The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

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.