The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

We can pass our thoughts through the portal of our bodies: seeking the verdict of our interoception, seeing what our gestures have to show us, acting out our ideas in movement, observing the inspirations that arise during or after vigorous exercise. We can spread out our thoughts in space, treating the contents of the mind as a territory to be mapped and navigated, surveyed and explored. And we can run our thoughts through the brains of the people we know, gathering from the lot of them the insights no single mind could generate. Most felicitous of all, we can loop our thoughts through all three of these realms. What we shouldn’t do is keep our thoughts inside our heads, inert, unchanged by encounters with the world beyond the skull.