us reading or watching. Yet we expect students and employees to attend to information that’s been drained of conflict, blandly presented as the established account or consensus view.
Compared to other informational formats, we attend to stories more closely. We understand them more readily. And we remember them more accurately.
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.
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.
the third principle: whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor.
the fourth principle: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-embody the information we think about.
The fifth principle emphasizes another human strength: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about.
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.
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.
the eighth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by creating cognitively congenial situations.
We’ll elicit improved performance from the brain when we approach it with the aim not of issuing orders but of creating situations that draw out the desired result.
The final principle of extension doubles back on itself with a self-referential observation. What kind of creatures are we? The kind who extend, eagerly and energetically, when given the chance.
the ninth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments.
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.
