The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Another kind of physical action capable of advancing our thinking is novel movements: movements that introduce us to an abstract concept via a bodily experience we haven’t had before. Consider: When you step into your shower at home, how do you turn on the hot water? To answer that simple question, you simulated the familiar, well-practiced action in your head; maybe you even reached out and turned an imagined faucet handle. But how would you engage in thinking about an action you’ve never physically experienced? That’s the dilemma facing physics students, who are expected to reason about phenomena like angular velocity and centripetal force without a felt sense of what they’re like. Decades of research on physics education reveal the discouraging result: most students never achieve a firm grasp of the subject. Some studies have found that students’ understanding of physics becomes less accurate after they have completed an introductory college physics course.

Yet the fact is that—very unlike computers—humans solve problems most effectively by imagining themselves into a given scenario, a project that is made easier if the human in question has had a previous physical encounter on which to base her mental projections. Providing students with such physical encounters was the purpose behind a study designed by Sian Beilock, inspired by the work with hockey players we read about earlier.

Students who’d experienced torque with their own bodies, the experimenters found, achieved higher scores on the assessment. Their superior understanding was especially evident in their answers to the most challenging theoretical questions. What’s more, brain scans showed that when they were asked to think about torque, the region of the brain that controls movement was activated only in those who’d had a direct physical encounter with the force. Even while lying immobile inside an fMRI machine—or while sitting still, taking an exam—these students were able to access a bodily experience of motion, access that gave them a deeper and more accurate understanding of the concept.

As education professor Dor Abrahamson puts it, “Learning is moving in new ways.”

YET ANOTHER TYPE of motion with the capacity to improve the way we think is self-referential movements: movements in which we bring ourselves—in particular, our bodies—into the intellectual enterprise. Though it may seem “unscientific” to place oneself at the center of the action, scientists themselves frequently use their bodies as instruments of exploration, imagining themselves as the object of their investigation. In so doing, they cultivate a kind of “empathy with entities they are struggling to understand,” notes Elinor Ochs, an anthropologist who has studied theoretical physicists at work in the laboratory. The world’s most famous physicist, Albert Einstein, reportedly imagined himself riding on a beam of light while developing his theory of relativity. “No scientist thinks in equations,” Einstein once claimed. Rather, he remarked, the elements of his own thought were “visual” and even “muscular” in nature.

Thinking and learning with our bodies takes advantage of humans’ fundamentally egocentric mindset. We’ve evolved to understand events and ideas in terms of how they relate to us, not from some neutral or impartial perspective. Research has found that the act of self-reference—connecting new knowledge to our own identity or experience—functions as a kind of “integrative glue,” imparting a stickiness that the same information lacks when it is encountered as separate and unrelated to the self. Adopting a first-person perspective doesn’t mean we become limited by it; indeed, using the movements of our own bodies to explore a given phenomenon seems to promote the ability to alternate between viewing it from an internal perspective and from an external one, an oscillation that produces a deeper level of understanding.

Smith notes that such “body-based activities” have been shown to deepen students’ understanding and strengthen their memory of mathematical concepts. Mathematics teachers have long incorporated manipulatives into their instruction—counting rods and cubes, for example. The research of Smith and others suggests that students learn even more when the “manipulatives” they employ are their own bodies.

ONE FINAL CATEGORY of thought-enhancing movements encompasses those that enact an analogy, whether explicit or implicit. The language we use is full of metaphors that borrow from our experience as embodied creatures; metaphorical movements reverse-engineer this process, putting the body through the motions as a way of prodding the mind into the state the metaphor describes. “Moving the body can alter the mind by unconsciously putting ideas in our head before we are able to consciously contemplate them on our own,” as Sian Beilock has written. “Getting a person to move lowers his threshold for experiencing thoughts that share something in common with the movement.”

To take one example: by moving our bodies, we activate a deeply ingrained and mostly unconscious metaphor connecting dynamic motion with dynamic thinking. Call to mind the words we use when we can’t seem to muster an original idea—we’re “stuck,” “in a rut”—and those we reach for when we feel visited by the muse. Then we’re “on a roll,” our thoughts are “flowing.” Research has demonstrated that people can be placed in a creati...

Remember Friedrich Nietzsche, from earlier in our journey. “Only thoughts which come from walking have any value,” he maintained. Søren Kierkegaard felt similarly. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” remarked the Danish philosopher. Walking is “gymnastics for the mind,” observed the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am unable to reflect when I am not walking; the moment I stop, I think no more, and as soon as I am again in motion, my head resumes its workings,” averred the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne lamented that his thoughts often came to him when he was on the move, at moments when “I have nothing to jot them down on”; this was wont to happen “especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.”

“Walking,” the essay by philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau first delivered at the Concord Lyceum in 1851. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,” he declared. That same year, Thoreau expanded on the theme in his journal. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” he exclaimed. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch. Where language is discrete and linear—one word following another—gesture is impressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things look and feel and move.

The special strengths of gesture are especially valuable in the effort to persuade or enlist others. Such movements visually place the gesturer at the center of the action, situating him at the locus of agency and control. When he talks, his words may describe or extol or explain—but when he gestures, he acts on the world (if only symbolically). At the same time, the gesturer’s motions render an abstract idea in human-scale, embodied terms, an act of translation that makes it easier for onlookers to mentally simulate the gesturer’s point of view for themselves. Perhaps most important, gesture generates the sense that an as yet immaterial enterprise is a palpable reality in the present moment. Using gesture in this way can confer an enormous advantage in the start-up world, one group of researchers notes, since “entrepreneurs are operating on the boundary of what is real and what is yet to happen.” That’s true for many of us, whether we’re offering projections for the next quarter, presenting a proposal for a project, or explaining why a change we’d like to make would be well advised. Gesture brings an uncertain future into the observable present, imbues it with a realness that we can almost touch.

In a study published in 2019, she and her colleagues reported that company founders who deployed “the skilled use of gesture” in their pitches were 12 percent more likely to attract funding for their new ventures. Such adept use of movement includes the presentation of “symbolic gestures”—movements that capture the overall meaning of the speaker’s message—along with what are called “beat gestures”: hand motions that serve to punctuate a particular point.

High-income parents gesture more than low-income parents, research finds. And it’s not just the quantity of gesture that differs but also the quality: more affluent parents provide a greater variety of types of gesture, representing more categories of meaning—physical objects, abstract concepts, social signals. Parents and children from poorer backgrounds, meanwhile, tend to use a narrower range of gestures when they interact with each other. Following the example set by their parents, high-income kids gesture more than their low-income counterparts. In one study, fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of twenty-four different meanings during a ninety-minute observation session, while children from lower-income families conveyed only thirteen meanings. Four years later, when it was time to start school, children from the richer families scored an average of 117 on a measure of vocabulary comprehension, compared to 93 for children from the poorer families.

Rather astonishingly, researchers have found that children’s “newest and most advanced ideas” about how to understand a concept or solve a problem often show up first in their gestures. Take, for example, a six-year-old girl faced with a classic “conservation” task. (Such tasks were first employed by the pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget to investigate the course of childhood cognitive development.) The girl is shown a tall, skinny glass full of water, the contents of which are then poured into a short, wide glass. Asked whether the amount of water remains the same, the girl answers no—but at the same time, her hands are making a cupping motion, indicating that she’s beginning to understand that the wider shape of the second glass accounts for the way the same amount of water fills it at a lower level than the first glass.

Furthermore, Goldin-Meadow has found, learners who produce such speech-gesture mismatches are especially receptive to instruction—ready to absorb and apply the correct knowledge, should a parent or teacher supply it. Even adults signal their readiness to learn through mismatches between what they’re saying and how their hands are moving. In one experiment, for example, a group of college students was asked to learn about a set of “stereoisomers”—chemical compounds that feature the same number of atoms but that differ from one another in the way the atoms are spatially arranged. The extent to which the undergraduates made gesture-speech mismatches while learning “predicted their ability to profit from instruction,” writes Goldin-Meadow, who was lead author of the study. “Namely, the more they expressed correct conceptual information in gesture that they did not verbalize in speech, the more they were subsequently able to learn.” When our words and our movements diverge, it’s our gestures that signal what happens next.

In one study, subjects who had watched a videotaped speech were 33 percent more likely to recall a point from the talk if it was accompanied by a gesture. This effect, detected immediately after the subjects viewed the recording, grew even more pronounced with the passage of time: thirty minutes after watching the speech, subjects were more than 50 percent more likely to remember the gesture-accompanied points.

It’s just these benefits of observing gesture that should lead us to take a second step: seeking out educational resources, for ourselves and others, in which the instructor makes proficient use of physical movement. A number of studies have demonstrated that instructional videos that include gesture produce significantly more learning for the people who watch them: viewers direct their gaze more efficiently, pay more attention to essential information, and more readily transfer what they have learned to new situations. Videos that incorporate gesture seem to be especially helpful for those who begin with relatively little knowledge of the concept being covered; for all learners, the beneficial effect of gesture appears to be even stronger for video instruction than for live, in-person instruction.

Yet the most popular and widely viewed instructional videos available online largely fail to leverage the power of gesture, according to a team of psychologists from UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles. The researchers examined the top one hundred videos on YouTube devoted to explaining the concept of standard deviation, an important topic in the study of statistics. In 68 percent of these recordings, they report, the instructor’s hands were not even visible. In the remaining videos, instructors mostly used their hands to point or to make emphatic “beat” gestures. They e...

The takeaway: When selecting instructional videos for ourselves or for our children or our students, we should look for those in which the teacher’s hands are visible and active. And if we ourselves are called upon to teach online—or even just to communicate via Zoom or another video-conferencing platform—we should make sure that others can see our moving hands. Research suggests that making these motions will improve our own performance: people who gesture as they teach on video, it’s been foun...

The disparity in spatial-thinking skills between males and females is the largest known cognitive gender difference. A study led by psychologists at the University of Chicago found that five-year-old boys were already better than girls the same age at solving spatial-thinking problems that involved mentally fitting shapes together to make a whole. Upon closer analysis, however, this disparity was revealed to be not a gender difference so much as a difference in the propensity to gesture: the more children gestured while executing the task, the better their performance—and boys tended to gesture far more than girls. While 27 percent of boys gestured on all eight problems, for example, only 3 percent of girls did; 23 percent of girls did not gesture at all, compared to only 6 percent of boys.

The study’s authors suggest that this discrepancy may emerge from differences in boys’ and girls’ experience: boys are more likely to play with spatially oriented toys and video games, they note, and may become more comfortable making spatial gestures as a result. Another study, this one conducted with four-year-olds, reported that children who were encouraged to gesture got better at rotating mental objects, another task that draws heavily on spatial-thinking skills. Girls in this experiment were especially likely to benefit from being prompted to gesture.

Wolff-Michael Roth is a cognitive scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada. His research on the role of gesture in the development of scientific literacy has led him to change the way he conducts his courses as a professor. Rather than presenting lectures in which he does most of the talking, Roth finds as many opportunities as he can to ask individual students to describe and explain the topics being covered in that day’s class. Lacking a fully developed understanding, or even the relevant technical vocabulary, his students lean heavily on gesture to convey their budding knowledge—and this is just what their professor wants to see. “It is from the attempt of expressing themselves that understanding evolves, rather than the other way around,” he maintains.

Roth is also a practitioner of another kind of occasion creation: he has observed, and research has confirmed, that people are more likely to gesture when they have something to gesture at. Providing what Roth calls “visual artifacts”—charts, diagrams, maps, models, photographs—induces speakers to gesture more, thus generating all the benefits for understanding that such hand motions confer.

Kerry Ann Dickson, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology at Victoria University in Australia, makes use of all three of these hooks when she teaches. Instead of memorizing dry lists of body parts and systems, her students practice pretending to cry (the gesture that corresponds to the lacrimal gland/tear production), placing their hands behind their ears (cochlea/hearing), and swaying their bodies (vestibular system/balance). They feign the act of chewing (mandibular muscles/mastication), as well as spitting (salivary glands/saliva production). They act as if they were inserting a contact lens, as if they were picking their nose, and as if they were engaging in “tongue-kissing” (motions that represent the mucous membranes of the eye, nose, and mouth, respectively). Dickson reports that students’ test scores in anatomy are 42 percent higher when they are taught with gestures than when taught the terms on their own.

Working memory—our ability to hold in mind information relevant to the problem we’re currently solving—also

It’s not the case that nature is simpler or more elementary than man-made environments. 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.

Nature is complex, it’s true, but its complexity is of a kind that our brains are readily able to process. When we’re surrounded by nature, we experience a high degree of “perceptual fluency,” notes Yannick Joye, a senior researcher at the ISM University of Management and Economics in Lithuania.

It does all this through an emotion that we confront most commonly in nature: awe. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has led much of the recent research on awe; he calls it an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.” One of the pleasurably fearsome things about awe is the radically new perspective it introduces. Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit, and we must work to accommodate the new information that is streaming in from the environment. Consider the physical behavior that accompanies awe: we stop, we pause, we stare with eyes wide and features slack, as if to let in more of the scene that has so astonished us. The experience of awe, Keltner and other researchers have found, prompts a predictable series of psychological changes. We become less reliant on preconceived notions and stereotypes. We become more curious and open-minded. And we become more willing to revise and update our mental “schemas”: the templates we use to understand ourselves and the world. The experience of awe has been called “a reset button” for the human brain. But we can’t generate a feeling of awe, and its associated processes, all on our own; we have to venture out into the world, and find something bigger than ourselves, in order to expe...

Scientists who study awe have also found that it alters the way we regard other people. Brain scans of people who are experiencing awe find that the region of the brain that contributes to our sense of occupying and orienting ourselves in space becomes less active. This diminished activity would seem to underlie the feeling we have when awestruck that the boundaries between ourselves and others have become more permeable, that we are part of a larger, connected whole. In behavioral terms, people act more prosocially and more altruistically following an experience of awe. They share and cooperate more in games after having watched a video of sublime scenes of nature; after having gazed up at a grove of old-growth trees, an experiment found, people were more likely to bend down and help pick up pens that a stranger (actually a confederate of the researcher) had dropped on the ground.

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. By extending ordinary thinking with awe at nature’s immensity, humankind may have ensured its own survival—a reminder to us, p...

Christopher Alexander, author of the classic book A Pattern Language and an architect who celebrates the hard-earned wisdom embedded in folk architecture, laments “the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings.” To the contrary, Alexander writes, “a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.” He adds: “Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.”

A tour through recent research in psychology and neuroscience, and through the varied kinds of places that humans have long created, can show us how to turn space into an extension of our minds.

APART FROM OFFERING shelter from the elements, the most critical function of a built interior is simply to give us a quiet place to think. Such protected space is necessary because thinking—at least of the kind the modern world expects of us—doesn’t come naturally to the human animal.

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. The walls of the study allowed the duke, a lover of literature, architecture, and mathematics, to retreat from the company of the townspeople he ruled into quiet study and contemplation. And because his studiolo was constructed in Renaissance Italy, these were no ordinary walls. Craftsmen from Siena, Florence, and Naples created elaborate trompe l’oeil murals made entirely of inlaid wood, a technique called intarsia. In slivers of rosewood, oak, and beech, these designs depict in precise detail (and in linear perspective, a then newly invented technique) simulated cabinets full of precious objects—each one a symbol of what the duke most admired and to which he most aspired. A lute and a harp showed he was a man of culture; a mace and a pair of spurs represented his skill in battle; a bound volume of Virgil’s Aeneid was a sign of his erudition. Incorporated into every corner of the space were mottos and motifs that represented the duke’s personal, familial, and regional identity. Federico’s version of a privat...

The coffeehouse, as author Steven Johnson has told us in his influential writings on “where ideas come from,” is the arena where the modern world was born. These buzzy gathering places, Johnson writes, “fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations; everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself.” New ideas, he argues, arise out of “the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.”

Allen found that fifty meters (about 165 feet) was the cutoff point for regular information exchange; beyond that distance, routine communication effectively ceased. People who are located close to one another are more likely to encounter one another, and it’s these encounters that spark informal exchanges, interdisciplinary ideas, and fruitful collaborations.

Allen further observed that shared spaces through which every member of an organization passes at least once a day are especially useful encounter promoters. He offered as an example MIT’s “Infinite Corridor,” an 825-foot-long hallway that runs through several buildings, effectively extending from one side of the campus to the other. (That’s longer than two football fields, although MIT students are less apt to be interested in football than in . . . other things. Undergraduates at the university celebrate the moment each school year when the sun lines up in just the right spot to beam its rays directly down the long hallway. They call it MIThenge.) More recent research has confirmed Allen’s original findings; in the age of texting, email, and Slack, the Allen curve still applies. Online communication, it seems, is no substitute for the offhand conversation, the casual exchange carried out in person.

First: humans are especially attuned to the presence of novelty, to whatever appears new and different. The pull of the novel on our attention is an efficient evolved strategy; it would be a waste of our time and energy to keep noticing the many things around us that don’t change from day to day. But our selective attraction to the fresh and new becomes a problem when we operate in environments that are hubs of constant activity and change. Psychologist Fabrice Parmentier, who researches the effects of acoustic distraction, reports that unexpected sounds “ineluctably break through attentional filters,” and end up distracting those who hear them—“regardless of the sound’s informational value.” Our attention, he notes, is subject to “involuntary capture” by any sudden or surprising noise.

In a 2014 study conducted by researchers from the University of Gävle in Sweden, participants were asked to write short essays under five different acoustic conditions. Background noise in the five conditions ranged from 0.08 to 0.71 on a measure called the Speech Transmission Index—that is, from completely unintelligible speech, to somewhat intelligible speech, to crystal-clear speech. The participants’ writing fluency, the investigators reported, dropped “drastically” at Speech Transmission Index values above 0.23—levels that, they note, “would not be at all uncommon” in an open-plan office.

(Students who try to study while listening to high-intensity music like hip hop, one researcher found, are subject to what he memorably called the “attention drainage effect.”)

Once we spot others’ eyes on us, the processing of eye contact takes precedence over whatever else our brains were working on. An awareness of being looked at even increases our physiological arousal, as revealed by a spike in skin conductance.

We know this because of how much better we think when we close our eyes. Eye closure “helps people to disengage from environmental stimulation and thereby enhances the efficiency of cognitive processing,” one team of researchers reports. Temporarily relieved of such stimulation, people experience less cognitive load, are better able to engage in visualization, and can more readily retrieve elusive information when faced with one of those frustrating “tip-of-the-tongue” moments. They’re also much better at recalling details, both visual and auditory. One study reported a 23 percent increase in correct answers when participants closed their eyes as they answered questions about a film they had just watched.

“Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote poet Robert Frost;

they also provide us with privacy, a state that bears a surprising relationship to creativity.

One recent study, conducted in a British government agency that switched from enclosed offices to an open-plan workspace, found that the heightened imperative to engage in self-presentation in such settings fell most heavily on women, for whom appearance is considered especially important.)

Moshe Bar has found. Bar, who directs the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, reports that when he taxed subjects’ mental resources as they completed a test of creative thinking, they came up with more “statistically common” (that is, conventional and commonplace) associations. 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. These are the thoughts that come most readily to mind, that take the least mental energy to generate. It requires abundant cognitive resources to inhibit these stale, reflexive responses and to reach beyond them for ideas that are fresher and more original.

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. Ethan Bernstein, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, has investigated the relationship between privacy and innovation at a mobile phone factory in China. In a study published in 2012, he found that granting the workers greater privacy—concealing their activities behind a curtain—led them to become more innovative and more productive. They came up with faster and more effective ways of doing their work when the process of experimentation was shielded from view.

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. A study by psychologists Graham Brown and Markus Baer, for example, found that people who engage in negotiation within the bounds of their own space claim between 60 and 160 percent more value than the “visiting” party.