The Extended Mind Quotes

“What we shouldn’t do is keep our thoughts inside our heads, inert, unchanged by encounters with the world beyond the skull.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Accordingly, the ninth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“compute for a while, print out the results, inspect what they have produced, add some marks in the margin, circulate copies among colleagues, and then start the process again. That’s not how computers work—but it is how we work; we are “intrinsically loopy creatures,” as Clark likes to say. Something about our biological intelligence benefits from being rotated in and out of internal and external modes of cognition, from being passed among brain, body, and world. This means we should resist the urge to shunt our thinking along the linear path appropriate to a computer—input, output, done—and instead allow it to take a more winding route.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“The sixth principle rounds out the roster of our innate aptitudes: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-socialize the information we think about. We learned earlier in this book that the continual patter we carry on in our heads is in fact a kind of internalized conversation. Likewise, many of the written forms we encounter at school and at work—from exams and evaluations, to profiles and case studies, to essays and proposals—are really social exchanges (questions, stories, arguments) put on paper and addressed to some imagined listener or interlocutor. As we’ve seen, there are significant advantages to turning such interactions at a remove back into actual social encounters.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“The fifth principle emphasizes another human strength: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about. We inherited “a mind on the hoof,” as Andy Clark puts it: a brain that was built to pick a path through a landscape and to find the way back home. Neuroscientific research indicates that our brains process and store information—even, or especially, abstract information—in the form of mental maps. We can work in concert with the brain’s natural spatial orientation by placing the information we encounter into expressly spatial formats: creating memory palaces, for example, or designing concept maps. In the realm of education research, experts now speak of “spatializing the curriculum”—that is, simultaneously drawing on and strengthening students’ spatial capacities by having them employ spatial language and gestures, engage in sketching and mapmaking, and learn to interpret and create charts, tables, and diagrams. The spatialized”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“We can begin to understand what this means by taking up the fourth principle: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-embody the information we think about. The pursuit of knowledge has frequently sought to disengage thinking from the body, to elevate ideas to a cerebral sphere separate from our grubby animal anatomy. Research on the extended mind counsels the opposite approach: we should be seeking to draw the body back into the thinking process. That may take the form of allowing our choices to be influenced by our interoceptive signals—a source of guidance we’ve often ignored in our focus on data-driven decisions. It might take the form of enacting, with bodily movements, the academic concepts that have become abstracted, detached from their origin in the physical world. Or it might take the form of attending to our own and others’ gestures, tuning back in to what was humanity’s first language, present long before speech. As we’ve seen from research on embodied cognition, at a deep level the brain still understands abstract concepts in terms of physical action, a fact reflected in the words we use (“reaching for a goal,” “running behind schedule”); we can assist the brain in its efforts by bringing the literal body back into the act of thinking.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Parents and teachers often believe they have to get kids to stop moving around before they can focus and get down to work, Schweitzer notes; a more constructive approach would be to allow kids to move around so that they can focus.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Collins and his coauthors identified four features of apprenticeship that could be adapted to the demands of knowledge work: modeling, or demonstrating the task while explaining it aloud; scaffolding, or structuring an opportunity for the learner to try the task herself; fading, or gradually withdrawing guidance as the learner becomes more proficient; and coaching, or helping the learner through difficulties along the way. Christoph Kreitz and his colleagues incorporated these features of traditional apprenticeships into their course redesign, reducing the amount”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Hence, the eighth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by creating cognitively congenial situations. We often regard the brain as an organ of awesome and almost unfathomable power. But we’re also apt to treat it with high-handed imperiousness, expecting it to do our bidding as if it were a docile servant. Pay attention to this, we tell it; remember that; buckle down now and get the job done. Alas, we often find that the brain is an unreliable and even impertinent attendant: fickle in its focus, porous in its memory, and inconstant in its efforts. The problem lies in our attempt to command it. We’ll elicit improved performance from the brain when we approach it with the aim not of issuing orders but of creating situations that draw out the desired result.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“such as the one encapsulated in the seventh principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Once we recognize this possibility, we can deliberately shape the material worlds in which we learn and work to facilitate mental extension—to enhance “the cognitive congeniality of a space,” in the words of David Kirsh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world,” psychologist Barbara Tversky has observed.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote poet Robert Frost; likewise, good walls make good collaborators.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Half of the participants were then asked to engage in what the researchers call “affect labeling,” filling in responses to the prompt “I feel _________,” while the other half were asked to complete a neutral shape-matching task. The affect-labeling group showed steep declines in heart rate and skin conductance compared to the control group, whose levels of physiological arousal remained high.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“The body scan trains us to observe such sensations with interest and equanimity. 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 their source. Research shows that the simple act of giving a name to what we’re feeling has a profound effect on the nervous system, immediately dialing down the body’s stress response.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Rooted in the Buddhist traditions of Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, the body scan was introduced to Western audiences by mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “People find the body scan beneficial because it reconnects their conscious mind to the feeling states of their body,” says Kabat-Zinn. “By practicing regularly, people usually feel more in touch with sensations in parts of their body they had never felt or thought much about before.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Visitors to the exhibit were instructed to place a finger on a sensor that detected their pulse; the readout of the sensor was visible only to Ainley. “Please tell me when your heart beats,” she would say to each patron who stepped forward. An elderly couple who stopped by the booth had very different reactions to Ainley’s request. “How on earth would I know what my heart is doing?” the woman asked incredulously. Her husband turned and stared at her, equally dumbfounded. “But of course you know,” he exclaimed. “Don’t be so stupid, everyone knows what their heartbeat is!” “He had always been able to hear his heart, and she had never been able to hear hers,” Ainley observed in an interview, smiling at the memory. “They had been married for decades, but they had never talked of or even recognized this difference between them.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“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.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“We did not evolve to solve tricky logic puzzles on our own, they point out, and so we shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that we’re no good at it, any more than by the fact that we’re no good at breathing underwater. What we did evolve to do is persuade other people of our views, and to guard against being misled by others. Reasoning is a social activity, in other words, and should be practiced as such.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Teaching is a mode of social interaction we can deliberately deploy in order to think more intelligently. There’s another form of social exchange that we can use to our advantage, one that comes just as naturally to the human animal: arguing. THE STUDY was positively devilish in its design. Participants were asked, first, to solve a series of logic puzzles: “A produce shop sells a variety of fruits and vegetables, some of which are organic and some of which are not. The apples sold by this shop are not organic. Which of the following statements about the shop’s wares are true? Provide a reason for each answer. 1) All the fruits are organic; 2) None of the fruits are organic; 3) Some of the fruits are organic; 4) Some of the fruits are not organic; 5) We cannot tell anything for sure about whether the fruits in this shop are organic.” After solving the puzzles, study participants were then asked to evaluate the responses provided by other participants—that is, to judge whether the reasons given by others seemed valid or not. The trick: one of the answers presented in this second round did not issue from someone else but rather was an answer the participant herself had supplied in the first round. Some participants recognized their own response, but many others did not. What happened next was fascinating. More than half of those who believed they were evaluating someone else’s response rejected as invalid the answer they themselves had put forth! They were especially likely to reject their own response when they had, in fact, offered a logically invalid answer originally. In other words, they applied more critical analysis to (what they thought were) other people’s arguments than to their own—and this scrutiny made them more accurate.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Humans learn best from other (live) humans. Perhaps more surprising, people learn from teaching other people—often more than the pupils themselves absorb. Consider this finding: firstborn children have an IQ that is on average 2.3 points higher than that of their younger brothers and sisters. After disconfirming several potential explanations, such as better nutrition or differential parental treatment, researchers concluded that firstborn children’s higher IQs stem from a simple fact of family life: older siblings engage in teaching younger ones.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Change one particular aspect of the task, however, and the percentage of participants getting it right shoots up to 75 percent. What is that change? Make it social. In the social version of the task, participants are told: “You are serving at a bar and have to enforce the rule that if a person is drinking beer, they must be 21 years of age or older. The four cards shown here have information about people sitting at a table. One side of the card tells you what a person is drinking, and the other side tells their age. Which card or cards must you turn over to see if the rule is being broken?” The puzzle, once so befuddling, now seems easily solved.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“We are, that is, continually expected to think about abstract symbols for the benefit of an abstract audience, an expectation that overlooks our actual strength. Humans are not especially good at thinking about concepts; our ability to think about people, however, is superlative. Consider the Wason Selection Task, a test of reasoning widely used in experimental psychology. Introduced by psychologist Peter Wason in 1966, the task seems straightforward enough. One version of it goes something like this: “Take a look at the cards shown here. Each card has a vowel or a consonant on one side and an even or an odd number on the other. Which card or cards must be turned over in order to determine whether it is true that If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other?” Four cards are displayed; the first is marked with an “E,” the second with a “K,” the third with the number 3, and the fourth with the number 6. People’s performance on this task is abysmal. Studies by many researchers over many years have shown that only about 10 percent of subjects given the task complete it correctly.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Tracking the intellectual advancement of several hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years, its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to the students’ engagement with their peers in the lab, and not to the guidance they received from their faculty mentors.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Humans are “high-fidelity” copiers: our young imitate adults to the letter, while other animals will make do with a slapdash approximation. This difference can make apes, monkeys, and even dogs look like the smarter species. Shown a procedure with an extra, unnecessary step—like touching a box with one’s forehead before prying it open and retrieving the treat inside—chimps and canines will skip the superfluous move to go right for the goods. Children, however, will faithfully imitate every step.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Even though the run of The Dining Room had ended five months earlier, and many of the actors had learned new roles since then, they still remembered the lines from Gurney’s play that had been accompanied onstage by movement or gestures (as when Arthur holds out the spoon to Sally). Lines they had delivered while standing or sitting still, the Noices discovered, were much more likely to be forgotten.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“When we’re engaged in physical activity, our visual sense is sharpened, especially with regard to stimuli appearing in the periphery of our gaze. This shift, which is also found in non-human animals, makes evolutionary sense: 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.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Radiologists inspected a batch of images while seated, and while walking on a treadmill at one mile per hour. The participating physicians identified a total of 1,582 areas of concern in the slides, and rated 459 of these as posing potentially serious risks to the health of the patient. When they compared the “detection rates” they achieved while sitting and while moving, the results were clear: radiologists who remained seated spotted an average of 85 percent of the irregularities present in the images, while those who walked identified, on average, fully 99 percent of them.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“The awareness that we are focusing on a particular stimulus along with other people leads our brains to endow that stimulus with special significance, tagging it as especially important. We then allocate more mental bandwidth to that material, processing it more deeply; in scientists’ terms, we award it “cognitive prioritization.” In a world of too much information, we use shared attention to help us figure out what to focus on, then direct our mental resources toward the object that the spotlight of shared attention has illuminated. As a result of these (mostly automatic) processes, we learn things better when we attend to them with other people. We remember things better when we attend to them with other people. And we’re more likely to act upon information that has been attended to along with other people.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“The significance of shared arousal was demonstrated in an ingenious experiment designed by researcher Joshua Conrad Jackson and published in the journal Scientific Reports in 2018. Jackson and his colleagues set out “to simulate conditions found in actual marching rituals”—which, they noted, “required the use of a larger venue than a traditional psychology laboratory.” They chose as the setting for their study a professional sports stadium, with a high-definition camera mounted twenty-five meters above the action. After gathering 172 participants in the stadium and dividing them into groups, the experimenters manipulated their experience of both synchrony and arousal: one group was directed to walk with their fellow members in rank formation, while a second group walked in a loose and uncoordinated fashion; a third group speed-walked around the stadium, boosting their physiological arousal, while a fourth group strolled at a leisurely pace. Jackson and his collaborators then had each group engage in the same set of activities, asking them to gather themselves into cliques, to disperse themselves as they wished across the stadium’s playing field, and finally to cooperate in a joint task (collecting five hundred metal washers scattered across the field). The result: when participants had synchronized with one another, and when they had experienced arousal together, they then behaved in a distinctive way—forming more inclusive groups, standing closer to one another, and working together more efficiently (observations made possible by analyzing footage recorded by the roof-mounted camera). The findings suggest that “behavioral synchrony and shared physiological arousal in small groups independently increase social cohesion and cooperation,” the researchers write; they help us understand “why synchrony and arousal often co-occur in rituals around the world.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain