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The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
A bold new book reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains—in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships
Use your head.
That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we’ve got it exactly backwards. What we need to do, says acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside the brain. A host of “extra-neural” resources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us— can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively.
The Extended Mind outlines the research behind this exciting new vision of human ability, exploring the findings of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and examining the practices of educators, managers, and leaders who are already reaping the benefits of thinking outside the brain. She excavates the untold history of how artists, scientists, and authors—from Jackson Pollock to Jonas Salk to Robert Caro—have used mental extensions to solve problems, make discoveries, and create new works. In the tradition of Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind or Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, The Extended Mind offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how we can all think better.
Use your head.
That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we’ve got it exactly backwards. What we need to do, says acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside the brain. A host of “extra-neural” resources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us— can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively.
The Extended Mind outlines the research behind this exciting new vision of human ability, exploring the findings of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and examining the practices of educators, managers, and leaders who are already reaping the benefits of thinking outside the brain. She excavates the untold history of how artists, scientists, and authors—from Jackson Pollock to Jonas Salk to Robert Caro—have used mental extensions to solve problems, make discoveries, and create new works. In the tradition of Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind or Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, The Extended Mind offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how we can all think better.
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First published June 8, 2021
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May 23, 2021
The brain is not a telephone switchboard, and it is not a computer. It is a kingdom unto itself, ruled by the prefrontal cortex. The PFC contains the giant lobes above the eyes, behind the forehead. It takes 21 years for it to fully grow out, and when it does, it takes control. The result is we only see what it wants us to see, and make connections that it allows us to make. It is what takes away our childhood wonder and excitement, and filters out (what it considers) irrelevant and unfocused factors. Humans uniquely spend their adult lives trying to overcome their own PFC’s harsh administration, mostly with alcohol.
Into this intriguing scenario, Annie Murphy Paul has written a book called The Extended Mind. Without her saying so explicitly, it is about the tricks and tips humans need and continue to refine to overcome the capacity limits set by the PFC. As it goes on, it becomes the model for why readers need a PFC to filter out the irrelevant and the unfocused.
It starts out well enough, with discussion of how using the hands in speaking adds information and ideas that speech alone does not convey. The same goes for writing things down and sketching. Adding perspectives adds to creativity and analysis. Errors and solutions appear in models where the mind alone could not imagine them.
Breaking up a long sit with a walk outdoors does wonders for resetting the PFC and inspiring new thoughts. Paul quotes famous scientists and writers who say things like all their best thinking takes place during a walk. Radiologists notice far more in X-rays when they examine them while moving around, and even on a treadmill. They can also accurately analyze far more of them while running in place. Many times as many, and far more accurately too. Sadly, observation and creativity are otherwise a child’s domain.
Also sadly, only 26% of children today play outdoors, missing out on the golden years of thinking and observing without being restricted by the PFC. Their parents are too busy, or they fear kidnappers, or just plain old injury. Far better to keep the kids indoors and have them watch television or computers. It goes against half a million years of evolution.
The high point of the book, at least for me, came very early on, where Paul writes about dementia and Alzheimer’s victims. She says the endless so-called mind exercises, graphic novels, word games and photo albums are pointless; they do nothing to stimulate the brain back to a healthy state. It simply continues to deteriorate. What they (and everyone) needs is real physical exercise. That is what causes the brain to stay functional or even rejuvenate. The walk outdoors is far more than a change of pace; it is the solution. A workout in the morning leaves people energized, awake and with more capacity to think things through. Exercising after work is not unhealthy, but a waste of the good and the potential it can deliver if done earlier.
She goes on about how students need to move around to absorb lessons. The whole institution of sitting quietly all day, facing the front and not fidgeting is completely wrong. It is the most inefficient way to educate. And it shows. In study after study. Recess does more for the mind that all the classes that precede it every day.
The other extreme is the noise. Studying while wearing earbuds and with the tv on simply does not work. The brain is not capable of separately absorbing those three streams of data in parallel. Worse, it is highly attuned to the human voice. People talking on tv, and singers singing their lyrics all detract from whatever the reader is meant to be absorbing, which rates a much lower priority in the brain than speech does. It is being called the Attention Draining Effect and it results in far less progress than would be otherwise achieved.
There is also an early chapter on how the brain itself tries to circumvent the PFC, pushing signals out elsewhere. Paul focuses on professional stock traders, who use their gut instinct to make split second buy and sell decisions. The stomach speaks to the mind with cramps. The hands speak with sweat. Heeding these signals, she says, can extend the mind beyond just the brain, which is not only overloaded but also restricted by the PFC. (It also leads to the discovery there are two kinds of people in the world: those who hear their every heartbeat, and those who don’t.) She implies that paying attention to these sorts of communications is a path to success, when that is so obviously untrue (or we’d all be trillionaires by the age of 30). You have only to know that for four years, President Donald Trump ignored all intelligence reports and relied totally on his “gut”, which he explained, was never wrong. And how many traders have taken down entire billion-dollar companies and even national economies by relying on their gut reaction? This was my first disagreement with The Extended Mind, but far from the last.
The book itself degenerates into a seemingly endless list of trivial facts and studies on how scientists can trick the brain into absorbing more data. Most of the book is about that, a kind of self-help manual. Worse, Paul overexplains everything, going on endlessly in totally skippable paragraphs where nothing new is transmitted, but the same point is hammered in again. Studies show that making students teach others forces them to understand the topic better themselves. Privacy screens allow workers in open office setups to be more productive. Surveillance cameras inhibit. Figuring things out in the mind is less thorough than also using the eyes and the hands. Personal meetings transmit more data than electronic contact.
I like to think we know all this. That’s my gut reaction.
But then the silliness starts. People who dine together in restaurants or even just in a conference room sign contracts that are 12% more profitable than those who simply negotiate a deal. Profitable for whom? How would anyone know? What was the Control? The people who sign the deals don’t do the actual work to make the profits; the number of factors involved is infinite. Signing a deal that comes out of dinner means not signing a similar deal with no dinner with that same partner, so there’s nothing to compare.
But when Paul gets into groupthink at the end, her arguments go totally off the rails. She cites a scientific paper authored by 5,154 scientists and academics as proof that groupthink can move mountains. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is an unfortunately common trick to win the game of Publish Or Perish. Getting one’s name on a published paper is a neverending goal. Those 5,154 scientists did not all run the same experiment. They did not all devise the same study or discover the same theory. They did not each contribute their own two or three words to the text of the paper. Five thousand people did not hold a three day conference to interpret the data and decide the findings together.
The actual authors allowed the rest to co-author the paper for two very good reasons: there is safety in numbers, and they will want the favor returned when another of them actually researches and writes a paper of their own. It happens all year long and it’s just a game to keep their name in lights (and sometimes their jobs if it is school policy). It has nothing whatever to do with the amazing power of groupthink to overcome the limitations of one brain alone. It was infuriating to read this as if it were evidence of neuroscience in bloom.
Then there’s the problem of what Paul missed. She never goes into the explanation of the prefrontal cortex as rigid censor and director, which is remarkable because she talks endlessly about the effects.
She never shows how alcohol, psychedelics and other mind-altering drugs target the PFC, disconnect it and thereby restore the ability to make infinite connections in the mind. How innumerable studies show that even just alcohol leads to far more creativity and innovation than working alone in an office. Drinking extends the brain far more than cubicle dividers or a walk in the park.
Some of the tips on learning more and better might inspire some readers. But The Extended Mind is not definitive and not a revelation.
David Wineberg
Into this intriguing scenario, Annie Murphy Paul has written a book called The Extended Mind. Without her saying so explicitly, it is about the tricks and tips humans need and continue to refine to overcome the capacity limits set by the PFC. As it goes on, it becomes the model for why readers need a PFC to filter out the irrelevant and the unfocused.
It starts out well enough, with discussion of how using the hands in speaking adds information and ideas that speech alone does not convey. The same goes for writing things down and sketching. Adding perspectives adds to creativity and analysis. Errors and solutions appear in models where the mind alone could not imagine them.
Breaking up a long sit with a walk outdoors does wonders for resetting the PFC and inspiring new thoughts. Paul quotes famous scientists and writers who say things like all their best thinking takes place during a walk. Radiologists notice far more in X-rays when they examine them while moving around, and even on a treadmill. They can also accurately analyze far more of them while running in place. Many times as many, and far more accurately too. Sadly, observation and creativity are otherwise a child’s domain.
Also sadly, only 26% of children today play outdoors, missing out on the golden years of thinking and observing without being restricted by the PFC. Their parents are too busy, or they fear kidnappers, or just plain old injury. Far better to keep the kids indoors and have them watch television or computers. It goes against half a million years of evolution.
The high point of the book, at least for me, came very early on, where Paul writes about dementia and Alzheimer’s victims. She says the endless so-called mind exercises, graphic novels, word games and photo albums are pointless; they do nothing to stimulate the brain back to a healthy state. It simply continues to deteriorate. What they (and everyone) needs is real physical exercise. That is what causes the brain to stay functional or even rejuvenate. The walk outdoors is far more than a change of pace; it is the solution. A workout in the morning leaves people energized, awake and with more capacity to think things through. Exercising after work is not unhealthy, but a waste of the good and the potential it can deliver if done earlier.
She goes on about how students need to move around to absorb lessons. The whole institution of sitting quietly all day, facing the front and not fidgeting is completely wrong. It is the most inefficient way to educate. And it shows. In study after study. Recess does more for the mind that all the classes that precede it every day.
The other extreme is the noise. Studying while wearing earbuds and with the tv on simply does not work. The brain is not capable of separately absorbing those three streams of data in parallel. Worse, it is highly attuned to the human voice. People talking on tv, and singers singing their lyrics all detract from whatever the reader is meant to be absorbing, which rates a much lower priority in the brain than speech does. It is being called the Attention Draining Effect and it results in far less progress than would be otherwise achieved.
There is also an early chapter on how the brain itself tries to circumvent the PFC, pushing signals out elsewhere. Paul focuses on professional stock traders, who use their gut instinct to make split second buy and sell decisions. The stomach speaks to the mind with cramps. The hands speak with sweat. Heeding these signals, she says, can extend the mind beyond just the brain, which is not only overloaded but also restricted by the PFC. (It also leads to the discovery there are two kinds of people in the world: those who hear their every heartbeat, and those who don’t.) She implies that paying attention to these sorts of communications is a path to success, when that is so obviously untrue (or we’d all be trillionaires by the age of 30). You have only to know that for four years, President Donald Trump ignored all intelligence reports and relied totally on his “gut”, which he explained, was never wrong. And how many traders have taken down entire billion-dollar companies and even national economies by relying on their gut reaction? This was my first disagreement with The Extended Mind, but far from the last.
The book itself degenerates into a seemingly endless list of trivial facts and studies on how scientists can trick the brain into absorbing more data. Most of the book is about that, a kind of self-help manual. Worse, Paul overexplains everything, going on endlessly in totally skippable paragraphs where nothing new is transmitted, but the same point is hammered in again. Studies show that making students teach others forces them to understand the topic better themselves. Privacy screens allow workers in open office setups to be more productive. Surveillance cameras inhibit. Figuring things out in the mind is less thorough than also using the eyes and the hands. Personal meetings transmit more data than electronic contact.
I like to think we know all this. That’s my gut reaction.
But then the silliness starts. People who dine together in restaurants or even just in a conference room sign contracts that are 12% more profitable than those who simply negotiate a deal. Profitable for whom? How would anyone know? What was the Control? The people who sign the deals don’t do the actual work to make the profits; the number of factors involved is infinite. Signing a deal that comes out of dinner means not signing a similar deal with no dinner with that same partner, so there’s nothing to compare.
But when Paul gets into groupthink at the end, her arguments go totally off the rails. She cites a scientific paper authored by 5,154 scientists and academics as proof that groupthink can move mountains. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is an unfortunately common trick to win the game of Publish Or Perish. Getting one’s name on a published paper is a neverending goal. Those 5,154 scientists did not all run the same experiment. They did not all devise the same study or discover the same theory. They did not each contribute their own two or three words to the text of the paper. Five thousand people did not hold a three day conference to interpret the data and decide the findings together.
The actual authors allowed the rest to co-author the paper for two very good reasons: there is safety in numbers, and they will want the favor returned when another of them actually researches and writes a paper of their own. It happens all year long and it’s just a game to keep their name in lights (and sometimes their jobs if it is school policy). It has nothing whatever to do with the amazing power of groupthink to overcome the limitations of one brain alone. It was infuriating to read this as if it were evidence of neuroscience in bloom.
Then there’s the problem of what Paul missed. She never goes into the explanation of the prefrontal cortex as rigid censor and director, which is remarkable because she talks endlessly about the effects.
She never shows how alcohol, psychedelics and other mind-altering drugs target the PFC, disconnect it and thereby restore the ability to make infinite connections in the mind. How innumerable studies show that even just alcohol leads to far more creativity and innovation than working alone in an office. Drinking extends the brain far more than cubicle dividers or a walk in the park.
Some of the tips on learning more and better might inspire some readers. But The Extended Mind is not definitive and not a revelation.
David Wineberg
September 29, 2021
There’s good material here, but I didn’t care for the writing; I found it awkward and even misleading at times. Her point is that the mind relies on the local environment, tools, social connections, etc — things outside of the brain. Fine. But in the first section, where she’s discussing what most people would call gut instinct, she rightly says that it’s wise to pay attention to it - and then writes as if people get “the chills” or whatever purely from their body. But of course, you get bodily reactions because of the brain itself (maybe a part disconnected from your self-awareness, but still…). So really, paying attention to your gut reactions isn’t a matter of a brain “listening” to the body, as the author writes, but is more in truth a part of the brain listening to another part of the brain, via paying attention to bodily reactions. A small thing, but acting as if the body “is aware” of things like a threatening sight is absurd, and she goes upon that track for quite a while. Who knows, maybe there’s an optic nerve that goes straight to sweat glands, but I’m doubting it. Anyway, there is a lot of interesting stuff in the book, but in my opinion the writing is a little more “fast and loose” than I expect from good science writing.
July 8, 2022
The Extended Mind is an exploration of the idea of extended mind proposed by Andy Clark, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh. The author quotes: “where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” According to this idea, we are not evolved to do thinking just inside our individual brain. The book has 9 chapters and can be divided into three parts.
Part One – thinking with our bodies is what I find fascinating. Chapter 1, thinking with our sensations, is the importance of intuition and how to sharpen it. It discusses the usefulness of introspection, and how mindfulness meditation (especially body scan) can help you to enhance your intuition. The author also talks about why relabelling your anxiety/nervousness as excitement is a useful way of dealing with such anxieties.
Chapter 2 is thinking with movements. It turns out staying still while thinking/talking is a bad idea, especially for ADHD patients. Chapter 3 is thinking with gestures. Gesturing is a normal part of thinking. Girls are taught to regulate their body and hand movement more at a young age. A study of young kids shows the gender discrepancy in the results of certain games is associated with girls gesturing less.
Part Two is thinking with our surroundings. Chapter 4, thinking with natural spaces, is a no-brainer to me. Nature makes me happy. I have known for a long time that I can think better when my eyes can see trees and flowers. After chapter 4, my interests started to wane. Part Three, thinking with our relationships, has nothing new to me.
The writing is bland, even by the standards of non-fiction.
Part One – thinking with our bodies is what I find fascinating. Chapter 1, thinking with our sensations, is the importance of intuition and how to sharpen it. It discusses the usefulness of introspection, and how mindfulness meditation (especially body scan) can help you to enhance your intuition. The author also talks about why relabelling your anxiety/nervousness as excitement is a useful way of dealing with such anxieties.
Chapter 2 is thinking with movements. It turns out staying still while thinking/talking is a bad idea, especially for ADHD patients. Chapter 3 is thinking with gestures. Gesturing is a normal part of thinking. Girls are taught to regulate their body and hand movement more at a young age. A study of young kids shows the gender discrepancy in the results of certain games is associated with girls gesturing less.
Part Two is thinking with our surroundings. Chapter 4, thinking with natural spaces, is a no-brainer to me. Nature makes me happy. I have known for a long time that I can think better when my eyes can see trees and flowers. After chapter 4, my interests started to wane. Part Three, thinking with our relationships, has nothing new to me.
The writing is bland, even by the standards of non-fiction.
December 29, 2020
This book is surprisingly interesting and captivating! It’s broken down into three parts. The parts are: Thinking with our bodies; thinking with our surroundings; and thinking with our relationships. Each part is further divided into interesting and relatable subjects. The Extended Mind offers unique perspectives, well-rounded research, and reliable data. But more than that, the author offers surprising and useful educative tidbits that lead to aha moments! I found myself engrossed in the book and before I knew it had finished a third of the book in just one sitting. This book is equal parts enlightening, thought-provoking and inspirational.
June 29, 2025
Can’t wait to read this one and have already started putting a few of these ideas into practice. Only time will tell if my creativity, performance, and energy will blossom new growth, the way I hope.
June 11, 2021
Brilliant! Check out my interview releasing soon with Annie - just search Create Out Loud wherever you listen to your podcasts. She's amazing and this book is gold!
August 23, 2022
Not rubbish, but not mind-blowing. For example, having a big computer screen is better than having a small one. Wow! Writing down ideas can be useful. Wow! But if you haven't bothered implementing such things before because you didn't think it was worth the trouble, then this sort of tip can be very useful. So, if this book had just been formatted as a menu of potentially useful life hacks, I'd probably have given it 5*. But it has much bigger ambitions.
What's troubling is the lack of solid evidence follow-through for the bold claims made at the beginning of the book about how this is a general theme that will improve many aspects of your life. The first story is about stock traders who can sense their own heart rates and how they do better making money than the brokers who can't do this. Maybe that's generally true, maybe not. Assuming it is, what does it prove? Maybe the traders who are experienced with a track record of success are more relaxed and have confidence that comes from competence, and that leads to a more regular/predictable heart rate. The critical test would be to take lousy traders with bad pulse awareness, train them to have objectively better pulse awareness, and then show that they make more money than a control group given training in trading discipline. But we don't get that kind of info in the book.
There's also a bizarre insistence on talking about the Brain as something distinct from the Body, which seems to confuse more than clarify with respect to the science.
What's troubling is the lack of solid evidence follow-through for the bold claims made at the beginning of the book about how this is a general theme that will improve many aspects of your life. The first story is about stock traders who can sense their own heart rates and how they do better making money than the brokers who can't do this. Maybe that's generally true, maybe not. Assuming it is, what does it prove? Maybe the traders who are experienced with a track record of success are more relaxed and have confidence that comes from competence, and that leads to a more regular/predictable heart rate. The critical test would be to take lousy traders with bad pulse awareness, train them to have objectively better pulse awareness, and then show that they make more money than a control group given training in trading discipline. But we don't get that kind of info in the book.
There's also a bizarre insistence on talking about the Brain as something distinct from the Body, which seems to confuse more than clarify with respect to the science.
September 8, 2021
This is book does a good job of pulling together many different techniques you can use offload your brain, so to speak. I’ve worked with teams of professionals and students doing innovation, problem-solving, and research most of my career. Many of these techniques are things I’ve used or learned through practice, so it was good to see some research that backs up these methods. A lot of these are covered in the active-learning pedagogy. And the discussion of teams was really nothing new. But overall I'd recommend it.
I remember when I had an office, I always kept little fidgets or toys on my table. When I talked to people in my office it was always interesting to see who played with them and who completely ignored them. To me it was a good test to me of their creative thinking. This books explains why that is true.
She concludes with a set of 9 principles in groups of three. She calls this nested set of principles a curriculum of the extended mind.The principles are below. I'll follow up with shorter version. This book does suffer from stilted writing sometimes.
Excerpts from the book:
"The first set of principles lays out some habits of mind we would do well to adopt, starting with this one: whenever possible we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world.
.. The second principle: whenever possible we should endeavor to transform information into an artifact, to make data into something real -- and then proceed to interact with it, labeling it, mapping it, feeling it, tweaking it, showing it to others.
..The third principle: whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor.
The second set of principles offers a higher level view of how mental extension works, in accordance with an understanding of what the brain evolved to do. The fourth principle: whenever possible we should take measures to re-embody the information we think about.
The fifth principle emphasizes another human strength: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about.
The six principle rounds out the roster of our innate aptitudes: whenever possible we should take measures to re-socialize information we think about.
The final set of principles of mental extension steps back for a still wider view, taking up a rather profound question: what kind of creatures are we? The seventh principle: whenever possible we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.
The eight principle: whenever possible we should manage our thinking by creating cognitively congenial situations.
The final principle doubles back on itself with a self-referential observation. What kind of creatures are we? The kind who extend eagerly and energetically when given the chance. The ninth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments. "
Fred’s take on the 9:
Write it down
Make a prototype, even just a drawing or framework/canvas.
Take a walk and get some sun.
Act it out.
Map/draw it out.
Talk about it and show it to other people.
Do it again, iterate it.
Explain it in front of your peers.
Create your “innovation” place (office, classroom, lab, etc)
I remember when I had an office, I always kept little fidgets or toys on my table. When I talked to people in my office it was always interesting to see who played with them and who completely ignored them. To me it was a good test to me of their creative thinking. This books explains why that is true.
She concludes with a set of 9 principles in groups of three. She calls this nested set of principles a curriculum of the extended mind.The principles are below. I'll follow up with shorter version. This book does suffer from stilted writing sometimes.
Excerpts from the book:
"The first set of principles lays out some habits of mind we would do well to adopt, starting with this one: whenever possible we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world.
.. The second principle: whenever possible we should endeavor to transform information into an artifact, to make data into something real -- and then proceed to interact with it, labeling it, mapping it, feeling it, tweaking it, showing it to others.
..The third principle: whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor.
The second set of principles offers a higher level view of how mental extension works, in accordance with an understanding of what the brain evolved to do. The fourth principle: whenever possible we should take measures to re-embody the information we think about.
The fifth principle emphasizes another human strength: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about.
The six principle rounds out the roster of our innate aptitudes: whenever possible we should take measures to re-socialize information we think about.
The final set of principles of mental extension steps back for a still wider view, taking up a rather profound question: what kind of creatures are we? The seventh principle: whenever possible we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.
The eight principle: whenever possible we should manage our thinking by creating cognitively congenial situations.
The final principle doubles back on itself with a self-referential observation. What kind of creatures are we? The kind who extend eagerly and energetically when given the chance. The ninth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments. "
Fred’s take on the 9:
Write it down
Make a prototype, even just a drawing or framework/canvas.
Take a walk and get some sun.
Act it out.
Map/draw it out.
Talk about it and show it to other people.
Do it again, iterate it.
Explain it in front of your peers.
Create your “innovation” place (office, classroom, lab, etc)
Read
May 7, 2022A fascinating look at how we use our bodies, nature, and the people around us to think. I was especially taken by how powerful using gestures can be, as someone who can be a hand talker and was always taught not to do that. Turns out...that's not only useful for remembering something but it's also extremely helpful for teaching others.
July 11, 2021
The thesis of this book is that the human mind extends beyond the brain to encompass movement, words, the space around us and relationships with other people, all of which can enhance our ability to think, be productive and achieve good results. When you consider this hypothesis, it seems intuitively obvious that it is correct; however, the way it plays out is often different from our expectations. Sometimes things that are commonly considered distractions, such as fiddling around with objects, not sitting still and taking breaks, can significantly enhance learning. Sometimes meetings and group efforts that seem to be complete wastes of time can produce better results than individual efforts. But to me the fascinating thing is that there are other situations that would seem to play into this theory that turn out to have the opposite effect; for example, open plan office spaces seem to create bad distractions not good ones, so that in open plan configurations productivity suffers. It goes to show that you can't just assume that setting up situations that increase human interactions will always have positive effects.
Even if there was nothing else in this book, I learned two things that made it a worthwhile read: (i) there is a theory called the "cooperative eye hypothesis" which says that humans, unlike most animals, evolved visible whites in their eyes so that we can better track each other's eye movement as a way to learn and enhance cooperation, and (ii) while it is no surprise that having meals together as a group can enhance group productivity or that family style meals are better in this way than individually served restaurant meals, I would not have guessed that the effect is enhanced when the food is spicy.
Even if there was nothing else in this book, I learned two things that made it a worthwhile read: (i) there is a theory called the "cooperative eye hypothesis" which says that humans, unlike most animals, evolved visible whites in their eyes so that we can better track each other's eye movement as a way to learn and enhance cooperation, and (ii) while it is no surprise that having meals together as a group can enhance group productivity or that family style meals are better in this way than individually served restaurant meals, I would not have guessed that the effect is enhanced when the food is spicy.
December 29, 2021
Annoyingly obvious points patronizingly presented.
I was looking forward to reading this book because Paul seemed to be challenging the dominant approach to the Brain as an isolated computer separated from the rest of our Being. I thought she might try to explain the interactions of various elements of the body’s nervous system in communicating with parts of the brain to guide our thoughts and actions in navigating our journey through Reality.
Instead all we got was a how-to, self-help book filled with cute, often interesting, stories of how folks in various scenarios came to realize that they could use their heads more efficiently if they remembered that their Brains were attached to a Human Being, who often found itself in a Natural Physical World along with other Human Beings.
Like so much of the Self-Help Culture, personified by TED Talkers and TikTok Influencers, the Author has been so moved by the Applause and Likes she has received, that she has produced a Book of “Principles” that the Old Folks would have called Common Sense.
Because some of her lessons contained nice stories, I’m giving it Three Stars, but I would warn any potential reader interested in a Theory of Mind to think twice before Extending a hand to pick it up.
I was looking forward to reading this book because Paul seemed to be challenging the dominant approach to the Brain as an isolated computer separated from the rest of our Being. I thought she might try to explain the interactions of various elements of the body’s nervous system in communicating with parts of the brain to guide our thoughts and actions in navigating our journey through Reality.
Instead all we got was a how-to, self-help book filled with cute, often interesting, stories of how folks in various scenarios came to realize that they could use their heads more efficiently if they remembered that their Brains were attached to a Human Being, who often found itself in a Natural Physical World along with other Human Beings.
Like so much of the Self-Help Culture, personified by TED Talkers and TikTok Influencers, the Author has been so moved by the Applause and Likes she has received, that she has produced a Book of “Principles” that the Old Folks would have called Common Sense.
Because some of her lessons contained nice stories, I’m giving it Three Stars, but I would warn any potential reader interested in a Theory of Mind to think twice before Extending a hand to pick it up.
January 14, 2023
My high expectations for this book were not realized. There were two main problems:
1. Paul makes many unsubstantiated leaps. For example, the book is about thinking but when we get to her argument that being in nature helps us think better, her actual argument is: Being in nature makes us feel less stressed. And when we’re less stressed we do better thinking. Um, yes. But that doesn’t mean that nature helps us think better. These disconnections happen over and over throughout the book.
2. Paul has a ‘gee whiz’ attitude in her writing. She writes as if no school, no business has ever conceived of some of the things she urges. But this is patently untrue. It’s also untrue that many of the ideas she discusses originated with people in the last couple of decades. I was personally involved in socially distributed learning in the early 80s and our work was based on Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development which she doesn’t seem to know exists, although it was the foundational precursor of all cognitive apprenticeship work since that time.
The book is a 3 because it addresses all of the various ways thought is influenced and changed beyond the boundaries of the individual brain. For scholarship and accuracy, it’s 2.5.
1. Paul makes many unsubstantiated leaps. For example, the book is about thinking but when we get to her argument that being in nature helps us think better, her actual argument is: Being in nature makes us feel less stressed. And when we’re less stressed we do better thinking. Um, yes. But that doesn’t mean that nature helps us think better. These disconnections happen over and over throughout the book.
2. Paul has a ‘gee whiz’ attitude in her writing. She writes as if no school, no business has ever conceived of some of the things she urges. But this is patently untrue. It’s also untrue that many of the ideas she discusses originated with people in the last couple of decades. I was personally involved in socially distributed learning in the early 80s and our work was based on Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development which she doesn’t seem to know exists, although it was the foundational precursor of all cognitive apprenticeship work since that time.
The book is a 3 because it addresses all of the various ways thought is influenced and changed beyond the boundaries of the individual brain. For scholarship and accuracy, it’s 2.5.
April 14, 2022
Foarte faină!
June 11, 2021
Written for the laypeople rather than neuroscientists, this book goes through all the current neuroscience on how we use our brain, and instead of focusing solely on the brain, looks at how our other forms of knowledge - from our body, from our environment, from other people - come into play.
For me, this was a book that confirmed some of what I already do (but didn't realise the importance of); and gave me other methods of thinking outside the brain.
It's a book to take your time with, to spend time reading, thinking and practicing, rather than reading straight through. And I think it's a book you will come back to again and again, for further or deeper insights,.
Highly recommended.
For me, this was a book that confirmed some of what I already do (but didn't realise the importance of); and gave me other methods of thinking outside the brain.
It's a book to take your time with, to spend time reading, thinking and practicing, rather than reading straight through. And I think it's a book you will come back to again and again, for further or deeper insights,.
Highly recommended.
July 14, 2022
The extended mind is a fascinating idea. Unfortunately this is not the book to explore it. It uses the Gladwell format, complete with heart warming anecdotes at the start of each chapter, and then skims lightly over a collection of topics loosely connected to a theme. The topics themselves are the usual collection of pop science things. The concept of the extended mind is more an organizing principle than a jumping off point for deeper discussion.
November 30, 2021
DNF 10%. Yet another journalist trying to act as a scientist and failing.
Read
September 17, 2021Whether you’re an extended mind convert or not, if you take away only one thing, let it be this: Your mind is not some lone ranger inside your skull, disconnected from the rest of the world. It extends far beyond your brain, through your body, through the environment and the objects around you and through other people.
From high frequency traders picking up on subtle bodily cues to guide their decisions; to famous artists and scientists using their environments to get creative and solve problems; to physics students developing truly independent and novel ways of thinking through interacting with other students: The human mind does its best work when it extends out of the brain and into the world.
---
Our bodies store subconscious knowledge, and by tuning into our sensations, we can tap into this intelligence.
Imagine a Wall Street trading floor full of people, swarming around like bees in a field of monitors, frantically shouting sales orders into multiple telephones. It’s loud and intense. It’s a challenging environment for a human brain.
In the middle of this mayhem is a man named John Coates. He’s been a trader for many years, and during this time he’s noticed something: the traders raking in the most cash don’t seem to be the analysis hounds or the data crunchers. The best traders aren’t the ones with the best educations or even the best ideas. The most successful traders seem to be the ones who know how, in key moments, to listen to their gut.
Coates, who came to Wall Street with a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge – and who definitely knows a thing or two about data crunching and complex data analysis – has noticed the same thing with his own trades. Often, what on paper seems like a perfect trade – well-reasoned, logically solid and perfectly executed – fails miserably. It doesn't make any sense. At other times – and this is even stranger – he will have a sudden feeling, a momentary glitch in his consciousness, showing him – in his own somewhat mystical words – “another path into the future.” When he follows this gut feeling, sometimes even against his better judgement, he’s often rewarded. It’s as if his body is somehow one step ahead of him, and all he needs to do is to listen.
Eventually, Coates became so fascinated by this phenomenon that he decided to leave Wall Street and return to Cambridge to become a physiologist and neuroscientist. Since then, he’s done research that suggests that his observation on the Wall Street trading floor was correct – that being in tune with your own body can make you smarter.
Here’s the science in a nutshell: Our senses are always active and they take in an ocean of data that never enters our consciousness. But that doesn’t mean this data is lost. It’s not. It’s processed subconsciously by our brain. And when our subconscious mind notices patterns in this data, our body alerts us through sensations generated in our organs, bones, and muscles. If we’re attuned to these signals, recognizing such a pattern around us might come with a slight speeding of the heart, or a twitch in the stomach.
This physical, subconscious process is called embodied cognition, and our receptivity to it is called interoception.
In 2016, Coates found that traders’ success closely correlated with their ability to accurately detect the beats of their own hearts. In other words, traders with greater sensitivity to signals coming from their own bodies made more money than their less sensitive colleagues. On the trading floor, where opportunities vanish in a split second, access to this embodied cognition gave them an edge.
Interoception isn’t just valuable when trading stocks though. It can give you an edge in a lot of areas. And here’s the good news: it’s a skill that you can easily practice and become better at. One simple and surprisingly effective way to do so is through an exercise called a mindfulness body scan.
The idea is simple. You sit down somewhere quiet, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Then you slowly move your awareness over your body, focusing on one body part at a time, all the way from your toes to the top of your head, noticing any sensations or feelings along the way. At the end, as a little bonus, you’ll find a guided mindfulness body scan, in case you’d like to try it out.
---
Gesture is our first language, and we can use it to explore, form and convey complex notions.
Christian Heath, a communications researcher, collects tapes of people interacting. He’s filmed and studied hundreds of interactions, and he’s come to pay special attention to a particular body part: the hands.
In one interaction, a doctor has prescribed a patient an anti-inflammatory drug. To explain the medication, he gestures downward three times. The patient nods, signaling that she understands even before the word “inflammation” has passed the doctor’s lips.
The patient in turn wants to tell the doctor that she’s overwhelmed with bills and she begins moving both hands in circles, but before she can say that the bills have her going “round and round” the doctor begins nodding in sympathy.
Heath and others doing similar research have come to a simple and powerful conclusion: in thought and communication, hands precede words.
This concept, known as gestural foreshadowing, makes a lot of sense. After all, long before you learned to speak, you conveyed your needs and feelings through gestures. If you have kids, you’ll know all about this. According to linguists, your distant ancestors’ first language was likely a language of the hands.
So, here’s some more practical advice on how to tap into your extended mind. Next time you’re speaking to someone, let yourself really gesture. Don’t hold back. As your hands fly about, you’ll likely notice that they will either mime the meaning you seek to express, or they’ll act as markers of emphasis, pointing, underlining, highlighting.
You’ll also notice that your gestures often arrive at an idea before your conscious mind has found the right word for it. This is gestural foreshadowing in action.
Which brings us to the most interesting part, which is this: by scouting ahead within your thoughts, your hands actually unburden your brain of some of its cognitive work, allowing your thoughts to move along even faster. In other words, through gesturing, you can speed up your thinking.
Of course, there are other benefits to using gestures too. They help make the abstract physical and more comprehensible to your audience, who, like you, also speak hands and are ready to receive your message in both words and gestures.
Embodied cognition. This is the subconscious ability of your brain to pick up patterns in the information coming from your senses, interpret that information and then generate signals in your body that you might experience as physical sensations.
Next, interoception. This is quite simply the activity of listening to these signals. It’s that gut feeling that gives some traders an edge on the trading floor.
Then there’s this nifty concept: you can give your cognition a boost by moving your body. Remember those radiologists on the treadmills who outperformed their seated colleagues? Exactly.
And last, we learned about gestural foreshadowing, which is just another way of saying that when we communicate with others, our hands have often already delivered the message before the words exit our mouth. The important point is that gestures not only improve communication; they can even ease your cognitive load and make you think faster.
OK, that was it for the mind and the body. Now it’s time to follow the extended mind one step further and out into the world. We’ll start in 1940s New York.
---
Natural landscapes have a unique power to refresh and open our minds.
In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock couldn’t get his abstract paintings into the galleries of New York City. Worse, he struggled with depressive exhaustion and alcohol abuse. In 1945, he and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, made an important decision. They left Manhattan for a rundown farmhouse on Long Island.
From their new home, Pollock would look out on green fields and marshes, the light falling through the trees. He’d taste the salt air sweeping in from Long Island Sound. Then, he’d retreat into a barn that he’d converted into a studio. There, he tapped into something larger than himself and created paintings unlike any that had ever been seen before, paintings that were at once serene and wild.
The restorative power of nature, and trees in particular, is the kind of common wisdom that’s also backed up by an increasing amount of empirical evidence. A view of trees from a hospital room, for example, has been shown to reduce patients’ need for painkillers. A walk through a wooded park, as opposed to a walk down an urban street, correlates with a decline in negative thoughts among people with depression.
But nature’s effect goes beyond relieving distress. As it turns out, being in nature can also give your cognition a boost. Researchers from the University of Chicago found that study participants who took a stroll through an arboretum scored 20 percent higher on a working memory test than participants who made a circuit through city streets.
So, why is that?
Well, nature’s effect on our cognition may have something to do with its simultaneously busy and soothing visual field. It confronts the eye with a complex interplay of layers and light, and yet that complexity tends to form patterns. Think of fern leaves, ripples in water, or mountains in a range. Shapes within nature repeat, growing or diminishing in scale.
Another study found that exposure to these natural occurring, repeating patterns, also known as fractals, sharpens our ability to navigate and judge distance.
Which brings us back to Pollock and his paintings. Perhaps the breakthrough he experienced after moving to Long Island came down to experiencing the enlivening effect of nature’s patterns. Inspired and liberated by the natural environment around him, he filled his landscape-sized canvases with fractals of splattered paint.
But there’s something else that may have caused this change in Pollock. Gazing out on Long Island Sound, gazing at this vast, wild piece of water, he may have felt a particular emotion – a feeling of awe.
Awe opens the mind. Think of that particular brand of astonishment you feel when looking at, say, a big mountain or a deep canyon. It’s a feeling akin to joy – but it’s tinged with fear. It’s a sensation of insignificance and possibility all mingled up, all mixed together, and this feeling of awe seems to have a mind-opening effect. According to research by Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, feelings of awe correlate with a drop in our dependence on preconceived notions.
But that doesn’t mean that nature is good for all kinds of thought. Sometimes you need a refuge.
---
When struggling with abstract concepts, transform ideas into objects.
The American journalist Robert Caro is in the middle of something big. Over the last four decades, he has completed four volumes of his biography of US President Lyndon Baines Johnson. You know, Lyndon B. Johnson, the guy who signed the Civil Rights Act into law – this guy:
At present, Caro is about 3,500 pages into the biography. His books are full of scrupulously researched detail, and yet it all goes down as smooth as a scotch and soda made with Cutty Sark whiskey – Lyndon Johnson’s favorite drink. Point is, though: Caro’s process involves reams of research and thousands of hours of interviews. And Caro, who is 85 years old, is still hard at work on volume five. So how the heck does he keep track of everything – let alone weave it into a compelling story?
Well, to chart a course through this ocean of material, Caro pins notes to a corkboard that spans an entire wall of his office. He steps back and views it as a whole. He re-pins new trajectories and steps back, repeating the process until the impenetrable wall of data becomes a map. Only when he has a starting point, a path, and a destination, he begins to write.
Caro’s process comes with at least three beneficial strategies of the extended mind.
First, he’s offloading. In other words, he’s transferring important information from his brain into his environment. He’s putting it up on that corkboard, and lightening his brain’s cognitive burden in the process. Second, by being able to step back from the board, he enjoys something called detachment gain. Detachment gain is just a technical term for that insight, that little bit of wisdom that we can sometimes get when we have some distance from our own thoughts. Third, he is taking advantage of interactivity. By turning ideas into physical objects, into notes on a corkboard, he can think not only with his brain, but with his eyes and his hands as well.
By his own account, Caro couldn’t write his epic biographies without a map across his wall. In its raw form, the research he compiles is simply too immense and daunting. Until he has it on the map, it simply overwhelms him.
As we’ve already discussed, the talents of the human mind tend to line up with thinking that once helped us survive. Until very recently – evolutionarily speaking – the ability to manipulate objects and navigate through our surroundings put more food on the table than being able to juggle concepts. In other words, our spatial reasoning trumps our capacity for abstraction.
So, you shouldn’t feel any shame in relying on things to do your best thinking. Caro, after all, is frequently lauded as a genius.
From high frequency traders picking up on subtle bodily cues to guide their decisions; to famous artists and scientists using their environments to get creative and solve problems; to physics students developing truly independent and novel ways of thinking through interacting with other students: The human mind does its best work when it extends out of the brain and into the world.
---
Our bodies store subconscious knowledge, and by tuning into our sensations, we can tap into this intelligence.
Imagine a Wall Street trading floor full of people, swarming around like bees in a field of monitors, frantically shouting sales orders into multiple telephones. It’s loud and intense. It’s a challenging environment for a human brain.
In the middle of this mayhem is a man named John Coates. He’s been a trader for many years, and during this time he’s noticed something: the traders raking in the most cash don’t seem to be the analysis hounds or the data crunchers. The best traders aren’t the ones with the best educations or even the best ideas. The most successful traders seem to be the ones who know how, in key moments, to listen to their gut.
Coates, who came to Wall Street with a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge – and who definitely knows a thing or two about data crunching and complex data analysis – has noticed the same thing with his own trades. Often, what on paper seems like a perfect trade – well-reasoned, logically solid and perfectly executed – fails miserably. It doesn't make any sense. At other times – and this is even stranger – he will have a sudden feeling, a momentary glitch in his consciousness, showing him – in his own somewhat mystical words – “another path into the future.” When he follows this gut feeling, sometimes even against his better judgement, he’s often rewarded. It’s as if his body is somehow one step ahead of him, and all he needs to do is to listen.
Eventually, Coates became so fascinated by this phenomenon that he decided to leave Wall Street and return to Cambridge to become a physiologist and neuroscientist. Since then, he’s done research that suggests that his observation on the Wall Street trading floor was correct – that being in tune with your own body can make you smarter.
Here’s the science in a nutshell: Our senses are always active and they take in an ocean of data that never enters our consciousness. But that doesn’t mean this data is lost. It’s not. It’s processed subconsciously by our brain. And when our subconscious mind notices patterns in this data, our body alerts us through sensations generated in our organs, bones, and muscles. If we’re attuned to these signals, recognizing such a pattern around us might come with a slight speeding of the heart, or a twitch in the stomach.
This physical, subconscious process is called embodied cognition, and our receptivity to it is called interoception.
In 2016, Coates found that traders’ success closely correlated with their ability to accurately detect the beats of their own hearts. In other words, traders with greater sensitivity to signals coming from their own bodies made more money than their less sensitive colleagues. On the trading floor, where opportunities vanish in a split second, access to this embodied cognition gave them an edge.
Interoception isn’t just valuable when trading stocks though. It can give you an edge in a lot of areas. And here’s the good news: it’s a skill that you can easily practice and become better at. One simple and surprisingly effective way to do so is through an exercise called a mindfulness body scan.
The idea is simple. You sit down somewhere quiet, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Then you slowly move your awareness over your body, focusing on one body part at a time, all the way from your toes to the top of your head, noticing any sensations or feelings along the way. At the end, as a little bonus, you’ll find a guided mindfulness body scan, in case you’d like to try it out.
---
Gesture is our first language, and we can use it to explore, form and convey complex notions.
Christian Heath, a communications researcher, collects tapes of people interacting. He’s filmed and studied hundreds of interactions, and he’s come to pay special attention to a particular body part: the hands.
In one interaction, a doctor has prescribed a patient an anti-inflammatory drug. To explain the medication, he gestures downward three times. The patient nods, signaling that she understands even before the word “inflammation” has passed the doctor’s lips.
The patient in turn wants to tell the doctor that she’s overwhelmed with bills and she begins moving both hands in circles, but before she can say that the bills have her going “round and round” the doctor begins nodding in sympathy.
Heath and others doing similar research have come to a simple and powerful conclusion: in thought and communication, hands precede words.
This concept, known as gestural foreshadowing, makes a lot of sense. After all, long before you learned to speak, you conveyed your needs and feelings through gestures. If you have kids, you’ll know all about this. According to linguists, your distant ancestors’ first language was likely a language of the hands.
So, here’s some more practical advice on how to tap into your extended mind. Next time you’re speaking to someone, let yourself really gesture. Don’t hold back. As your hands fly about, you’ll likely notice that they will either mime the meaning you seek to express, or they’ll act as markers of emphasis, pointing, underlining, highlighting.
You’ll also notice that your gestures often arrive at an idea before your conscious mind has found the right word for it. This is gestural foreshadowing in action.
Which brings us to the most interesting part, which is this: by scouting ahead within your thoughts, your hands actually unburden your brain of some of its cognitive work, allowing your thoughts to move along even faster. In other words, through gesturing, you can speed up your thinking.
Of course, there are other benefits to using gestures too. They help make the abstract physical and more comprehensible to your audience, who, like you, also speak hands and are ready to receive your message in both words and gestures.
Embodied cognition. This is the subconscious ability of your brain to pick up patterns in the information coming from your senses, interpret that information and then generate signals in your body that you might experience as physical sensations.
Next, interoception. This is quite simply the activity of listening to these signals. It’s that gut feeling that gives some traders an edge on the trading floor.
Then there’s this nifty concept: you can give your cognition a boost by moving your body. Remember those radiologists on the treadmills who outperformed their seated colleagues? Exactly.
And last, we learned about gestural foreshadowing, which is just another way of saying that when we communicate with others, our hands have often already delivered the message before the words exit our mouth. The important point is that gestures not only improve communication; they can even ease your cognitive load and make you think faster.
OK, that was it for the mind and the body. Now it’s time to follow the extended mind one step further and out into the world. We’ll start in 1940s New York.
---
Natural landscapes have a unique power to refresh and open our minds.
In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock couldn’t get his abstract paintings into the galleries of New York City. Worse, he struggled with depressive exhaustion and alcohol abuse. In 1945, he and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, made an important decision. They left Manhattan for a rundown farmhouse on Long Island.
From their new home, Pollock would look out on green fields and marshes, the light falling through the trees. He’d taste the salt air sweeping in from Long Island Sound. Then, he’d retreat into a barn that he’d converted into a studio. There, he tapped into something larger than himself and created paintings unlike any that had ever been seen before, paintings that were at once serene and wild.
The restorative power of nature, and trees in particular, is the kind of common wisdom that’s also backed up by an increasing amount of empirical evidence. A view of trees from a hospital room, for example, has been shown to reduce patients’ need for painkillers. A walk through a wooded park, as opposed to a walk down an urban street, correlates with a decline in negative thoughts among people with depression.
But nature’s effect goes beyond relieving distress. As it turns out, being in nature can also give your cognition a boost. Researchers from the University of Chicago found that study participants who took a stroll through an arboretum scored 20 percent higher on a working memory test than participants who made a circuit through city streets.
So, why is that?
Well, nature’s effect on our cognition may have something to do with its simultaneously busy and soothing visual field. It confronts the eye with a complex interplay of layers and light, and yet that complexity tends to form patterns. Think of fern leaves, ripples in water, or mountains in a range. Shapes within nature repeat, growing or diminishing in scale.
Another study found that exposure to these natural occurring, repeating patterns, also known as fractals, sharpens our ability to navigate and judge distance.
Which brings us back to Pollock and his paintings. Perhaps the breakthrough he experienced after moving to Long Island came down to experiencing the enlivening effect of nature’s patterns. Inspired and liberated by the natural environment around him, he filled his landscape-sized canvases with fractals of splattered paint.
But there’s something else that may have caused this change in Pollock. Gazing out on Long Island Sound, gazing at this vast, wild piece of water, he may have felt a particular emotion – a feeling of awe.
Awe opens the mind. Think of that particular brand of astonishment you feel when looking at, say, a big mountain or a deep canyon. It’s a feeling akin to joy – but it’s tinged with fear. It’s a sensation of insignificance and possibility all mingled up, all mixed together, and this feeling of awe seems to have a mind-opening effect. According to research by Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, feelings of awe correlate with a drop in our dependence on preconceived notions.
But that doesn’t mean that nature is good for all kinds of thought. Sometimes you need a refuge.
---
When struggling with abstract concepts, transform ideas into objects.
The American journalist Robert Caro is in the middle of something big. Over the last four decades, he has completed four volumes of his biography of US President Lyndon Baines Johnson. You know, Lyndon B. Johnson, the guy who signed the Civil Rights Act into law – this guy:
At present, Caro is about 3,500 pages into the biography. His books are full of scrupulously researched detail, and yet it all goes down as smooth as a scotch and soda made with Cutty Sark whiskey – Lyndon Johnson’s favorite drink. Point is, though: Caro’s process involves reams of research and thousands of hours of interviews. And Caro, who is 85 years old, is still hard at work on volume five. So how the heck does he keep track of everything – let alone weave it into a compelling story?
Well, to chart a course through this ocean of material, Caro pins notes to a corkboard that spans an entire wall of his office. He steps back and views it as a whole. He re-pins new trajectories and steps back, repeating the process until the impenetrable wall of data becomes a map. Only when he has a starting point, a path, and a destination, he begins to write.
Caro’s process comes with at least three beneficial strategies of the extended mind.
First, he’s offloading. In other words, he’s transferring important information from his brain into his environment. He’s putting it up on that corkboard, and lightening his brain’s cognitive burden in the process. Second, by being able to step back from the board, he enjoys something called detachment gain. Detachment gain is just a technical term for that insight, that little bit of wisdom that we can sometimes get when we have some distance from our own thoughts. Third, he is taking advantage of interactivity. By turning ideas into physical objects, into notes on a corkboard, he can think not only with his brain, but with his eyes and his hands as well.
By his own account, Caro couldn’t write his epic biographies without a map across his wall. In its raw form, the research he compiles is simply too immense and daunting. Until he has it on the map, it simply overwhelms him.
As we’ve already discussed, the talents of the human mind tend to line up with thinking that once helped us survive. Until very recently – evolutionarily speaking – the ability to manipulate objects and navigate through our surroundings put more food on the table than being able to juggle concepts. In other words, our spatial reasoning trumps our capacity for abstraction.
So, you shouldn’t feel any shame in relying on things to do your best thinking. Caro, after all, is frequently lauded as a genius.
November 8, 2024
3.5/5
A meta analysis of a currently scattered and bludgeoning field. It is accessible to the reader from non psychology background. I would have also loved more technicalities included, for that, I am now looking at the textbooks for this discipline.
This book offers a critique of the brain bound approach to existence, and builds up the argument that actually lies in the metaphysics of Jainism - the mind is co-extensive with the body. It goes further, and lays a case for mind extending beyond the body. At least for the Indian audience, that is not a surprising proposition. At once the ideas of Advait Vedanta and yoga spring to mind.
Coming to present times, the mind-body debate now stands deepend - embodied cognition appears to confirm that a holistic approach lies underneath our functioning - in terms of the body, social surroundings and environment. An unexpected input I got was the complete overhaul of "group think" into social thinking that is capable of extraordinary achievements. Irving Janis would find this perspective interesting.
All in all, the entire field of psychology seeks to gain from embodied cognition. It might also reduce the panic people have on hearing doomsday AI phenomena. It seeks a return to visceral reclamation of our identities beyond our brains - our body and the world and the people around us.
The writing however, is not scientific, and often circular.
A meta analysis of a currently scattered and bludgeoning field. It is accessible to the reader from non psychology background. I would have also loved more technicalities included, for that, I am now looking at the textbooks for this discipline.
This book offers a critique of the brain bound approach to existence, and builds up the argument that actually lies in the metaphysics of Jainism - the mind is co-extensive with the body. It goes further, and lays a case for mind extending beyond the body. At least for the Indian audience, that is not a surprising proposition. At once the ideas of Advait Vedanta and yoga spring to mind.
Coming to present times, the mind-body debate now stands deepend - embodied cognition appears to confirm that a holistic approach lies underneath our functioning - in terms of the body, social surroundings and environment. An unexpected input I got was the complete overhaul of "group think" into social thinking that is capable of extraordinary achievements. Irving Janis would find this perspective interesting.
All in all, the entire field of psychology seeks to gain from embodied cognition. It might also reduce the panic people have on hearing doomsday AI phenomena. It seeks a return to visceral reclamation of our identities beyond our brains - our body and the world and the people around us.
The writing however, is not scientific, and often circular.
January 3, 2025
Really interesting material but this is one case I wish I read the paper copy instead of the audiobook - I just found the narration very grating. The ideas presented are neat and seem easy enough to implement into one's life.
May 10, 2022
There is a commonly held belief that humans only use about 10% of their brains. There is no scientific basis to this belief and most studies show that most of our brain is in use one way or another whether we are waking or sleeping. The problem is that as children we are constantly learning and expanding the neuron connections in our brain, but as adults we fall into predictable patterns and the neurons become hard-wired, making learning and growth much, much harder. And for those unlucky enough to have difficult childhoods, that hard-wiring can be a heavy burden that affects lifelong learning.
This book, The Extended Mind, shows that many of us use less than 1% of our brain's potential, given that we now have the ability to expand its reach beyond the skull and body. Annie Murphy Paul is a science writer and author of three books. Her research in this book covers “extra-neural” resources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us—can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively.
What? You can use external resources to enrich and empower your brain? Yes, that three pounds of mostly water between our ears has evolved quickly over the last few centuries to expand its powers and reach way beyond the human body. This concept is revolutionary in a time when we still understand so little about how the mind works. The author points to nine major ways we can expand our brain beyond basic cognitive thinking, and they are fascinating.
1- Interoception is the ability to read signals from the body itself to guide conscious decisions. If your heart starts racing in a particular situation, your body is telling you to be careful and watch for danger. This is the knowledge that's buried deep down in our subconscious- gut feelings that tell us things our conscious mind can't process. Sometimes these messages are wrong, but the more in tune we are with our body, the more accurately we can read them. The author recommends mindfulness meditation and a "body scan" to uncover hidden data that's below our conscious comprehension.
2- Movement of our bodies greatly heightens our senses and increases our brain's abilities. Embodied cognition is the way some people learn by doing. Kinesthetic learning works better than visual or auditory learning for many people because as the body moves, it triggers links in the memory that helps the knowledge stick more than if a sedentary person experiences the same information. Novel movements and experiences increase learning even more. There have been numerous studies that show when children are allowed to move about during the day, they learn better than seated quietly at desks. Also, when movement itself is incorporated into a lesson, it becomes much more likely to be retained. Actors use movement to recall their lines in a play or production. This goes against many beliefs that our brains work best when our bodies are still and paying attention.
3- Gestures and body language can be very persuasive to the human brain. Babies depend entirely on gestures to understand their world, and that ability never goes away. Studies have shown that in educational talks and videos that use prolific hand gestures, students recall the information substantially better. Using the hands to express size, shape, or movement helps the brain to create helpful mental images rather than trying to process abstract words. There is a famous rule, the 7-38-55 rule that states that human communication is 55% non-verbal, 38% vocal, and only 7% the actual words that are spoken. Being the logical creatures that we are, we assume that the content itself is the most important, when the way it's delivered matters much more.
4- Natural Spaces have a profound effect on the brain. Everybody who has ever experienced a day in the park, on a lake, or by the beach can attest to the healing and restorative powers of natural spaces. Civilization, data, and constant information flow can be very draining and taxing to the working memory of the brain. Because nature is more predictable, it allows passive attention most of the time, which is less demanding and more restorative. There is a term called biophilic design that looks at how incorporating natural images and items into human architecture and living or work spaces can greatly improve thinking, mood, and general happiness.
5- Built spaces can make a huge difference for the productivity of the brain. The author recommends walls over open floor plans, because shutting out distractions is what protects the brain and its thinking power the most. Noise, clutter, and interruptions are the enemy of deep thought today, and the more a person can control their work and living environment, the better their brain will perform.
In the push towards efficiency, some workplaces have tried to remove individuality and control, thinking that personal distractions like photos of family on the desk are unnecessary. On the contrary, personal items in the workspace increases confidence and gives the person more ownership, raising productivity and job satisfaction. For our brain to work best, it needs to feel safe and at home in its immediate environment.
6- The space of ideas is a way to bring partially formed ideas out into the open and work on them as they evolve. This was my favorite part of the book. Think of a 3-D model of a building- architects wouldn't think of starting a building without a physical model so that they can see the finished product and improve upon it before construction begins. The same goes for creative artists and storyboards, where an entire book or movie can be laid out on a large wall to see how it flows and visualized as it goes through its process. We all have mental map of how we'd like things to turn out, but using the physical space around us to play with our ideas could be the most powerful tool at our disposal. Even just drawing sketches or playing with words or numbers on a piece of paper gives the brain something external to latch onto while it tries to create something new.
7- Expert knowledge uses the brains of others who have already encountered a problem and following their lead to save time and effort. Relying on experts- either online resources or respected human beings, helps our brain to take huge shortcuts towards solutions that could otherwise take years. Of course experts can be wrong, or there might not be much expertise in new or emerging problems, but on balance using the prior works of an expert not only avoids costly mistakes, it acts as a powerful motivating force knowing that someone else faced a similar problem and found a solution.
8- Peers can be critical in the learning process. Many types of learning are social, and can only be found through people teaching each other. One of the best ways to learn something deeply is to teach it to somebody else. Another way to experience deep learning is through stories, which generic textbooks try to avoid. Stories told by a peer who has experiences that we don't can be very powerful. Teens and young people are especially wired to learn from their peers, making it even more important for them to find strong, supportive, and intelligent peer groups.
9- Groups and groupthink offer yet another way to supplement the brain. By specializing and distributing information,members of a group can accomplish much more than they could on their own. Humans are social animals, and our ability to synchronize and collaborate with others multiplies our knowledge base exponentially. Groups can also be very damaging when they stifle individual creativity or demonize those not in the group, but most of our basic institutions- government, business, education, science, and the arts relies on organized groups to build from the past and plan for the future.
This book invites the reader to think differently about the brain and its powers. The temptation in our individualistic society is to see the brain as a static, finite organ, reflective of its owner and his or her character. Those who succeed in life must have good brains, while those who fail have defective ones. But it's much more complicated than that. Our brains are dependent on so much more than the limited inputs and processing capability that each of us has at birth.
We depend on our environment, our peers and leaders, and our general health to be able to fully utilize the full reach of our brain's potential. In addition to the nine factors above, I would add quality education and parenting, mental health, good wi-fi, libraries, access to affordable healthcare, and freedom from fear of crime or poverty as factors that influence our ability to think clearly and creatively. Our lives are an unfathomably complex mixture of inputs from everywhere, and we depend on our brains to make sense of it all.
Tools from this book like controlling your environment, offloading content into notepads and models, and reaching out to others are all ways that we can help our brain make the most sense of this confusing and rapidly changing world. Protect your brain by extending it and sharing its ideas with others.
This book, The Extended Mind, shows that many of us use less than 1% of our brain's potential, given that we now have the ability to expand its reach beyond the skull and body. Annie Murphy Paul is a science writer and author of three books. Her research in this book covers “extra-neural” resources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us—can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively.
What? You can use external resources to enrich and empower your brain? Yes, that three pounds of mostly water between our ears has evolved quickly over the last few centuries to expand its powers and reach way beyond the human body. This concept is revolutionary in a time when we still understand so little about how the mind works. The author points to nine major ways we can expand our brain beyond basic cognitive thinking, and they are fascinating.
1- Interoception is the ability to read signals from the body itself to guide conscious decisions. If your heart starts racing in a particular situation, your body is telling you to be careful and watch for danger. This is the knowledge that's buried deep down in our subconscious- gut feelings that tell us things our conscious mind can't process. Sometimes these messages are wrong, but the more in tune we are with our body, the more accurately we can read them. The author recommends mindfulness meditation and a "body scan" to uncover hidden data that's below our conscious comprehension.
2- Movement of our bodies greatly heightens our senses and increases our brain's abilities. Embodied cognition is the way some people learn by doing. Kinesthetic learning works better than visual or auditory learning for many people because as the body moves, it triggers links in the memory that helps the knowledge stick more than if a sedentary person experiences the same information. Novel movements and experiences increase learning even more. There have been numerous studies that show when children are allowed to move about during the day, they learn better than seated quietly at desks. Also, when movement itself is incorporated into a lesson, it becomes much more likely to be retained. Actors use movement to recall their lines in a play or production. This goes against many beliefs that our brains work best when our bodies are still and paying attention.
3- Gestures and body language can be very persuasive to the human brain. Babies depend entirely on gestures to understand their world, and that ability never goes away. Studies have shown that in educational talks and videos that use prolific hand gestures, students recall the information substantially better. Using the hands to express size, shape, or movement helps the brain to create helpful mental images rather than trying to process abstract words. There is a famous rule, the 7-38-55 rule that states that human communication is 55% non-verbal, 38% vocal, and only 7% the actual words that are spoken. Being the logical creatures that we are, we assume that the content itself is the most important, when the way it's delivered matters much more.
4- Natural Spaces have a profound effect on the brain. Everybody who has ever experienced a day in the park, on a lake, or by the beach can attest to the healing and restorative powers of natural spaces. Civilization, data, and constant information flow can be very draining and taxing to the working memory of the brain. Because nature is more predictable, it allows passive attention most of the time, which is less demanding and more restorative. There is a term called biophilic design that looks at how incorporating natural images and items into human architecture and living or work spaces can greatly improve thinking, mood, and general happiness.
5- Built spaces can make a huge difference for the productivity of the brain. The author recommends walls over open floor plans, because shutting out distractions is what protects the brain and its thinking power the most. Noise, clutter, and interruptions are the enemy of deep thought today, and the more a person can control their work and living environment, the better their brain will perform.
In the push towards efficiency, some workplaces have tried to remove individuality and control, thinking that personal distractions like photos of family on the desk are unnecessary. On the contrary, personal items in the workspace increases confidence and gives the person more ownership, raising productivity and job satisfaction. For our brain to work best, it needs to feel safe and at home in its immediate environment.
6- The space of ideas is a way to bring partially formed ideas out into the open and work on them as they evolve. This was my favorite part of the book. Think of a 3-D model of a building- architects wouldn't think of starting a building without a physical model so that they can see the finished product and improve upon it before construction begins. The same goes for creative artists and storyboards, where an entire book or movie can be laid out on a large wall to see how it flows and visualized as it goes through its process. We all have mental map of how we'd like things to turn out, but using the physical space around us to play with our ideas could be the most powerful tool at our disposal. Even just drawing sketches or playing with words or numbers on a piece of paper gives the brain something external to latch onto while it tries to create something new.
7- Expert knowledge uses the brains of others who have already encountered a problem and following their lead to save time and effort. Relying on experts- either online resources or respected human beings, helps our brain to take huge shortcuts towards solutions that could otherwise take years. Of course experts can be wrong, or there might not be much expertise in new or emerging problems, but on balance using the prior works of an expert not only avoids costly mistakes, it acts as a powerful motivating force knowing that someone else faced a similar problem and found a solution.
8- Peers can be critical in the learning process. Many types of learning are social, and can only be found through people teaching each other. One of the best ways to learn something deeply is to teach it to somebody else. Another way to experience deep learning is through stories, which generic textbooks try to avoid. Stories told by a peer who has experiences that we don't can be very powerful. Teens and young people are especially wired to learn from their peers, making it even more important for them to find strong, supportive, and intelligent peer groups.
9- Groups and groupthink offer yet another way to supplement the brain. By specializing and distributing information,members of a group can accomplish much more than they could on their own. Humans are social animals, and our ability to synchronize and collaborate with others multiplies our knowledge base exponentially. Groups can also be very damaging when they stifle individual creativity or demonize those not in the group, but most of our basic institutions- government, business, education, science, and the arts relies on organized groups to build from the past and plan for the future.
This book invites the reader to think differently about the brain and its powers. The temptation in our individualistic society is to see the brain as a static, finite organ, reflective of its owner and his or her character. Those who succeed in life must have good brains, while those who fail have defective ones. But it's much more complicated than that. Our brains are dependent on so much more than the limited inputs and processing capability that each of us has at birth.
We depend on our environment, our peers and leaders, and our general health to be able to fully utilize the full reach of our brain's potential. In addition to the nine factors above, I would add quality education and parenting, mental health, good wi-fi, libraries, access to affordable healthcare, and freedom from fear of crime or poverty as factors that influence our ability to think clearly and creatively. Our lives are an unfathomably complex mixture of inputs from everywhere, and we depend on our brains to make sense of it all.
Tools from this book like controlling your environment, offloading content into notepads and models, and reaching out to others are all ways that we can help our brain make the most sense of this confusing and rapidly changing world. Protect your brain by extending it and sharing its ideas with others.
September 12, 2021
Tinha imensa vontade de ler “The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain” (2021) uma vez que o assunto me interessa muito, contudo depois de ler o prólogo, seguido de uma introdução que se limitava a repetir o prólogo adicionando-lhe pequenas histórias, senti uma enorme desilusão, percebendo que não era para mim. Annie Murphy Paul pode ser uma boa jornalista de ciência, mas para escrever um livro sobre ciência tem de se oferecer mais do que jornalismo. Paul demonstra grande ligeireza na abordagem de assuntos complexos, mas pior do que isso, pretende por meio das meras leituras que realizou, apresentar toda uma nova teorização sobre o funcionamento da cognição.
Paul diz-nos que: “Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently.”
O que não tem qualquer problema. Os problemas começam desde logo quando vem dizer que a ideia é uma originalidade de Andy Clark e David Chalmers, apresentada num paper de 1995, intitulado “The Extended Mind”. O problema é que não é, de todo. McLuhan apresentou estas mesmas ideias em 1964, no livro “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, ideias que foram depois amplamente trabalhadas por muitos autores, nomeadamente Derrick de Kerckhove, entre outros.
Apresentar a historieta de que Andy Clark em 1997 se esqueceu do seu portátil no comboio e que tal teve como efeito " repentino e algo vicioso de dano cerebral (esperançosamente transitório)" que ficou "atordoado, confuso, e visivelmente enfraquecido — como se um ciborgue tivesse sofrido um ligeiro derrame”. É engraçado, mas não diz nada de novo. Não diz nada, que não sintamos quando nos falta a nossa caneta predileta para escrever, ou o nosso bloco de folhas, ou o habitual processador de texto, ou ainda o lugar concreto da biblioteca, ou as prateleiras que todos os dias revisitamos, etc. etc.
Paul evoca um conjunto de grandes campos da psicologia — embodied cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition — que sendo altamente relevantes, nomeadamente no trabalho que faço de design de interação, contém ainda imensos problemas do ponto de vista científico, dada a enorme variabilidade que comportam. Por isso, escrever um livro dizendo que quer “unificar todas estas teorias intrigantes” é tão audaz como tonto. Não restam dúvidas quando à frente diz: “Psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists are now able to provide a clear picture of how extra-neural inputs shape the way we think”. Não, peço desculpa, mas não é verdade. Existe ainda muito caminho a fazer antes de chegarmos aí.
Como se não bastasse, depois embrulha ainda tudo isto com discussões sobre as metáforas do cérebro computador e do cérebro musculo, evocando teorias e mais teorias, como se tudo junto funcionasse na mais perfeita harmonia. Mas não funciona. As teorias são interessantes, e apresentam caminhos de compreensão do modo de funcionamento do nosso cérebro, mas não se pode pegar naquelas que nos interessam, e começar a montar um puzzle explicativo, apenas porque do ponto de vista lógico-narrativo fazem sentido.
A ciência não é mera conversa reflexiva, nem é mera leitura de artigos ou livros, menos ainda é mera conjetura de seleções de factos e conceitos. A ciência faz-se experimentando. Lançando ideias, teses e hipóteses, e pondo-as à prova, testando e validando. O que Paul nos apresenta é uma narrativa que parece fazer lógica, mas não passa de uma narrativa, não é ciência.
Publicado em: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Paul diz-nos que: “Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently.”
O que não tem qualquer problema. Os problemas começam desde logo quando vem dizer que a ideia é uma originalidade de Andy Clark e David Chalmers, apresentada num paper de 1995, intitulado “The Extended Mind”. O problema é que não é, de todo. McLuhan apresentou estas mesmas ideias em 1964, no livro “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, ideias que foram depois amplamente trabalhadas por muitos autores, nomeadamente Derrick de Kerckhove, entre outros.
Apresentar a historieta de que Andy Clark em 1997 se esqueceu do seu portátil no comboio e que tal teve como efeito " repentino e algo vicioso de dano cerebral (esperançosamente transitório)" que ficou "atordoado, confuso, e visivelmente enfraquecido — como se um ciborgue tivesse sofrido um ligeiro derrame”. É engraçado, mas não diz nada de novo. Não diz nada, que não sintamos quando nos falta a nossa caneta predileta para escrever, ou o nosso bloco de folhas, ou o habitual processador de texto, ou ainda o lugar concreto da biblioteca, ou as prateleiras que todos os dias revisitamos, etc. etc.
Paul evoca um conjunto de grandes campos da psicologia — embodied cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition — que sendo altamente relevantes, nomeadamente no trabalho que faço de design de interação, contém ainda imensos problemas do ponto de vista científico, dada a enorme variabilidade que comportam. Por isso, escrever um livro dizendo que quer “unificar todas estas teorias intrigantes” é tão audaz como tonto. Não restam dúvidas quando à frente diz: “Psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists are now able to provide a clear picture of how extra-neural inputs shape the way we think”. Não, peço desculpa, mas não é verdade. Existe ainda muito caminho a fazer antes de chegarmos aí.
Como se não bastasse, depois embrulha ainda tudo isto com discussões sobre as metáforas do cérebro computador e do cérebro musculo, evocando teorias e mais teorias, como se tudo junto funcionasse na mais perfeita harmonia. Mas não funciona. As teorias são interessantes, e apresentam caminhos de compreensão do modo de funcionamento do nosso cérebro, mas não se pode pegar naquelas que nos interessam, e começar a montar um puzzle explicativo, apenas porque do ponto de vista lógico-narrativo fazem sentido.
A ciência não é mera conversa reflexiva, nem é mera leitura de artigos ou livros, menos ainda é mera conjetura de seleções de factos e conceitos. A ciência faz-se experimentando. Lançando ideias, teses e hipóteses, e pondo-as à prova, testando e validando. O que Paul nos apresenta é uma narrativa que parece fazer lógica, mas não passa de uma narrativa, não é ciência.
Publicado em: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
September 29, 2024
نشر كلارك وزميله ديفد تشارلمز عام ١٩٩٥ ورقة بحثية بعنوان العقل الممتد وطرحا سؤال: أين يتوقف العقل ويبدأ بقية العالم؟ وقدَّما إجابة غير تقليدية مدارها أن العقل لا يتوقف عند الحدود المعيارية للجلد والجمجمة، بل يجب أن يُنظر إليه بدقة أكثر على أنه "نظام ممتد، وباعتباره اقترانًا بين الكائن البيولوجي والموارد الخارجية".
(اعصِر دماغك) هذا ما نقوله غالبًا عند التفكير في حل لمشكلة مستعصية، لكن الكاتبة آني مورفي، تقول أن علينا فعل العكس، أي التفكير خارج الدماغ.
إذ يمكن لمجموعة من الموارد غير العصبية مساعدتنا في التفكير مثل مشاعرنا وحركاتنا الجسدية والبيئات المادية التي ندرس ونعمل فيها والعقول الأخرى التي نتعامل معها. فالتفكير يحدث داخل وخارج الدماغ، لذلك، يجب أن نستخدم موارد خارج الكتلة العصبية لمساعدتنا على التفكير.
وفقًا للأبحاث التي التي أجراها علماء النفس وعلماء الإدراك وعلماء الأعصاب التي وضحت كيف تأثر المدخلات الخارجية على تفكيرنا، لا ترجع الفروق الفردية في الذكاء إلى اختلافات متأصلة في قوة الدماغ فقط.
منها: دراسة الإدراك المتجسد التي تستكشف دور الجسم في تفكيرنا، ودراسة الإدراك الموضعي التي تبحث في تأثير المكان على تفكيرنا، ودراسة إلإدراك الموزع التي تبحث في آثار التفكير مع الآخرين.
الكتاب مقسم إلى ثلاثة أجزاء رئيسة: التفكير باستخدام أجسادنا (باستخدام الأحاسيس، والحركة، والإيماءات)، والتفكير باستخدام ما يُحيط بنا (المساحات الطبيعية، والمبنية، وفضاء الأفكار)، والتفكير باستخدام علاقاتنا (الخبراء والأقران والمجموعات). وتُشير الأدلة إلى أن الامتدادات تكون أقوى عندما توظف معًا وتُدمج في إجراءات عقلية تعتمد على النطاق الكامل للموارد غير العصبية المتوفرة لدينا.
"تعتبر الإيماءات جزءًا طبيعيًا من التواصل البشري ويمكن أن تنقل معاني لا تستطيع اللغة الوصول إليها. وتعزز ذاكرتنا من خلال تعزيز الكلمات المنطوقة بإشارات بصرية وحركية. كما تخفف العبء الذهني وتحرر مواردنا العقلية من خلال تفرغ المعلومات في أيدينا. تُظهر الإيماءات أفكارنا الأكثر تقدمًا قبل أن تظهر في حديثنا، ويعود ذلك إلى أنها تساعدنا في تشكيل فكرة أولية لا تزال تتشكل في أذهاننا".
"للجدران والخصوصية التي تمنحنا أثر إيجابي على تفكيرنا، فأفضل طريقة للتعامل مع إلهاء الآخرين هي أن يكون لديك جدار يفصلك عنهم، ما يتيح لك التركيز على عملك دون تشتت. يستنزف المكتب المفتوح الموارد العقلية، فالخصوصية التي تمنحنا إياها الجدران، ضرورية لتخفيف الضغط العقلي وحمايتنا من العبء المعرفي لضرورة تتبع أنشطة من حولنا".
(اعصِر دماغك) هذا ما نقوله غالبًا عند التفكير في حل لمشكلة مستعصية، لكن الكاتبة آني مورفي، تقول أن علينا فعل العكس، أي التفكير خارج الدماغ.
إذ يمكن لمجموعة من الموارد غير العصبية مساعدتنا في التفكير مثل مشاعرنا وحركاتنا الجسدية والبيئات المادية التي ندرس ونعمل فيها والعقول الأخرى التي نتعامل معها. فالتفكير يحدث داخل وخارج الدماغ، لذلك، يجب أن نستخدم موارد خارج الكتلة العصبية لمساعدتنا على التفكير.
وفقًا للأبحاث التي التي أجراها علماء النفس وعلماء الإدراك وعلماء الأعصاب التي وضحت كيف تأثر المدخلات الخارجية على تفكيرنا، لا ترجع الفروق الفردية في الذكاء إلى اختلافات متأصلة في قوة الدماغ فقط.
منها: دراسة الإدراك المتجسد التي تستكشف دور الجسم في تفكيرنا، ودراسة الإدراك الموضعي التي تبحث في تأثير المكان على تفكيرنا، ودراسة إلإدراك الموزع التي تبحث في آثار التفكير مع الآخرين.
الكتاب مقسم إلى ثلاثة أجزاء رئيسة: التفكير باستخدام أجسادنا (باستخدام الأحاسيس، والحركة، والإيماءات)، والتفكير باستخدام ما يُحيط بنا (المساحات الطبيعية، والمبنية، وفضاء الأفكار)، والتفكير باستخدام علاقاتنا (الخبراء والأقران والمجموعات). وتُشير الأدلة إلى أن الامتدادات تكون أقوى عندما توظف معًا وتُدمج في إجراءات عقلية تعتمد على النطاق الكامل للموارد غير العصبية المتوفرة لدينا.
"تعتبر الإيماءات جزءًا طبيعيًا من التواصل البشري ويمكن أن تنقل معاني لا تستطيع اللغة الوصول إليها. وتعزز ذاكرتنا من خلال تعزيز الكلمات المنطوقة بإشارات بصرية وحركية. كما تخفف العبء الذهني وتحرر مواردنا العقلية من خلال تفرغ المعلومات في أيدينا. تُظهر الإيماءات أفكارنا الأكثر تقدمًا قبل أن تظهر في حديثنا، ويعود ذلك إلى أنها تساعدنا في تشكيل فكرة أولية لا تزال تتشكل في أذهاننا".
"للجدران والخصوصية التي تمنحنا أثر إيجابي على تفكيرنا، فأفضل طريقة للتعامل مع إلهاء الآخرين هي أن يكون لديك جدار يفصلك عنهم، ما يتيح لك التركيز على عملك دون تشتت. يستنزف المكتب المفتوح الموارد العقلية، فالخصوصية التي تمنحنا إياها الجدران، ضرورية لتخفيف الضغط العقلي وحمايتنا من العبء المعرفي لضرورة تتبع أنشطة من حولنا".
October 1, 2021
The best pop psychology book I’ve read this year, highly recommend
March 10, 2022
There really are a host of extra-neural resources available to help us think better. This book opened my mind to the intelligence that exists in my body, gut, and the built and cultural environments around me. Evolved my mental model of the world.
September 25, 2021
Fascinating
April 29, 2022
There is a great book that explains ideas around how the brain works in the context of the physical world. The body, the environment, and nearby people. I love these ideas. Sadly this is not that book.
The first example given is how people who "trust their gut" do better than those who just trust data when picking stocks. Nope, nope, nope. There is a huge body of evidence that says nobody out-picks the market over the long term. This was not even addressed. Bad start.
Later examples didn't mention mitigating circumstances that were clearly there. If the studies accounted for those circumstances, Paul didn't think to mention them. While I'm very agreeable with the ideas here, the support presented was very lacking.
The first example given is how people who "trust their gut" do better than those who just trust data when picking stocks. Nope, nope, nope. There is a huge body of evidence that says nobody out-picks the market over the long term. This was not even addressed. Bad start.
Later examples didn't mention mitigating circumstances that were clearly there. If the studies accounted for those circumstances, Paul didn't think to mention them. While I'm very agreeable with the ideas here, the support presented was very lacking.
April 29, 2022
کامل نخوندم، بعضی جاها حرفهای جالبی میزد، ولی خیلی طولانی بود!
درمورد اینکه مغز ما مثل یک کامپیوتر نیست که خودش به تنهایی پردازش انجام بده، بلکه از محیط و بقیه قسمتهای بدن مستقیما تاثیر میگیره.
مثال: مثلا اگر تو مکانهایی با سقفهای با ارتفاع بالا باشین، بیشتر برای ایده پردازس خوبه، در حالی که برعکسش میتونه برای تمرکز خوب باشه.
اینکتاب به شدت نیازمند خلاصه است.
ولی اگر خلاصهاش باشه، خلاصهی خوبیه!
درمورد اینکه مغز ما مثل یک کامپیوتر نیست که خودش به تنهایی پردازش انجام بده، بلکه از محیط و بقیه قسمتهای بدن مستقیما تاثیر میگیره.
مثال: مثلا اگر تو مکانهایی با سقفهای با ارتفاع بالا باشین، بیشتر برای ایده پردازس خوبه، در حالی که برعکسش میتونه برای تمرکز خوب باشه.
اینکتاب به شدت نیازمند خلاصه است.
ولی اگر خلاصهاش باشه، خلاصهی خوبیه!
August 4, 2021
Only got a couple of hours into it. Way too many animal spirits. For such a bold claim that the brain, especially cognition, is greatly affected by things like movement I expected a lot more experimental evidence. Feels like yet more pop psychology pulp to me.
January 27, 2022
How can one wrote such an interesting and important topic in such a dreadful way I wonder. For all what the author is proposing about education, this book itself serves as an utter failing example in communicating information effectively.
I really tried; I finished 1/3.
I really tried; I finished 1/3.
March 6, 2023
Lots of anecdotes, lots of scientific references, and a few useful tips here and there. I don’t dislike this book, I just don’t need it.
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