The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

“Thinking was assumed to be a kind of computer program that runs in people’s brains.”

The computer and muscle analogies fit neatly with our society’s emphasis on individualism—its

our persistent inclination “to order items by ranking them in a linear series of increasing worth.” Computers may be slow or fast, muscles may be weak or strong—and so it goes, we assume, with our own and others’ minds.

“Natural scenery,” wrote landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, “employs the mind without fatigue

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.”