The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Wieman is working to achieve wider recognition of an often overlooked truth: the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process. We can engage in thinking on our own, of course, and at times solitary cognition is what’s called for by a particular problem or project. Even then, solo thinking is rooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitive scientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind of internalized conversation. 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.