The Extended Mind

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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, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.

It’s true that we’re more accustomed to thinking about our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships. But we can also think with and through them—by using the movements of our hands to understand and express abstract concepts, for example, or by arranging our workspace in ways that promote idea generation, or by engaging in social practices like teaching and storytelling that lead to deeper understanding and more accurate memory. Rather than exhorting ourselves and others to use our heads, we should be applying extra-neural resources to the project of thinking outside the skull’s narrow circumference.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 2). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The human brain is limited in its ability to pay attention, limited in its capacity to remember, limited in its facility with abstract concepts, and limited in its power to persist at a challenging task.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 2). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Succeeding in this world requires focused attention, prodigious memory, capacious bandwidth, sustained motivation, logical rigor, and proficiency with abstractions. The gap between what our biological brains are capable of, and what modern life demands, is large and getting larger each day.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (pp. 2-3). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

We’re not trained to use bodily movements and gestures to understand highly conceptual subjects like science and mathematics, or to come up with novel and original ideas. Schools don’t teach students how to restore their depleted attention with exposure to nature and the outdoors, or how to arrange their study spaces so that they extend intelligent thought. Teachers and managers don’t demonstrate how abstract ideas can be turned into physical objects that can be manipulated and transformed in order to achieve insights and solve problems. Employees aren’t shown how the social practices of imitation and vicarious learning can shortcut the process of acquiring expertise. Classroom groups and workplace teams aren’t coached in scientifically validated methods of increasing the collective intelligence of their members. Our ability to think outside the brain has been left almost entirely uneducated and undeveloped.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 4). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The brain can be developed but what if it's easier to develop the capabilities outside of the brain. Better tooling, better resources. June 17, 2023 @ 9:09 PM

First, as to that growing need to think outside the brain: as many of us can readily recognize—in the accelerated pace of our days and the escalating complexity of our duties at school and work—the demands on our thinking are ratcheting up. There’s more information we must deal with. The information we have to process is coming at us faster. And the kind of information we must deal with is increasingly specialized and abstract. This difference in kind is especially significant. The knowledge and skills that we are biologically prepared to learn have been outstripped by the need to acquire a set of competencies that come far less naturally and are acquired with far more difficulty.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 12). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The best way—and, at least for now, the only way—for us to get smarter is to get better at thinking outside the brain.

What are the ways we can get smarter by leveraging knowledge in the world?- June 17, 2023 @ 9:09 PM

“Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 14). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The literature on the extended mind suggests a different view: experts are those who have learned how best to marshal and apply extra-neural resources to the task before them.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 16). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

although the conventional take on expertise highlights economy, efficiency, and optimality of action—geniuses and superstars “just do it”—research in the vein of the extended mind finds that experts actually do more experimenting, more testing, and more backtracking than beginners. They are more apt than novices to make skillful use of their bodies, of physical space, and of relationships with others. In most scenarios, researchers have found, experts are less likely to “use their heads” and more inclined to extend their minds—a habit that the rest of us can learn to emulate on our way to achieving mastery.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 16). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.

Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind (p. 18). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

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