The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

We associate stillness with steadiness, seriousness, and industriousness; we believe there’s something virtuous about controlling the impulse to move.

Sitting still

She found that more intense physical movement was associated with better cognitive performance on the task. The more the children moved, in other words, the more effectively they were able to think.

We have at our disposal a flexible and sensitive mechanism for making the necessary adjustments: fidgeting.

Fidgeting!

Katherine Isbister after she put out a call on social media for descriptions of people’s favorite “fidget objects” and how they used them.

Katherine Isbister's work.

“embodied self-regulation.”

For children, this is precisely the role played by recess; research shows that kids return from a session on the playground better able to focus their attention and to engage their executive function faculties.

procedural memory (memory of how to do something, such as how to ride a bike) that is distinct from declarative memory (memory of informational content, such as the text of a speech).

Procedural and Declarative memory.

“striking”: students who incorporated movement into their learning strategy remembered 76 percent of the material, while those who engaged in “deliberate memorization” recalled only 37 percent.

research on using movement to enhance thinking identifies four types of helpful motion: congruent movements, novel movements, self-referential movements, and metaphorical movements.

Four types of helpful motion.

congruent

novel movements:

self-referential movements:

“No scientist thinks in equations,” Einstein once claimed. Rather, he remarked, the elements of his own thought were “visual” and even “muscular” in nature.

Einstein

Barbara McClintock,

Jonas Salk,

visceral

“Being it”—embodying a conceptual object—is a very different experience from “watching it,” or viewing a conceptual object as “remote and separate from oneself,” notes Carmen Petrick Smith of the University of Vermont, who has studied the effects of physically embodying mathematical concepts. Groups of students might form a triangle with their outstretched arms, for example, and then experiment with moving closer to and farther away from one another; in this way they come to understand that the size of a triangle can vary without changing the degree of the angles at its corners. Smith notes that such “body-based activities” have been shown to deepen students’ understanding and strengthen their memory of mathematical concepts. Mathematics teachers have long incorporated manipulatives into their instruction—counting rods and cubes, for example. The research of Smith and others suggests that students learn even more when the “manipulatives” they employ are their own bodies.

Mathematics

metaphorical movements

Such experiments suggest we can activate a particular cognitive process by embodying the metaphor that has come to be associated with it. Simply moving the body through space is itself a loose kind of metaphor for creativity—for new angles and unexpected vistas, for fluid thinking and dynamic change. The activation of this metaphor may help account for the finding that people are more creative during and after walking than when they are sitting still.

Although contemporary culture prescribes sitting still while thinking, a stroll through the history of literature and philosophy finds ample evidence of a counter-message. Remember Friedrich Nietzsche, from earlier in our journey. “Only thoughts which come from walking have any value,” he maintained. Søren Kierkegaard felt similarly. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” remarked the Danish philosopher. Walking is “gymnastics for the mind,” observed the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am unable to reflect when I am not walking;

Walking

the moment I stop, I think no more, and as soon as I am again in motion, my head resumes its workings,” averred the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne lamented that his thoughts often came to him when he was on the move, at moments when “I have nothing to jot them down on”; this was wont to happen “especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.”

“Walking,” the essay by philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau first delivered at the Concord Lyceum in 1851. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,” he declared.

Thoreau

Researchers who study embodied cognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and convey their thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of the hands and the rest of the body.

Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch. Where language is discrete and linear—one word following another—gesture is impressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things look and feel and move.

“symbolic gestures”—movements

“beat gestures”:

Indeed, linguists theorize that gesture was humankind’s earliest language, flourishing long before the first word was spoken.

gesture represents the leading edge of our thought.

Pointing

Amazingly enough, as one researcher puts it, “Young children use their hands to tell their mothers what to say.”

Indeed, researchers have documented a link between a child’s rate of gesturing at fourteen months and the size of that same child’s vocabulary at four and a half years of age.

“gesture gap.”

A gesture gap?

vocabulary size at the start of schooling is, in turn, a strong predictor of how well children perform academically in kindergarten and throughout the rest of their school years.

“penetrative thinking.”

American Sign Language (ASL). People who are fluent in sign language, as Cooke is, have been found to have an enhanced ability to process visual and spatial information.

intuitive genius of gesture.

for all learners, the beneficial effect of gesture appears to be even stronger for video instruction than for live, in-person instruction.

takeaway: When selecting instructional videos for ourselves or for our children or our students, we should look for those in which the teacher’s hands are visible and active. And if we ourselves are called upon to teach online—or even just to communicate via Zoom or another video-conferencing platform—we should make sure that others can see our moving hands. Research suggests that making these motions will improve our own performance: people who gesture as they teach on video, it’s been found, speak more fluently and articulately, make fewer mistakes, and present information in a more logical and intelligible fashion.

The Takeaway!

the shape of a hand gesture, to the motion of a hand gesture, and to the placement of a hand gesture. After receiving these simple instructions, study subjects watched the videos once more. Before the brief gesture training, the observing adults identified only around 30 to 40 percent of instances when children displayed emerging knowledge in their gestures; after receiving the training, their hit rate shot up to about 70 percent.

Shape, Motion, Placement of hand gestures

we can “translate” that individual’s gesture into words (“It looks like you’re suggesting that . . .”); and we can “second” her gesture by reproducing it ourselves, thereby reaffirming the promising strategy she has pointed to with her hands.

Teaching strategies

spontaneous

designed

auditory

visual hook:

“proprioc...

Young children encounter new words in a rich sensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch the shiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh and smelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing from the second-language classroom.

Macedonia eventually became a student again herself, writing her PhD thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory during foreign-language encoding. In the years since, she has continued to contribute to a growing body of evidence showing that enacting a gesture while learning a word helps cement that word in memory—perhaps by stimulating a more extensive network of areas in the brain.

Duolingo and Rosetta Stone—might be made much more effective by adding an animated agent who induces users to engage in gesture.

Real life application

A familiar example of such offloading is the way young children count on their fingers when working out a math problem. Their fingers “hold” an intermediate sum so that their minds are

Hands can be a prompt, a window, a way station—but what they ought never have to be is still.