The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

First, as to that growing need to think outside the brain: as many of us can readily recognize—in the accelerated pace of our days and the escalating complexity of our duties at school and work—the demands on our thinking are ratcheting up. There’s more information we must deal with. The information we have to process is coming at us faster. And the kind of information we must deal with is increasingly specialized and abstract. This difference in kind is especially significant. The knowledge and skills that we are biologically prepared to learn have been outstripped by the need to acquire a set of competencies that come far less naturally and are acquired with far more difficulty. 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 bi...