The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

For humans these parts include, most notably, the feelings and movements of our bodies; the physical spaces in which we learn and work; and the other minds with which we interact—our classmates, colleagues, teachers, supervisors, friends. Sometimes all three elements come together in especially felicitous fashion, as they did for the brilliant intellectual team of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

interoception).

First, there is the study of embodied cognition, which explores the role of the body in our thinking: for example, how making hand gestures increases the fluency of our speech and deepens our understanding of abstract concepts. Second, there is the study of situated cognition, which examines the influence of place on our thinking: for instance, how environmental cues that convey a sense of belonging, or a sense of personal control, enhance our performance in that space. And third, there is the study of distributed cognition, which probes the effects of thinking with others—such as how people working in groups can coordinate their individual areas of expertise (a process called “transactive memory”), and how groups can work together to produce results that exceed their members’ individual contributions (a phenomenon known as “collective intelligence”).

Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition(s)

Here we arrive at a dilemma—one that we all share: The modern world is extraordinarily complex, bursting with information, built around non-intuitive ideas, centered on concepts and symbols. Succeeding in this world requires focused attention, prodigious memory, capacious bandwidth, sustained motivation, logical rigor, and proficiency with abstractions. The gap between what our biological brains are capable of, and what modern life demands, is large and getting larger each day. With every experimental discovery, the divide between the scientific account of the world and our intuitive “folk” understanding grows more pronounced. With every terabyte of data swelling humanity’s store of knowledge, our native faculties are further outstripped. With every twist of complexity added to the world’s problems, the naked brain becomes more unequal to the task of solving them.

The brain has limitations.

“gritty”

(As the comedian Emo Philips has remarked: “I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”)

Newspaper and magazine articles described the ENIAC as a “giant electronic brain,” a “robot brain,” an “automatic brain,” and a “brain machine.” But before long, the analogy got turned around. It became a commonplace that the brain is like a computer. Indeed, the “cognitive revolution” that would sweep through American universities in the 1950s and 1960s was premised on the belief that the brain could be understood as a flesh-and-blood computing machine. The first generation of cognitive scientists “took seriously the idea that the mind is a kind of computer,” notes Brown University professor Steven Sloman. “Thinking was assumed to be a kind of computer program that runs in people’s brains.”

“NEW RESEARCH SHOWS That the Brain Can Be Developed Like a Muscle,” read the headline of the news article, set in bold type. The year was 2002,

From 1946 to 2002

Carol Dweck,

Carol Dweck

Dweck’s idea, which she initially called “the incremental theory of intelligence,” would eventually become known to the world as the “growth mindset”:

Mindset,

At the center of it all is a metaphor: the brain as muscle.

“grit.”

“essentialism”—that is, the conviction that each entity we encounter possesses an inner essence that makes it what it is.

"Essentialism"

This is, admittedly, a radically new way of thinking about thinking.

The demands of the modern environment have now met, and exceeded, the limits of the biological brain.

His brain plus his computer equaled his mind, extended.

Clark and his colleague David Chalmers

Once “the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped,”

"Skin and skull..."

Embodied cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition: each of these takes up a particular aspect of the extended mind, investigating how our thinking is extended by our bodies, by the spaces in which we learn and work, and by our interactions with other people.

The literature on the extended mind suggests a different view: experts are those who have learned how best to marshal and apply extra-neural resources to the task before them.

That is: some people are able to think more intelligently because they are better able to extend their minds.

When reading the chapters that follow, we should keep in mind the way access, or lack of access, to mental extensions might be shaping the thinking of our students, employees, co-workers, and fellow citizens.

Policy and process in the world.

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.

The individual process.

“Good judgment may require the ability to listen carefully to feedback from the body.”

Interoception is, simply stated, an awareness of the inner state of the body.

Interoception

Mindfulness meditation is one way of enhancing such awareness.

But tuning in to these feelings is only a first step. The next step is to name them. Attaching a label to our interoceptive sensations allows us to begin to regulate them; without such attentive self-regulation, we may find our feelings overwhelming, or we may misinterpret

“affect labeling,”

Affect Labeling

Homo economicus

anchoring effect,

availability heuristic,

self-serving bias,

resilience and low resilience.

The ability to allocate our internal resources effectively in tackling mental challenges is a capacity researchers call “cognitive resilience.”

Cognitive Resilience

Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training,

Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training

By remaining alert to these preliminary signals, she says, we can avoid being taken by surprise and then overreacting, entering a state of physiological arousal from which it is hard to come down. (Stanley notes ruefully that many of us take just the opposite approach, as she once did: pushing aside internal red flags in the hope that we can “power through” and get the job done.)

The vision of resilience she offers is not a formidable display of will and grit of the kind she once would have embraced; it is, rather, a flexible, moment-by-moment responsiveness to changing conditions—both inside and out.

Will and Grit?

The body produces sensations, the body initiates actions—and only then does the mind assemble these pieces of evidence into the entity we call an emotion.

Emotions and Sensations; it can be confusing.

wrote James, to say that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.”

First: the greater our awareness of interoceptive sensations, the richer and more intense our experience of emotion can be. And second: equipped with interoceptive awareness, we can get in on the ground floor of emotion construction; we can participate in creating the type of emotion we experience.

This is important.

“cognitive reappraisal.”

Cognitive reappraisal

Reappraising nervousness as excitement yielded a noticeable difference in performance.

In a similar fashion, we can choose to reappraise debilitating “stress” as productive “coping.” A 2010 study carried out with Boston-area undergraduates looked at what happens when people facing a stressful experience are informed about the positive effects of stress on our thinking—that is, the way it can make us more alert and more motivated. Before taking the GRE, the admissions exam for graduate school, one group of students was given the following message to read: “People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” A second group received no such message before taking the exam. Three months later, when the students’ GRE scores were released, the students who had been encouraged to reappraise their feelings of stress scored an average of 65 points higher.

Similar to Kelly McGonigal's findings.

The increased activity in these areas suggests that the act of reappraisal allowed students to redirect the mental resources that previously were consumed by anxiety, applying them to the math problems instead.

adopting the strategy of reappraisal. The first is that reappraisal works best for those who are interoceptively aware: we have to be able to identify our internal sensations, after all, before we can begin to modify the way we think about them. Second, the sensations we’re actually feeling have to be congruent with the emotion we’re aiming to construct. We’re able to reappraise nervousness as excitement because the physiological cues associated with the two emotions are so similar; if what we’re feeling is a heavy sense of apathy or lassitude, exclaiming “I’m so excited!” isn’t going to work.

Reappraisal works when...

“social interoception.”

doppel.

Doppel

the visual system becomes more sensitive when we are actively exploring our environment. When our bodies are at rest—that is, sitting still in a chair—this heightened acuity is dialed down.

to this day, bodily activity and mental acuity are still intimately intertwined.