Annie Murphy Paul > Quotes

“Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.”
― Annie Murphy Paul

“We often respond to today's world with yesterday's adaptations. (quoting Dan Fesster)”
― annie murphy paul

“The world has its way with us long before we're born.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

“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

“For many centuries people have believed that there is continuity between the individual in utero and the individual in the world; now there is solid evidence that this ancient belief is correct, albeit in a far more complex and nuanced way than our ancestors ever imagined.
But science can't tell us everything we need to know about this new perspective; there's always a gap where the hard evidence of the laboratory meets the soft flesh of our bodies.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“In any case, psychological type has built a private world around itself, an intimate universe that has no need for external validation . . . For those within its charmed circle, type provides an unwavering self-conception, a foundation for relating to others, a plan for success, and an excuse for failure. It offers an explanation for why some people refuse to join in . . . Still at the center of this world is the haloed figure of Myers herself, whom her many followers affectionately call "Isabel." It sometimes seems that her fierce ardor for the test she created has been passed on to these followers like a torch. They, like her, appear to value type more than the people type is supposed to describe.”
― Annie Murphy Paul

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“High-income parents gesture more than low-income parents, research finds. And it’s not just the quantity of gesture that differs but also the quality: more affluent parents provide a greater variety of types of gesture, representing more categories of meaning—physical objects, abstract concepts, social signals. Parents and children from poorer backgrounds, meanwhile, tend to use a narrower range of gestures when they interact with each other. Following the example set by their parents, high-income kids gesture more than their low-income counterparts. In one study, fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of twenty-four different meanings during a ninety-minute observation session, while children from lower-income families conveyed only thirteen meanings. Four years later, when it was time to start school, children from the richer families scored an average of 117 on a measure of vocabulary comprehension, compared to 93 for children from the poorer families.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“The drawbacks of “hot-desking” or “hoteling,” as it’s called, point to another way in which space can be used to extend our minds (but too often is not). When we operate within a space over which we feel ownership—a space that feels like it’s ours—a host of psychological and even physiological changes ensues. These effects were first observed in studies of a phenomenon known as the “home advantage”: the consistent finding that athletes tend to win more and bigger victories when they are playing in their own fields, courts, and stadiums. On their home turf, teams play more aggressively, and their members (both male and female) exhibit higher levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with the expression of social dominance.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“Such interoceptive prodding was visible during a gambling game that formed the basis of an experiment led by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, a professor at the University of Southern California. In the game, presented on a computer screen, players were given a starting purse of two thousand “dollars” and were shown four decks of digital cards. Their task, they were told, was to turn the cards in the decks face-up, choosing which decks to draw from such that they would lose the least amount of money and win the most. As they started clicking to turn over cards, players began encountering rewards—bonuses of $50 here, $100 there—and also penalties, in which small or large amounts of money were taken away. What the experimenters had arranged, but the players were not told, was that decks A and B were “bad”—they held lots of large penalties in store—and decks C and D were “good,” bestowing more rewards than penalties over time.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

“One recent study, conducted in a British government agency that switched from enclosed offices to an open-plan workspace, found that the heightened imperative to engage in self-presentation in such settings fell most heavily on women, for whom appearance is considered especially important.) When people are relieved of the cognitive load imposed by their environment, they immediately become more creative, neuroscientist Moshe Bar has found.”
― 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

“Reading literature makes us better people.”
― Annie Murphy Paul

“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

“At the highest speed I can sustain on the hills, about 14 minutes for a mile, I do not even try to think of anything else.”
― Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain