The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

What we may not realize is that good work also requires periods of abstention from such exchanges—a phenomenon that organizational psychologists call “intermittent collaboration.” Research on intermittent collaboration is based on the understanding that complex problem solving proceeds in two stages, the first of which entails gathering the facts we need to clarify the nature of the problem and begin constructing a solution. In this stage, communication and collaboration are essential. But there is a second phase, equally vital: the process of generating and developing solutions, and figuring out which of these solutions is best. During this phase, studies find, excessive collaboration is actually detrimental.

The reason can be found in our nature as a group-dwelling species. We are exquisitely sensitive to social pressure, easily drawn into consensus and conformity. When we’re constantly in touch with others, we all end up gravitating toward the same pretty-good-but-not-great answers. Research finds that people who keep lines of communication perpetually open consistently generate middling solutions—nothing terrible, but nothing exceptional either. Meanwhile, people who isolate themselves during the solution-generation phase tend to come up with a few truly extraordinary solutions—along with a lot of losers. The best of all worlds is enjoyed by those who engage in cycles of sociable interaction and quiet focus. Just as we need walls to protect us from our propensity to be distracted, so we require walls to shield us from our susceptibility to social pressure.

intermittent collaboration

Self-referential images and messages are not mere decorations—whether they’re built into the paneling of a duke’s splendidly outfitted retreat or tacked to the walls of an office worker’s cubicle. Research shows that in the presence of cues of identity and cues of affiliation, people perform better: they’re more motivated and more productive. The first of these are the tangible signs and signals we employ to support our self-conception: we’re the kind of person who likes cats, or rock climbing, or “Far Side” cartoons. We use our space to advertise our hobbies, to show off our awards and honors, to express an unexpected creative streak or a quirky sense of humor. Such displays may sometimes be aimed at informing other people of who we are (or who we’d like to be), but often they are intended for a more intimate audience: ourselves. For a study published in the Academy of Management Journal, researchers examined the workspaces of people holding a variety of jobs—from engineer to event planner, from creative director to real estate agent. The investigators found that about one-third of the personal tokens these professionals had incorporated into their workspaces were positioned so as to be visible only to their owners. Of the objects whose stated purpose for their owners was “reminding them of their goals and values,” 70 percent were placed out of sight of others.

One particularly striking example: research has found that cues that remind Asian American girls of their ethnicity improve their performance on math tests, while cues that remind them of their gender undermine their performance. For all of us, the objects on which our eyes come to rest each day reinforce what we’re doing in that place, in that role.

When we engage in such “environmental self-regulation,” we rely on cues outside ourselves to maintain the kind of equilibrium inside ourselves that facilitates the pursuit of our goals. In a study of mid-level professionals, Gregory Laurence, a professor of management at the University of Michigan–Flint, found that incorporating personal items into their workspaces helped them relieve the “emotional exhaustion” brought on by a stressful job. Especially for employees whose office settings did not afford much privacy, being able to personalize their work area—with photographs, posters, comic strips, mugs—helped them “carve out their own space, inscribe it with personal meaning, and thus create a kind of sanctuary at work,” write Laurence and his coauthors.

The key, she says, is not to eliminate stereotypes but to diversify them—to convey the message that people from many different backgrounds can thrive in a given setting. Just such an effort was undertaken at the University of Washington, where Cheryan is now a professor. UW revamped its computer science lab, applying a fresh coat of paint, hanging new artwork, and arranging the seating to encourage more social interaction. Five years later, the proportion of undergraduate computer science degrees earned by women at UW reached 32 percent, higher than at any other flagship public university in the country.

Cheryan and others are now exploring how to create a sense of ambient belonging in online “spaces,” an example of extending technology with what we know to be true about physical spaces in the offline world. As is the case in “real life,” research finds that members of historically stigmatized groups are especially attuned to cues of exclusion that appear on digital platforms, such as online courses.

In another study led by Kizilcec, the inclusion of a diversity statement on the Web pages of online courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics increased the enrollment of students of lower socioeconomic status—another group that is often underrepresented in STEM fields. “This is an equal opportunity course that offers you a supportive and inclusive space to learn,” the statement read. “Everyone, no matter their age, gender, or nationality, can be successful in this course. People like you are joining from all over the world and we value this diversity.” Such “psychologically inclusive design,” as Kizilcec calls it, aims to lower barriers to participation by “strategically placing content and design cues in the environment”—an effort that is as important in the online world as it is in the material one.

He continues: “A sign saying ‘wait here’ would be superfluous in the vestibule of the cathedral or temple, as the appropriate behavior or action is already inscribed in the architecture and ritual practices of the place. Neither would we require a text saying ‘Think of God,’ or ‘Consider your finitude’ in such places. In fact it could be said that we are already caught up in such thought by virtue of being in the sacred place.” But such rich signification is missing from non-places. What meaning or message is inscribed on a featureless chain store, or a generic hotel lobby, or the bleak urban “plaza” that surrounds many a skyscraper? What thoughts are inspired, what emotions are stirred by a row of beige cubicles, or a classroom housed inside a windowless trailer? We are set adrift in such spaces, alienated and purposeless. This is not simply a question of aesthetics; it is a question of what we think, how we act, who we are.

6 Thinking with the Space of Ideas

Notes Barbara Tversky, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College in New York: “We are far better and more experienced at spatial thinking than at abstract thinking. Abstract thought can be difficult in and of itself, but fortunately it can often be mapped onto spatial thought in one way or another. That way, spatial thinking can substitute for and scaffold abstract thought.”

But true human genius lies in the way we are able to take facts and concepts out of our heads, using physical space to spread out that material, to structure it, and to see it anew. The places we make for ideas can take many forms: a bank of computer screens, the pages of a field notebook, the surface of a workshop table—or even, as one celebrated author demonstrates, an expanse of office wall.

But at first Caro struggled even to wrap his head around his subjects. While researching and reporting The Power Broker, he was overwhelmed by the volume of information he had collected. “It was so big, so immense,” he has said. “I couldn’t figure out what to do with the material.” Caro’s books are too colossal to be held entirely in mind—even their author’s mind. Nor is the space of a typewritten page (Caro does not use a computer) nearly big enough to contain the full sweep of his storytelling. In order to complete these massive projects, Caro has to extend his thinking into physical space. One entire wall of his office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is taken up by a cork board four feet high and ten feet wide; the board is covered with a detailed outline of Caro’s current work in progress, plotting its trajectory from beginning to end. (So thorough is Caro that he must know the last sentence of a book before he starts composing its first lines.)

In another interview, Caro explained how the outline wall helps him stay in the zone. “I don’t want to stop while I’m writing, so I have to know where everything is,” he explained. “It’s hard for me to keep in the mood of the chapter I’m writing if I have to keep searching for files.”

“When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world,” psychologist Barbara Tversky has observed.

On the most basic level, the author is using physical space to offload facts and ideas. He need not keep mentally aloft these pieces of information or the complex structure in which they are embedded; his posted outline holds them at the ready, granting him more mental resources to think about that same material. Keeping a thought in mind—while also doing things to and with that thought—is a cognitively taxing activity. We put part of this mental burden down when we delegate the representation of the information to physical space, something like jotting down a phone number instead of having to continually refresh its mental representation by repeating it under our breath.

concept mapping.

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. As we construct the concept map, the process may reveal gaps in our understanding of which we were previously unaware. And, having gone through the process of concept mapping, we remember the material better—because we have thought deeply about its meaning. Once the concept map is completed, the knowledge that usually resides inside the head is made visible. By inspecting the map, we’re better able to see the big picture, and to resist becoming distracted by individual details. We can also more readily perceive how the different parts of a complex whole are related to one another.

Researchers from the University of Virginia and from Carnegie Mellon University reported that study participants were able to recall 56 percent more information when it was presented to them on multiple monitors rather than on a single screen. The multiple monitor setup induced the participants to orient their own bodies toward the information they sought—rotating their torsos, turning their heads—thereby generating memory-enhancing mental tags as to the information’s spatial location. Significantly, the researchers noted, these cues were generated “without active effort.” Automatically noting place information is simply something we humans do, enriching our memories without depleting precious mental resources.

Indeed, the use of a compact display actively drains our mental capacity. The screen’s small size means that the map we construct of our conceptual terrain has to be held inside our head rather than fully laid out on the screen itself. We must devote some portion of our limited cognitive bandwidth to maintaining that map in mind; what’s more, the mental version of our map may not stay true to the data, becoming inaccurate or distorted over time. Finally, a small screen requires us to engage in virtual navigation through information—scrolling, zooming, clicking—rather than the more intuitive physical navigation our bodies carry out so effortlessly. Robert Ball reports that as display size increases, virtual navigation activity decreases—and so does the time required to carry out a task. Large displays, he has found, require as much as 90 percent less “window management” than small monitors.

The young man carefully observed and emulated the actions of the experienced captain. Darwin had never kept a journal before coming aboard the Beagle, for example, but he began to do so under the influence of FitzRoy, whose naval training had taught him to keep a precise record of every happening aboard the ship and every detail of its oceangoing environment. Each day, Darwin and FitzRoy ate lunch together; following the meal, FitzRoy settled down to writing, bringing both the formal ship’s log and his personal journal up to date. Darwin followed suit, keeping current his own set of papers: his field notebooks, in which he recorded his immediate observations, often in the form of drawings and sketches; his scientific journal, which combined observations from his field notebooks with more integrative and theoretical musings; and his personal diary. Even when Darwin disembarked from the ship for a time, traveling by land through South America, he endeavored to maintain the nautical custom of noting down every incident, every striking sight he encountered.

The historian of science and Harvard University professor Janet Browne has remarked upon the significance of this activity of Darwin’s: “In keeping such copious records, he learned to write easily about nature and about himself. Like FitzRoy, he taught himself to look closely at his surroundings, to make notes and measurements, and to run through a mental checklist of features that ought to be recorded, never relying entirely on memory and always writing reports soon after the event.” She adds, “Although this was an ordinary practice in naval affairs, it was for Darwin a basic lesson in arranging his thoughts clearly and an excellent preparation for composing logical scientific arguments that stood him in good stead for many years afterwards.” But Darwin’s careful note keeping did not simply help him learn to “arrange his thoughts clearly” and “compose logical scientific arguments.” The projection of the internal workings of his mind onto the physical space of his journal created a conceptual map he was able to follow all the way to his theory of evolution. Some twenty-five years before the publication of his epochal book The Origin of Species, the entries in the journal Darwin kept throughout his expedition moved his thinking forward, step by tentative step.

In 1849, at forty years of age—his voyage on the HMS Beagle behind him but the publication of The Origin of Species still to come—Darwin advised those who would follow in his footsteps to “acquire the habit of writing very copious notes, not all for publication, but as a guide for himself.” The naturalist must take “precautions to attain accuracy,” he continued, “for the imagination is apt to run riot when dealing with masses of vast dimensions and with time during almost infinity.”

Here, then, is one of the unique affordances of an external representation: we can apply one or more of our physical senses to it. As the tiger example shows, “seeing” an image in our mind’s eye is not the same as seeing it on the page. Daniel Reisberg, a professor emeritus of psychology at Reed College in Oregon, calls this shift in perspective the “detachment gain”: the cognitive benefit we receive from putting a bit of distance between ourselves and the content of our minds. When we do so, we can see more clearly what that content is made of—how many stripes are on the tiger, so to speak. This measure of space also allows us to activate our powers of recognition. We leverage these powers whenever we write down two or more ways to spell a word, seeking the one that “looks right.” The curious thing about this common practice is that we do tend to know immediately which spelling appears correct—indicating that this is knowledge we already possess but can’t access until it is externalized.

So external representations are more definite than internal ones—and yet, in another sense, they are also more usefully ambiguous. When a representation remains inside our heads, there’s no mystery about what it signifies; it’s our thought, and so “there can be neither doubt nor ambiguity about what is intended,” notes Daniel Reisberg. Once we’ve placed it on the page, however, we can riff on it, play with it, take it in new directions; it can almost seem as if we ourselves didn’t make it. And indeed, researchers who have observed artists, architects, and designers as they create report that they often “discover” elements in their own work that they did not “put there,” at least not intentionally.

Gabriela Goldschmidt, professor emeritus of architecture at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, explains how this works: “One reads off the sketch more information than was invested in its making. This becomes possible because when we put down on paper dots, lines, and other marks, new combinations and relationships among these elements are created that we could not have anticipated or planned for. We discover them in the sketch as it is being made.” Architects, artists, and designers often speak of a “conversation” carried on between eye and hand; Goldschmidt makes the two-way nature of this conversation clear when she refers to “the backtalk of self-generated sketches.”

David Kirsh has made close observations of the way architects use physical mock-ups of the buildings they are designing; when they interact with the models they have constructed, he maintains, “they are literally thinking with these objects.” Interactions carried out in three dimensions, he says, “enable forms of thought that would be hard if not impossible to reach otherwise.” Kirsh calls this the “cognitive extra” that comes from moving concrete objects through physical space—a mental dividend that made the difference for one scientist struggling with a seemingly insoluble problem.

Collins and his coauthors identified four features of apprenticeship that could be adapted to the demands of knowledge work: modeling, or demonstrating the task while explaining it aloud; scaffolding, or structuring an opportunity for the learner to try the task herself; fading, or gradually withdrawing guidance as the learner becomes more proficient; and coaching, or helping the learner through difficulties along the way.

There’s just one problem: as a society we are suspicious of imitation, regarding it as juvenile, disreputable, even morally wrong. It’s a reaction Roze has come to know well. Despite the demonstrated benefits of mime-based role play, many of his fellow medical school professors have expressed apprehension about implementing the practice. Some of his students, too, initially voiced discomfort at the prospect of imitating patients. Roze is careful to note that those who participate are in no way mocking or making fun of their charges. In fact, he says, the act of imitation is imbued with respect: it’s treating patients as the ultimate authority, as the experts on what it’s like to have their condition.

The conventional approach to cognition has persuaded us that the only route to more intelligent thinking lies in cultivating our own brain. Imitating the thought of other individuals courts accusations of being derivative, or even of being a plagiarist—a charge that can end a writer’s career or a student’s tenure at school.

In the Romans’ highly structured system of schooling, students would begin by reading and analyzing aloud a model text. Early in pupils’ education, this might be a simple fable by Aesop; later on, a complex speech by Cicero or Demosthenes. The students would memorize the text and recite it from memory. Then they would embark on a succession of exercises designed to make them intimately familiar with the work in question. They would paraphrase the model text, putting it in their own words. They would translate the text from Greek to Latin or Latin to Greek. They would turn the text from Latin prose into Latin verse, or even from Latin prose into Greek verse. They would compress the model into fewer words, or elaborate it at greater length; they would alter its tone from plainspoken to grandiloquent, or the other way around. Finally, they would write their own pieces—but in the style of the admired author. Having imitated the model from every angle, students would begin the sequence anew, moving on to a more challenging text.

We know about the Roman system largely from the writings of Quintilian, the “master teacher of Rome.” Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, born around the year AD 35, headed a school of rhetoric that enrolled students from the city’s most illustrious families, including the emperor Domitian’s two heirs. In his masterwork, the Institutio Oratoria (subtitle: Education of an Orator in Twelve Books), Quintilian unapologetically asserted the value of copying. From authors “worthy of our study,” he wrote, “we must draw our stock of words, the variety of our figures, and our methods of composition” so as to “form our minds on the model of every excellence.” The educator continued: “There can be no doubt that in art, no small portion of our task lies in imitation, since, although invention came first and is all-important, it is expedient to imitate whatever has been invented with success, and it is a universal rule of life that we should wish to copy what we approve in others.”

Then, as the eighteenth century was drawing to a close, the Romantics arrived on the scene. This band of poets and painters and musicians worshiped originality, venerated authenticity. They rejected all that was old and familiar and timeworn in favor of what was inventive and imaginative and heartfelt. Their insistence on originality came in response to two major developments of the age. The first of these was industrialization. As factories rose brick by brick, an aesthetic countermovement mounted in tandem: machines could stamp out identical copies; only humans could come up with one-of-a-kind ideas. A particular sort of machine occasioned the second major development of the time: a flood of texts produced by the newly common printing press. More than any generation before them, the thinkers of the Romantic era bore what literary critic Walter Jackson Bate called “the burden of the past,” as masterworks from earlier eras became widely available for the first time. Immersed in a sea of their predecessors’ words, they felt an urgent need to create something new and fresh and never before said.

In his illuminated book Jerusalem, Los—Blake’s alter ego—voiced a sentiment that might have served as the Romantics’ motto. “I must create a system,” Blake’s character declared, or else “be enslav’d by another man’s.”

Under the Romantics’ influence, imitation did not merely become less favored than previously. It came to be actively disdained and disparaged—an attitude that was carried forward into succeeding decades. The naturalists of the late nineteenth century described imitation as the habit of children, women, and “savages,” and held up original expression as the preserve of European men. Innovation climbed to the top of the cultural value system, while imitation sank to an unaccustomed low.

In the same issue, Laland, a professor of biology at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, reported on the results of a computerized competition he and his collaborators had set up. This was a multi-round tournament in which the contenders—bots that had been programmed to behave in particular ways—battled to victory for a monetary prize. A hundred entrants from around the world had faced off, each designed to act according to one of three strategies (or a combination thereof): applying original ideas, engaging in trial and error, or copying others.

As for which strategy worked best, there was really no contest: copying was far and away the most successful approach. The winning entry exclusively copied others—it never innovated. By comparison, a player-bot whose strategy relied almost entirely on innovation finished ninety-fifth out of the one hundred contestants. The result came as a surprise to Laland and to one of his collaborators, Luke Rendell. “We were expecting someone to come up with a really clever way to say, ‘In these conditions you should copy, and in these conditions you should learn stuff for yourself,’ ” says Rendell. “But the winner just copied all the time.”

Kevin Laland acknowledges that imitation has a bad reputation. But, he says, researchers like him—in fields from biology to economics to psychology to political science—are discovering how valuable imitation can be as a way of learning new skills and making intelligent decisions. Researchers from these varied disciplines are using models and simulations, as well as historical analyses and real-world case studies, to show that imitation is often the most efficient and effective route to successful...

First on the list: by copying others, imitators allow other individuals to act as filters, efficiently sorting through available options. Finance professors Gerald Martin and John Puthenpurackal examined what would happen if an investor did nothing but copy the moves of celebrated investor Warren Buffett. (Buffett’s investment choices are periodically made public, when his company files a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission.) An individual who simp...

Second: imitators can draw from a wide variety of solutions instead of being tied to just one.

At the headquarters of its parent company, Inditex, Zara’s designers cluster around tables covered with pages ripped from fashion magazines and catalogs; with photographs snapped of stylish people on streets and in airports; and with the deconstructed parts of other designers’ garments, fresh from the runway. “Zara is engaged in a permanent quest for inspiration, everywhere and from everybody,” says Spanish journalist Enrique Badía, who has written extensively about the company. Zara even copies its own customers. Store managers from the chain’s hundreds of locations are in frequent touch with its designers, passing along new looks spotted on Zara’s fashion-forward clientele.

Kasra Ferdows, a professor of operations and information management at Georgetown University, notes that Zara’s adroit use of imitation has helped make Inditex the largest fashion apparel retailer in the world. Its success, he and two coauthors concluded in a company profile written for the Harvard Business Review, “depends on a constant exchange of information throughout every part of Zara’s supply chain—from customers to store managers, from store managers to market specialists and designers, from designers to production staff.” Crucially, the “information” that flows so freely at the company concerns not new ideas, but ideas good enough to copy.

The third advantage of imitation: copiers can evade mistakes by steering clear of the errors made by others who went before them, while innovators have no such guide to potential pitfalls. A case in point: diapers. Among parents who rely on disposable diapers, Pampers is a household name. Less familiar is the brand...

Gerard Tellis and Peter Golder, both professors of marketing, conducted a historical analysis of fifty consumer product categories (including diapers, from which the Pampers versus Chux example was taken). Their results showed that the failure rate of “market pioneers” is an alarming 47 percent, while the mean market share they capture is only 10 percent. Far better than being first, Tellis and Golder concluded, is being what some have called a “fast second”: an agile imitator. Companies that capitalize on others’ innovations have “a minimal failure rate” and “an average market share almost three times that of market pioneers,” they found. In this category they include Timex, Gillette, and Ford, firms that are often recalled—wrongly—as being first in their field.

Fourth, imitators are able to avoid being swayed by deception or secrecy: by working directly off of what others do, copiers get access to the best strategies in others’ repertoires. Competitors have no choice but to display what social scientists call “honest signals,” as they make decisions for themselves based on their own best interests. This is the case in every sort of contest—including sporting events like the America’s Cup, the high-profile sailing race.

Jan-Michael Ross and Dmitry Sharapov, both business professors at Imperial College London, studied the competitive interactions among yachts engaged in head-to-head races in the America’s Cup World Series. The researchers found that sailors often engaged in “covering,” or copying, the moves made by their rivals—especially when their boat was in the lead. It might seem surprising that sailors at the front of the pack would imitate those who are trailing, but Ross notes that such emulation makes sense: as long as the leaders do as their rivals behind them do, the...

Last, and perhaps most important, imitators save time, effort, and resources that would otherwise be invested in originating their own solutions. Research shows that the imitator’s costs are typically 60 to 75 percent of those borne by the innovator—and yet it is the i...

Engaging in effective imitation is like being able to think with other people’s brains—like getting a direct download of others’ knowledge and experience. But contrary to its reputation as a lazy cop-out, imitating well is not easy. It rarely entails automatic or mindless duplication. Rather, it requires cracking a sophisticated code—solving what social scientists call the “correspondence problem,” or the challenge of adapting an imitated solution to the particulars of a new situation. Tackling the correspondence problem involves breaking down an observed solution into its constituent parts, and then reassembling those parts in a different way; it demands a willingness to look past superficial features to the deeper reason why the original solution succeeded, and an ability to apply that underlying principle in a novel setting. It’s paradoxical but true: imitating well demands a considerable degree of creativity.

But as she investigated ways to address the medication error crisis, Pape didn’t rack her brain for an innovative fix. Instead she sought to imitate a solution that had been successfully applied in another industry. That industry was aviation—an enterprise, like health care, in which people’s lives depend on professionals’ precision and accuracy. While reading up on aviation safety, Pape learned that the moments of highest risk occurred during takeoffs and landings—periods when the plane was under ten thousand feet. She spotted a correspondence in her own field: for hospital patients who are given medication, the riskiest moments happen during the preparation of the drug dosage, and during administration of the drug to the patient.