Annie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind
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“Use your head.” That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But what if the brain isn’t the end all, be all of thought, and what if the extended mind were much more important? In this episode, Barry Kibrick gets into a thought-provoking conversation with acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul. Annie discusses the existence of the extended mind, talks about channels of communication and enteroception, or gut feels. Challenge the way you think with this exciting episode.
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Annie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind
Thinking Outside Your Brain
“Use your head,” that's what we tell ourselves when facing tricky problems or a difficult project. What we need to do, according to the acclaimed science writer, Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside of our brain. In her book, The Extended Mind, she delves into the research behind this exciting new vision of human ability. She mines the secret history of how artists, scientists and authors employ mental extensions to solve problems, make discoveries and create new works. She explains how we can incorporate outside-the-brain thinking into our everyday lives. I want to give special thanks to my patrons who make this show possible. If you enjoy reading, please subscribe and visit my website, BarryKibrick.com, to become a supporter of the show.
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Annie, welcome to the show. I saw your book written up in The Wall Street Journal and The Extended Mind is what it's called. From the review alone, I was in sync with the material. I had to invite you on. Thank you for joining me.
The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
That’s nice to know, Barry. I'm glad to be here with you.
As you say, “The future lies in thinking outside of the brain.” It is something I've always believed in but I've never seen it well articulated and researched as you did. Let's dive deep into why most of the future and wisdom lies in thinking outside of our brain.
Maybe we can help your readers understand what I mean when I use that phrase and what is meant by the phrase, “The extended mind,” which was a term coined by two philosophers, Andy Clarke and David Chalmers. What they meant by that is that they pose the question, “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” The customary answer to that is the skull and then everything outside it is outside the mind. They said, “No. The mind is spread across our bodies, below the neck and across the physical spaces that we occupy. It extends even into the interactions we have with other people.”
The brain is not the be-all-end-all when it comes to thinking. We think outside the brain in the sense that we pull in all these external resources, the body, physical spaces, other people, also our tools and devices into our thinking process. That can enrich, extend and augment our thinking processes in ways that the naked brain can't do. That's what I mean about the future lies in thinking outside the brain because the brain is rather limited in what it can do. Our world is complicated. To think as well as we need to face the challenges and problems of our world, we need to reach outside the brain.
That is one of the things we're not yet doing. That's why this book is not only observed as a reporter doing all this research, in a sense, it’s a call to arms as well. By the way, we can even take this to the thoughts of a possible common consciousness that may exist even outside of the connections of our contacts. It can go that far. If we don't do this, we're not only shortchanging ourselves, we're shortchanging our society and we need not do that now more than ever.
Students aren't taught in schools how to think outside the brain. Workers are not trained. It’s such a brain-centric society that all of our efforts at education and training are aimed at cultivating the brain and its abilities. That leaves our faculty for thinking outside the brain under-developed. All the potential that is there for thinking outside the brain is going unrealized because we don't have the knowledge to skillfully use those external resources.
You give a lot of attention to the reasons why to and two classic ones, “Are we either think of the brain as a computer or we think of the brain as a muscle?” Either way, if you think of it as a muscle, it could be “exercised” and grow that way. If you think of it as a computer, you can shove in more RAM or hard drives. It's not that we can't expand or extend our minds. It's that those two metaphors are not the way it's going to happen.
Metaphors are powerful in terms of how they shaped the way we think. Those are the two dominant metaphors in our society, “The brain is a muscle and computer.” I see both of them as problematic. I came up with my metaphor that I share in the book, “The brain as a magpie.” It’s that bird that gathers bits and pieces from its environment and weaves it together into its nest, whatever it can find in its environment. What I argue in the book is that we can think of our brains that way. They are drawing on the raw materials that are available in the environment. The quality of those raw materials affects how well we're able to think. Because we're such a brain-bound society, we tend to think that intelligent thought is dependent on what's up here. That's a much too limited view.
Extended Mind: We actually think outside the brain in the sense that we pull in all these external resources, the body physical spaces, other people also are pools and devices into our thinking process.
You give examples from Einstein to modern-day thinkers that they're less likely to “use their heads” and to extend their minds as you describe the magpie. By taking in all this other material and richness around them, that's how you strengthen the thinking and the thought process. Some of the examples were how some of the great thinkers would take a walk in the park with their friends and usually somebody that they could converse with because that's another element. Not only just nature but the fact that they're doing something else but thinking. That's when the door opens up for the riches to soak in.
That's a different view of expertise than the one that is conventionally available, which is we think that experts have crammed so much information into their heads and that's what makes them experts. If you observe, study and research what experts do, they are offloading a lot of their mental contents onto space so that their brains don't have to keep track of it. They're experimenting and iterating out in the world using movement and using conversations with other people to enrich their thinking. It’s a limited and limiting idea of what expertise is as somebody with a big brain. That's a notion of expertise that will be good to get past.
I love you for giving me credit for this. I want to remind our viewers, I am getting this because this is the information that you so richly put in your book. Although these are my thoughts and that's why I wanted you on the show, the words I'm using are blessedly mostly yours. Thank you, Annie, once again for doing that.
It's our shared extended mind, you could say.
One of the things which I've not heard of before, which is rare when you think of over 26 years and thousands of guests, is the word interoception. What that is the way we think with sensation and bodies. I’d love to begin to explore that for the readers because that starts to open up the pathways again even further. What’s interception?
Interoception is a technical word. Your readers probably are much more familiar with another term, gut feeling. Within our bodies, if it doesn't feel like it comes from our heads, we have a sense about what we should do or what we should pay attention to. The scientific term for that is interoception, our ability to sense internal cues and signals. Like we take in all this information from the outside through our sensory organs, we also have the ability to feel what's going on inside our bodies.
What was interesting to me about this research is that the way it works, the way gut feelings can often guide us in an advantageous direction is that there's so much information in the world. It’s much more than our conscious minds can attend to at all times. We are taking in all that information as we go through our daily lives. We're noticing patterns, regularities and tagging them for future reference. A lot of that has to be stored non consciously because our conscious minds can only hold so much information at one time. The way that we get access to that stored non-unconscious information is through the body. These are signals rising from within us, which means that if you're more attuned to your interoceptive signals, you can better use that accumulated wisdom that might not otherwise be inaccessible to you.
By the way, when we were talking about the mind as a computer and as a muscle, the way you can exercise it is by deliberately cultivating these gut feelings. This is what excited me when I read the review of your book. It happened a while ago for me but I began to sense that my body was telling me things before my mind was. I have story after story, maybe we'll get into some of them at some time. It took a while. It wasn't while it was happening. It was sometimes even years later when I said, “On that day when this happened, this is what my body was feeling.” It took a while for me to patch it all up. When I did, it is amazing when you realize that. You can prevent yourself from going off the deep end because the body gives you a little nudge. It would then save me from myself.
As amazing as it may seem, research has confirmed that sometimes our bodies know things before the conscious brain does. It behooves us to pay close attention to what our body is telling us. Also, cultivate and nurture that ability to perceive those internal signals. I suggest that people try the body scan, which is a component of mindfulness meditation where you're paying close but non-judgmental attention to all those sensations that are rising within your body. It doesn't even have to be a formal practice. Throughout the day, check-in with your body and what messages it's sending you.
You hit a keyword that I have triple starred and bolded in my reading of your book and you mentioned it, non-judgmental awareness. There are several times within the book that you used either those exact words or words that are similar to it. I cannot emphasize to my readers, my family, and friends enough that when we place judgment on these feelings, whether it's through a body scan, mindfulness, even if it's through our ordinary dealings, feelings of worthiness or worthlessness. When we view them with a judgmental lens, we take away responsibility and we put blame and shame on ourselves. Blame and shame get us nowhere. Responsibility, as they say, is the ability to respond. That's what you get when you have non-judgmental awareness. It's one of the easier things to say and difficult to do. It took me 50 years to get through that one.
That's another reason why staying with the body and the raw material of those sensations can be so useful. The more we can have a direct experience of those sensations and not be applying all these labels and judgments, the more in-tune we are to the body in a direct fashion, which is not something we're encouraged to do. We're often encouraged to do the opposite, to ignore the body's signals, to put power through and get our work done. That's not an effective way to engage in complex cognitive tasks.
You criticized some of the “modern-day” philosophers who are still going by those older rules, so to speak. You do it, especially, when you talk about resilience. Resilience, some people might have called it grit. True grit comes only from the mind. I must tell you, I was one of those people. I thought it was my mind that was doing this. You let us know that true resilience is coming from the awareness that we have rooted outside of our minds. When you said that in the book, I began to rethink my vision of resilience and realize, “Whoa.” It relieves a little pressure on you when it doesn't have to be that it's me being able to be resilient but it's because of my surroundings, friends and body sensations. You emphasized resilience.
Another function of interoception is that it acts as a gauge of how much energy we have to apply to a given task. That includes an intellectual task as well as a task of endurance or strength. To have a good sense of what you're capable of at the moment or if you're not feeling as capable as empowered to act, what you need to do to restore that balance. If you're so much in your head that you're not in-tune with your body, its energy supply, and its capacity to take on a difficult task, then you're going to burn out and get frustrated. You're going to give up instead of skillfully managing your energy so that you can always meet the demands of the moment.
When you write about emotions, you specifically get into exactly that. That's important because, in a certain way, we can't control our emotions but we can control how we feel about them and how we address them. You get into that in The Extended Mind in a passionate way. Please share some of those things with my readers. I always throw myself in the mix because it happens to me as well as everyone, I'm certain. We start getting into our heads too much. It sends us on a downward spiral rather than getting out of it a little bit and relieving ourselves.
I know that experience myself. One thing that I found helpful in the research that I reviewed for the book is this idea of paying non-judgmental attention to our internal sensations and then labeling them. This isn't applying a judgment but simply labeling them, saying, “My heart is beating. I have butterflies in my stomach. I feel a tightness in my chest.” Those bodily sensations are the building blocks for what we then call emotions.
The really interesting work of scientists like Lisa Feldman Barrett and others has shown that we play a role in constructing emotion. The emotion doesn't come to us or wash over us in some inevitable way. We're constructing what our emotions are out of the raw material of these bodily sensations. Once we know that and sensed those sensations and labeled them, we can get in on the ground floor of constructing those emotions.
Some examples that I give in the book include pointing out the sensations that come along with being nervous and scared. Those sweaty palms and racing heartbeat are similar to the bodily sensations that come along with being excited, energized, and alert. Rather than telling yourself, “Calm down,” which is a way of trying to suppress those bodily sensations, it doesn't work. They don't go away. You instead reinterpret them. That technique is called cognitive reappraisal. You're reappraising your internal sensations. Instead of saying, “God, I'm nervous. I'm scared.” You could try saying to yourself, “I'm excited. I feel these things in my body and I'm feeling psyched up.” It turns out that works much better than ignoring our feelings, denying them or berating ourselves for feeling the way we do.
Extended Mind: If you observe and study and research what experts do, they are offloading a lot of their mental contents onto space so that their brains don't have to keep track of it. They're experimenting and iterating out in the world.
May I quote you directly? You said it in the book as beautiful as you did now. I wrote it down. I don't want to blow the fact that I wrote it down. You said, “If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” It's not only calming you down. It's moving you even further forward. It's a double-edged positive sword.
Another element of this is that arousal is our body getting us ready to face a challenge. That can help us tackle that challenge more effectively. That's a helpful thing to remind yourself of when you're in the midst of feeling those feelings.
Especially in our times, if we have anything in common besides the opposing thumb, we humans have anxiousness right now that separates us from everything that's on the planet. I don't want to say escape because none of the words that you use take us out only adds to it. One of the things is the way we move. You said that movement is a key element in getting ourselves out of our spiraling heads.
It's ironic and unfortunate that our notion of how thinking happens is to picture someone sitting still at a desk and working their brain until the job is done as if the brain is the only organ that is involved in thinking. If we got up from our desks, took a walk, maybe even made some gestures or did some acting out of the problem in a physical sense, we'd be using these resources that the body brings to thinking instead of wasting them by sitting there still. It’s what we expect of students and workers, unfortunately.
You said gestures. I'm going to get to that in one second because that's important. Before I do, you also said movement. I had a friend who put together a routine for me of exercise where I would write at the computer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. I then would do a small bit of exercise. Throughout the day, you accumulate as much time as you spend in the gym but without any of the wear and tear on the body and the benefit of the movement. Every time you go back to work, it’s increasing those endorphins or whatever they might be that helps the mind work better.
That was a smart plan that your friend put together for you. Something I encourage people to do in the book is to take periodic not coffee breaks and not Twitter breaks or let alone news breaks, which can bring you down during the workday but movement breaks. There are a few different reasons that those are helpful and one is that moderate-intensity exercise sharpens our mental faculties. This is why recess is important for children. They need to go out, run around and then they can come back into the classroom with their attention in their executive faculties operating at their peak.
Another reason that movement is effective for enhancing our thinking is because we are embodied creatures and because we did evolve to understand things in terms of our bodies moving in the real world rather than these symbols and concepts that we deal in as modern people. We tend to put things in embodied terms and that shows up in our language all the time. We talk about reaching for a goal or, “I'm running behind schedule.” We put it in these metaphorical terms that have to do with the body.
The movement itself is a metaphor that when we enact it when we're moving through space, that primes our brains to think in a more dynamic and fluid fashion, which is all wasted. That’s not happening when we’re sitting still at our desks. Our metaphor for sitting still is being stuck or being in a rut. Those are the metaphors that get activated when we're sitting still. I encourage people to build movement into their workday and their school day as much as possible.
Because both of us are hand talkers, I want to get back to what you mentioned before and that's gestures. I found this fascinating. In your words, you said gestures were humanity's first language. Please talk a bit more about this because you say that through gesturing, “We are sharpening our minds.” We're taught even in school to sit with our hands folded and don't move. I remember when I was producing television, I used to tell all my guests, “Please, use your hands.” They were always taught to sit still, “Use your hands, it's important. Annie, you seem to grasp this at its core.” Tell my readers what the gestures are all about and how they can help grease the wheels.
You were smart to tell your guests to gesture because that helped their thinking and mess their communication in at least two ways. One is that we speak more fluidly when we gesture because our gestures can help share some of the mental load. We offload some of our mental contents onto our hands when we gesture. Also, this was fascinating to me, often our most advanced and our newest ideas show up first in our gestures. Before we have the words to apply to an idea, we're working them out, in some sense, gesturing at them with our hands. We then can read off of that to help inform our evolving verbal account of ideas.
Secondly, your guests were also communicating with others with their gestures. The research shows that people remember the points we make better when they're accompanied by a gesture. I did want to get back to your point about gesture being humanity's first language and that's true in two senses. One is that linguists think that gestures preceded the spoken language in our evolution. Our forebears gestured with their hands before they ever were able to speak words. That's recapitulated every time a baby is born because babies gesture and can communicate and understand much more than they're able to say. Before they're ever able to speak a word, they're gesturing. Gesture never goes away. It's always that second channel of communication and extended thought that's right alongside our spoken language.
I also learned that many times, everyone from investigators to Navy SEALs to police communicate in gestures only because they have to be silent. You'll be surprised at how communicative a gesture can be. It’s amazing.
Extended Mind: We're often encouraged to ignore the body's signals, to push through and get our work done. That's not a very effective way to be engaging in complex cognitive tasks.
It’s interesting how sophisticated that communication can be. We do tend to disparage gestures or think that they're trivial, that they're just so much hand waving. We focus so much on the spoken word but there's a whole other channel of communication going on through our hands.
You even said that when you do it, your words, it'll bring the right term to your lips. I never thought of it that way. You hit it right on the head like that.
This is something I've brought into my own life. As a parent, for example, if one of my sons is trying to explain something, I'll say, “Try moving your hands when you say that.” A gesture is like a tool that is always available to us. Barbara Tversky, who is a researcher in this area, says that gestures are like drawing a diagram only in the air with our hands. We always have this tool with us and we don't use it as much as we could. We're not instructed in how to use gestures, for example, to enhance our memory when we're learning a foreign language. We could be not just reading our new vocabulary words or hearing them but we could be pairing them with a gesture, which is one more way to reinforce our memory and to help bring those words back into mind when we need them.
Another thing you dedicate a large portion of the book to is the natural spaces, our surroundings, and how our minds are tuned to certain organic frequencies. You even get certain specific organic frequencies. Although, you say that even if it's a glance out the window, that still is good. Let's talk about the value of that natural space, especially in our urban environments. By the way, you can still escape to many natural spaces too even with art. Let's talk a little bit about that, to begin with. I want the readers to understand why it is important to extend their minds.
This is another body of research that I enjoy delving into because we know intuitively that when we go into nature, we feel more at ease, more relaxed and less frazzled. That's not the kind of gauzy I love nature reaction. There's the real science behind why we have that reaction. Humankind evolved in the outdoors. It's a development that we spend upwards of 90% of our time in houses, buildings, and cars. Our species grew up in the outdoors. The way to restore those mental capacities and faculties is to spend some time outside in that diffused and relaxing mental environment.
You’re careful to emphasize that we don't have to wait for the perfect moment, environment or amount of time. You even say if it's 20 to 60 seconds, that might be enough. I want to explore that because when people think, “I don't have the time to go hiking Yosemite. That means I'm never going to calm my mind.” Listen to what Annie says. She says that you can do this by going out to the backyard or staring out the window and looking at a plant. Doing anything will help not only restore the mind but, as your book is titled, extend the mind as well.
Even 40 seconds of looking outside at nature, which scientists call a micro restorative break, can bring back some of those attentional faculties that get drawn down by our demanding work. There's even interesting research to suggest that experiences of virtual nature like watching a video of the nature of animals can bring some of that restorative potential back to us. Even if you can't look out the window, you can always have access to a nature video.
I'm on the board of an art foundation that is using the art of Kamran Khavarani, who is a fantastic painter who paints in natural scopes using his hand and what he's feeling like. There was research done up at New Paltz University that showed his paintings. They were images not of nature but of nature-like, which made them more powerful. He didn't even have to paint the exact nature. They had healing power and they were able to monitor this. I began to get involved with him because I had him on my show. His work is beautiful. It can be as simple as a picture that gives you that chance to escape the internal mind wrapped up in that skull.
Fortunately, one place that's gotten this message is the health care sector. Many hospitals and facilities for people who are undergoing medical procedures are being redesigned with nature in mind. They’re bringing natural elements and natural light into the places where people are sick or recovering from surgery. It does seem that nature has these healing qualities and may even reduce pain, which is such an amazing force that nature would have for us even in this day and age.
That's what this nonprofit I'm on the board of does. We supply these paintings to hospitals. That's exactly what it is because that's where it has the most use. I'm thinking of expanding it to prisons and all sorts of places because it is restorative. As your book says, “I always like to say restorative is one thing but extending is one step further.” I'm glad that you saw that. In the book, you write these words, “The key when you experience this is to have a non-judgmental response.” I almost thought for a second, how would you even have a judgmental response to being outdoors? There must be ways because you emphasized having a non-judgmental response to the environment that you're in.
Extended Mind: If you're so much in your head that you're not in tune with your body and its energy supply and its capacity to take on a difficult task, then you're going to burn out.
It's important to leave our devices behind too when we go out into nature. That might be part of this idea of leaving behind all the preoccupations that occupy us when we're inside working and to go outside and be in nature and taking it in maybe without analyzing it. You're right. It's hard to think about how you'd be judgmental about nature. Soft gazing was a term that I use in the book, which applies to the act of taking it all in and not letting your attention be drawn here and there. That's the relaxed, diffused focus that you want to adopt in nature.
That is different from bird watching, for example. I'm not knocking that. Bird watching is great. What I'm saying is that diffusing of it. That’s why I said that these paintings are more impressionistic. You're not judging, “Is that a real butterfly? Is that a real leaf?” You're letting it wash over you.
That is the key to the restorative experience that you get in nature.
When we do this, you give us even one more level or notch that it can go to. You say that this experience could be called awe. That itself is a reset button for the human brain. It's not something that we can bring up in our own minds. It's something that we do have to experience in some way outside of ourselves. I've done this before because awe is something that you want to feel every single day and you're blessed if you’ve experienced it once in a lifetime. It is something that you can appreciate. Patient and gratitude go hand in hand with awe.
The point you made there was important, Barry, which is that we can't manufacture or muster within ourselves the experience of awe. We have to go out. Usually, the experience of majestic, amazing and vast natural spaces is how awe gets created in us. We have to go out there, get outside ourselves, get outside the little screens that we're staring at so much and experience the vastness of nature. Allow it to work on us in the sense that we feel small, we get a sense of our tiny space in this vast universe and yet we don't feel diminished. We feel a part of this huge, vast world. That's the experience that can shake up our mental schemas, our usual ways and perspectives of looking at the world. Awe is an experience. It’s the potential to change the way we look at the world.
I want to make one correction. Those weren't my thoughts. I thought that I could figure it out in my mind. It was only when I read your book that those words came to my mind. I want to give credit where credit is due. Those were your words, Annie. That is what made me realize, “That's another little trinket I can put on.” When I was reading about the awe, the one interesting thing is prior to our conversation, I had a conversation with Ron Garan, who wrote Floating In Darkness and The Orbital Perspective.
We've seen everyone from Jeff Bezos and Bronson going up into space. There is a certain awe that only they could experience. Ron lets us know that if you take in the words of the awe that they experience, you too can feel that awe. It’s that sense of feeling small in this massiveness but realizing how important your smallness is in this massiveness. When you combine those two things, that is where the awe may lie. Otherwise, you can feel like nothing in the vastness. The truth is you're important.
What's striking about those accounts of astronauts is they line up in remarkable ways to the extent that it's gotten a name from psychologists, The Overview Effect. When astronauts are out in space looking over the Earth, what they feel is this incredibly powerful sense of connectedness. They see how all the parts of the Earth are connected and how all the people on Earth are connected. They don't feel like separate individuals so much as part of this enormous ecosystem. That's an incredible experience of awe. Maybe one day we'll all be having that, too. We’ll be going up in space. In the meantime, it's interesting to hear that is the personal experience of astronauts who are able to get that view of Earth.
We talked about city life and how many of us are now city dwellers. You even gave us hope and truth to the fact that even our built spaces can affect us. The classic example you give in the book is with Jonas Salk, who believes that his experience at a monastery was what allowed him to come back and create the polio vaccine.
I love that story. Salk was working thirteen-hour a day in his laboratory to get this polio vaccine created to work it out. Working in this brain-bound way, applying himself and pushing and it wasn't working, he realized he needed to get away from the lab and put himself in a different context, different surroundings. He chose a beautiful place to go, which is this thirteenth-century monastery in Italy, The Basilica of Assisi. He spent several weeks walking around, taking in the light and these beautiful old structures and working out in his mind this problem that he had struggled with so much back at home at his lab in Pittsburgh. When he left the monastery and returned, he was able to solve this problem that had bedeviled him before. He gave credit to the inspiring architecture that he'd experienced in Italy.
I want people to know about the book and what it does. What your writing does well, Annie, is you give us balance to everything. When I was reading that, I found that at first, I would go, “This sounds like a dichotomy.” I then go, “No. Annie is explaining it.” What I want to bring out is a wall. When we were talking about space, the last thing I would think about is a wall. Yet, you want us to know how sometimes a wall of some sort is what you also need. Once you go out, come back in. The funniest thing is while I was reading this, we had a beautiful fence built around our house. It's not like one of these close-off-the-world-type fences but it still separates our space. In a weird way, it's affected us in a positive way because there's a sense of protection, which a wall gives you. It wasn't the closing of. It’s weird. It was an opening up.
It doesn't sound like you're necessarily expected to have that experience but it is how it felt once that wall was built.
I wasn't expecting it at all. Now, what do I want to do? I want to go outside more to look at that. It's not a wall. It’s a fence. I want to look at it more because it looks pretty. You let us know that it is important to go out. Sometimes when you have to formulate and go back into your mind, you're not taking us just on one path but you're bringing us back. What I enjoyed thoroughly about the way you wrote this was that you give us all the tools and we don't have to feel guilty. I'll go back to your words, “We don't have to be judgmental.”
That word balance is important. We do need interaction with other people. We do need to experience new and stimulating spaces. We do need to get outside. We need to do that hard work of focusing on idea generation. We don't want too much social input. At that point, we need to be generating our thoughts and focusing on our thoughts. That's when walls are the best collaborators. They protect us from all the stimuli that would distract us. As I explained in the book, when we're trying to focus on a difficult cognitive task, that distractibility is a real disadvantage because it keeps drawing our attention away from the task at hand. That's why a private, quiet space is as important as having those spaces where people come together, talk, collaborate and brainstorm.
Humanity itself seems to be at a loss. It's a dilemma that I see happening. It seems that we should be doing a lot better because our minds are extended. We've gone so far and yet, it seems like there's a chasm that still needs to be crossed. Why I wanted you on the show is a book like yours helps us cross that chasm but it still needs to be crossed. I don't know what's holding us back. I was curious about thoughts you might have on that.
The essential struggle or conflict here is that our world is complex. With the expertise we've accumulated as human beings, there's so much information coming at us all the time. Yet, our brains are still stone-age brains. They're the same brains that our forebears had. They evolved to do a specific and limited number of things. That would be bad news except that we, as humans, have learned to transcend those limits by bringing in all these external resources, the body, space, other people and all these resources that we've talked about.
We need to learn to do that more skillfully and to do it more intentionally. We do it a bit haphazardly. Maybe we rely on the body, spaces or other people sometimes but it's not something we've been trained to do in any systematic or holistic way. I say in the book that we all need to acquire a second education, not just cultivating the brain and what it can do but also thinking outside the brain. To me, that is the hopeful vision for what could lie ahead for us as a species.
Annie, I’m grateful that you came and joined us to help us extend our minds. I want to end with the way you ended your book with these words and I want you to tell us why they're important, “Acknowledging the reality of the extended mind might well lead us to embrace the extended heart.”
Those are the last lines of the book. I ended the book that way because I wanted to leave the reader with this notion that although in our society, we're encouraged to think of ourselves as individuals who achieve as individuals and accomplish what we accomplish as individuals, that's a delusion. It's an illusion. We are connected to each other, our bodies and our worlds. We are creatures of the particular world that we live in. As we all know, the worlds that each of us lives in and the raw materials that each of us has access to in terms of what we build our thoughts out of, they're in no way equal or equitable. That's something I would love to see us work to change.
Annie, I'm grateful you joined us. I thank you for helping extend all of our minds.
You're welcome, Barry. I'm glad to have had this conversation with you.
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Ron Garan - Past episode
About Annie Murphy Paul
Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected by that publication as a "Notable Book," and The Cult of Personality, hailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a “fascinating new book.” She has held the Bernard Schwartz Fellowship and the Future Tense Fellowship at New America; currently, she is a fellow in New America’s Learning Sciences Exchange. She has also received the Spencer Education Reporting Fellowship and the Rosalyn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship. Paul has spoken to audiences around the world about learning and cognition; her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 2.6 million people. A graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she has served as a lecturer at Yale University and as a senior advisor at the Yale University Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.
