The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone. It’s true that we’re more accustomed to thinking about our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships. But we can also think with and through them—by using the movements of our hands to understand and express abstract concepts, for example, or by arranging our workspace in ways that promote idea generation, or by engaging in social practices like teaching and storytelling that lead to deeper understanding and more accurate memory. Rather than exhorting ourselves and others to use our heads, we should be applying extra-neural resources to the project of thinking outside the skull’s narrow circumference.

This oversight is the regrettable result of what has been called our “neurocentric bias”—that is, our idealization and even fetishization of the brain—and our corresponding blind spot for all the ways cognition extends beyond the skull.

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And nature provides particularly rich and fertile surroundings with which to think.

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Over hundreds of thousands of years of dwelling outside, the human organism became precisely calibrated to the characteristics of its verdant environment, so that even today, our senses and our cognition are able to easily and efficiently process the particular features present in natural settings. Our minds are tuned to the frequencies of the organic world. No such evolutionary adjustment has prepared us for the much more recent emergence of the world in which we now spend almost all our time: the built environment, with its sharp lines and unforgiving textures and relentless motion.

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only 26 percent of mothers report that their kids play outside every day.

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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.

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The more stressed individuals are, the more benefit they derive from exposure to nature.

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Navigating an urban environment—with its hard surfaces, sudden movements, and loud, sharp noises—requires voluntary attention. 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.”

Soft fascination

what researchers call “open monitoring,” or a curious, accepting, nonjudgmental response to all we encounter.

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.

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MICRORESTORATIVE EXPERIENCES

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.

Time

Children’s play is more imaginative when they are outdoors than when they are inside, research has shown; natural play spaces are less structured and more varied, and the props children may come across (leaves, pebbles, pinecones) have no purpose predetermined by teachers or parents. 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.

Nature

The “functional” account of awe—biologists’ and psychologists’ attempt at explaining why we feel this emotion—proposes that it spurs humans to put aside their individual interests in the service of a collective project. Members of the species who were inclined to feel awe, the story goes, were better able to band together to accomplish essential tasks.

Awe

THE OCCASIONS FOR awe available to our forebears are the same ones that move us now: mountains, oceans, trees, sky.

The ancestors

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell recalled an “explosion of awareness” upon seeing Earth from space, an experience that gave him an “overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness.”

One

An early example of such walls can be found amid the hubbub of today’s Manhattan, tucked away inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, among the Grecian urns and the colonial-era silver, is a tiny gem of a room, re-created as it was in fifteenth-century Perugia: the studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. Federico, whose title called on him to be variously a royal, a politician, and a warrior, lived in the town of Gubbio in what is now central Italy.

Studiolo

The fad for the studiolo spread north through Europe, as people of means added such rooms to their homes. Like Federico’s study, these spaces often featured displays of meaningful or sacred objects: collections of books, scientific and musical instruments, religious relics. And they carved out a space of undisturbed quiet—space that made deep, fresh thinking possible.

Studiolo

For example: during the years he lived in London, from 1764 to 1775, Benjamin Franklin spent many hours at a coffeehouse near St. Paul’s Cathedral. In his book The Invention of Air, Johnson recounts how Franklin mingled there with a group of “freethinkers”—scientists, mathematicians, philosophers—who stimulated and inspired one another through their wide-ranging conversations.

Mingling

Research by Lauren Emberson, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, has found that we are more distracted, and our cognitive performance more impaired, when we overhear what she calls a “halfalogue” than when we catch both sides of an in-person dialogue. When we hear only half of a conversation, it’s more difficult to predict when the speaker will pause or resume talking, and what that person will say to their unheard-by-us conversational partner.

Overheard

In his study, Bar found that “a high mental load consistently diminished the originality and creativity” of his subjects’ responses. His explanation: when our minds are otherwise occupied, we resort to mental shortcuts—convenient stereotypes, familiar assumptions, well-worn grooves.

Creativity

Privacy supports creativity in another way: it offers us the freedom to experiment unobserved.

Creativity

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.

Home advantage