The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the podcast Annie Murphy-Paul. Annie is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Oh! The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications. She's the author of three books, including Origins, How the Nine Months Before Birth Shaped the Rest of Our Lives, The Cult of Personality Testing, and her new book, which we're here to talk about today, The Extended Mind, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.

[00:44] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] SPEAKER_01:

Annie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:48] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Justin. It's really good to be here.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'm so excited to speak with you just as I enjoy speaking with researchers like Dan Willingham to really get a sense of the brain that is at the center of a lot of our efforts as educators. And I'm so intrigued by your new book where you have discovered and you're illustrating some of the ways in which the brain is not the whole story. Take us into that idea of thinking beyond the brain.

[01:16] SPEAKER_00:

You know, our culture in general and specifically our academic and educational culture has what I think is a kind of obsession with the brain. Like we kind of fetishize and glorify the brain as the place where thinking happens. And what I'm arguing in this book, The Extended Mind, is that it's actually in many ways the stuff outside the brain that makes us smart, that allows us to think in intelligent and effective and efficient ways. And we have a blind spot for that because we focus so much on the brain. And because so many of our practices and techniques are aimed at making the brain work better, at having the brain take on all of the work that we are trying to attempt, we tend to do too much in our heads is what I'm contending. And that we actually could think better if we offloaded some of that

[02:10]

mental work onto the world, onto our bodies, onto the minds of other people. And if we incorporated those extra neural resources, in other words, outside the brain resources into our thinking, instead of expecting the brain to do it all, that's the argument of the book in a nutshell.

[02:27] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I love it because it builds on that moment of recognition we've all had when trying to help our kids with math, right? That like, okay, I can't do this in my head. I need a pencil. Like I need to put something down on paper, just a little bit of storage to help me go through the steps of this multiplication problem or whatever. And our members who use our repertoire app will be familiar with the problem of just trying to keep all of your teacher evaluation criteria in your head. You know, most school districts use a teacher evaluation rubric that's 5, 10, 15 pages long, and it's too much to keep in our heads.

[02:59]

So I feel like maybe memory is a part of this, but not the whole story. What are some of the components that extended mind? Obviously, we can't remember everything or everything. you know, and there are lots of easy ways to store information elsewhere. But what else going on?

[03:12] SPEAKER_00:

So you mentioned the app, and I think the easiest way into the extended mind idea, and in fact, the way that it was originally conceived by there were two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who came up with the idea of the extended mind in a paper that they published in 1998. And their focus was on the tools and the technologies we use to extend our minds. They use the example of a notebook that if you have a notebook within easy reach and you use it to make lists and maybe, you know, sketch a diagram or a flow chart, that notebook has become in effect a part of your thinking process, even a part of your mind. And that seemed at the time like kind of a wacky idea from academia, you know, an ivory tower kind of, oh, well, that's sort of, you know, interesting, but crazy. But then, so that paper was published in 1998.

[04:04]

Then smartphones came on the scene. And this idea of the extended mind, started to seem a lot more plausible because all of us every day were downloading, offloading the contents of our minds onto our smartphones. No one remembers phone numbers anymore because our phones do that for us. And even other kinds of mental functions were being offloaded onto our phones. And so The extended mind originated, as I say, in the idea that technology can extend our minds. And in fact, technology is almost designed to do that.

[04:40]

But I think what's even more interesting is that the ways in which other outside the brain resources can extend our minds, not just technology, but for example, our bodies, you know, the way you mentioned the pencil and paper and how people might use that to aid their mathematical calculations. But the simplest and earliest example of that is a kid using their fingers to count. And that's a really basic example of how we offload the contents of our minds onto our bodies. And In The Extended Mind, I write about how movement can enhance our thinking, help us understand abstract concepts, how the gestures of our hands in particular actually are a part of our thinking process. And research has shown that our most advanced ideas are the kind of cutting edge of our thought.

[05:35]

that often shows up first in our gestures before we can really put it into words. And then once we've expressed that concept spatially, we're able to draw on that self-generated information, you know, of our own hands movements to inform our verbal account of what we're learning. And so this has a lot of relevance for education in the sense that teachers who are aware of their students' gestures, can see in their students' gestures what they understand and what they aren't quite getting yet. And interestingly, research suggests that those students who are expressing an idea in gesture but not yet in their words, they're in a state that is primed for instruction. If they are then, at that moment, supplied with the information that they're just almost grasping, it turns out that they learn that information and they retain that information much better than students whose gestures and words match up, you know, either in a incorrect way or in a correct way.

[06:35]

Those kids who are expressing an idea and gesture that they can't yet put into words, they're in a transitional state that is primed for learning. So that's one example of how the body is really a part of thinking in a way that we haven't always acknowledged or recognized.

[06:51] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Annie, as educators, we've for years known that the body matters in learning, right? We know that our students need to get up and move around. We know students need to do things that are hands-on and manipulate objects as well as ideas. What have been some of the most important findings from the research? Because I think it's important to point out that you're a science writer. You have for years been an interpreter for the rest of us, some of the denser scientific literature and the primary research that's been done on how our brains work.

[07:22]

Take us into some of that research.

[07:23] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So this research is emerging out of a discipline known as embodied cognition, which is a really sprawling field. And I think one reason that it hasn't always been fully appreciated is that there's a lot of disparate findings. And what I tried to do in the chapter on thinking with the body and the extended mind is not just pull together that research, but organize it in a way that we can actually use it. And there's two aspects of movement and the use of the body that I focus on. One is intensity of movement.

[07:56]

And here I'm talking about low intensity, moderate intensity, and high intensity. Low intensity movement is the kind of movement you might see in a classroom that's what they call activity permissive classroom, where like kids don't necessarily have to be sitting. They can be working at standing desks or maybe even bouncing on an exercise ball or whatever makes them comfortable. But it turns out that research shows us that that kind of small, minor bodily movements, they actually help us fine tune our physiological arousal and our energy and our alertness. And because we're not really...

[08:31]

We didn't evolve as human beings to stay absolutely still. And yet we associate serious thinking, real thinking with staying still. And in fact, that's not a natural or a beneficial state, especially for children to be in. So that kind of low intensity activity can help kids stay engaged and alert. And then there's medium intensity activity, which is the kind of exercise that the kind of activity that kids would engage in in recess. And, you know, one of the real shames of the very long term push towards standardized testing and academic accountability was that recess got taken away in many schools and replaced with seat time.

[09:11]

And that's actually really counterproductive in the sense that our vigilance, our ability to pay attention and maintain our focus is declines over time and it gets refreshed when we are able to move our bodies around and get some of that physical activity going. And so that kind of medium intensity activity is really important and recess is perfect for giving kids that. And then high intensity activity, I think, is a really interesting thing, maybe less applicable to an educational setting. But the fact is, when you engage in really intense exercise, there's a state that we can reach, which is called hypofrontality, which means the frontal part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex that usually engages in self-control and judgment and analysis that, you know, the word hypo means low or diminished.

[10:03]

So that kind of those functions get suspended temporarily. And we actually can enter this really creative state that some scientists have compared to like a dreaming or even like a drug trip. So that very high intensity activity can actually boost our creativity in really interesting ways. So those are some findings that relate to movement and the body. And then the other piece I want to talk about is the kind of movements that we can engage in. And some of those movements that are relevant here are congruent movements, and that is moving the body in ways that are congruent with the ideas being learned.

[10:43]

So, you know, the easiest example of that to comprehend is like if you had an oversized number line and you had kids learn about adding numbers by taking steps along this number line. And if you add a big number, you have to take a big leap. But if you add a small number, you just take a little step. And those kinds of congruent movements really help bridge the gap between what are symbolic, abstract ideas and the kind of grounded understanding that is really the way that humans make sense of the world. And then there's another kind of movement, which is self-referential movement. And that is when you become the thing that you're studying.

[11:26]

And there's a kind of bias, especially in the study of science, that We should be looking at things from an objective kind of distanced viewpoint. And that's very important to teach students to do that. But what's interesting is that real scientists, professional scientists, they often talk about embodying the things that they're studying. You know, Jonas Salk, who is the virologist who discovered the polio vaccine, he said that he would actually imagine himself as the virus or as the vaccine that he was trying to invent. And that helped him understand. It helped him understand in a way that actually advanced his scientific thinking.

[12:05]

And the same is true of students, that when we can get them to role play or actually enact in some way the entity that they're studying, they pay more attention, they're more engaged, and they understand more deeply. Because again, as human beings, we're sort of naturally egocentric. We pay attention to and we care about things that relate to us. And yet, we so often in education tend to teach things from this objective distance point of view, this disembodied point of view. And that's actually leaving a whole lot of exciting ways of making intellectual connections on the table, that we really could be incorporating that into our teaching and learning.

[12:48] SPEAKER_01:

So we've talked a little bit about tools and apps and kind of things outside of ourselves as being ways of extending the mind. And we've talked about our bodies as well. What are some of the other big kind of external places where our thinking takes place or where we can extend our thinking?

[13:05] SPEAKER_00:

There's four. Yeah. There's tools and technologies. There's our bodies. There's other people, social interactions. And then there's the one I could talk about right now, which is, as you said, literally places, physical spaces.

[13:18]

And that plays out in a couple different ways. One is the spaces in which kids do their learning and their studying. And I think that some of the important takeaways there from the research are that A sense of control and ownership over one's space is really important. A sense of privacy. And those are things that students don't always get, you know, in their classrooms and in their study space. Those are important things for adults, but also for kids.

[13:46]

And then also there's the matter of what you see, what you're surrounded by in the space where you do your learning. And it turns out that we actually, our identities and our sense of self are fluid enough that it's really helpful to have cues and reminders and symbols of who we are in that particular role. In that moment, they're being a student and not a friend or a son or daughter or whatever. a grandchild or whatever, they're being a student. And so they need actual reminders of that identity. So in the book, I write about how it's important that a study space and a learning space has cues of identity, but also cues of belonging.

[14:27]

It's important for kids to be able to see visually cues of membership in a group that's meaningful to them. So again, I think that would really argue for allowing kids to have some control and some discretion over what they put in their spaces and to help them understand that reminders of their role as student can be really helpful in priming their mental state for doing their academic work. Another way to think about physical space, which is downloading our mental contents onto physical space and then interacting with it. And what's interesting to me here is that we acknowledge the value of this in the really younger grades, the really lower grades like kindergarten. We think it's perfectly fine for kindergarten kids or first graders to manipulate tokens during math class, you know, but we have this idea that as we get older, that's sort of like a childish habit that we should leave behind.

[15:26]

But actually, that's really mistaken. And the benefits of, first of all, offloading your mental contents onto physical space, and then interacting with them as if your ideas were objects, that has benefits that continue throughout our lives. And I think, you know, we have this false idea that geniuses or really smart people do it all in their heads. But that's not the case. And it's not something that we should relegate to those early ages.

[15:53] SPEAKER_01:

It almost reminds me of the whiteboards or the chalkboards in a movie, like a movie about a great thinker. They're covering chalkboards. The physical space is almost a character in the story where they're sliding the chalkboards back and forth in the university classroom and writing all over. And I think about organic chemistry and the lab notebooks and the carbon paper and the glassware and all the stuff that you do as a as a science major, that that learning is, as you said, not just in your head, but it's in the tools, it's in the physical environment. And the thinking probably couldn't happen in the same way if you were to just sit on a park bench and think about chemistry or think about a math problem.

[16:31] SPEAKER_00:

Again, I think this book ended up being an effort to debunk a lot of myths. And one of the myths that is really most persistent is this idea that the brain, the human brain, is this amazing, extraordinary thing. And it is, that's true. But we have this way of believing that the brain can do it all on its own. We don't acknowledge, I think, to a sufficient extent, the built-in limits of the brain. And we're not talking here about individual differences in intelligence.

[17:01]

We're talking about the limits on the brain that exist for everyone because it's a biological organ that evolved to do certain specific things, things that are very different from what we ask of it in our modern knowledge-centric world. And so the brain needs help. And it And to glorify and sort of fetishize and idealize the brain in the way we do kind of sets us up for disappointment because then when our brains fail, when we don't pay attention as well as we think we should, or we're not as motivated as we think we should, or we can't figure something out, we blame our own individual brains instead of recognizing that there are limits on all our brains. And the way to transcend that is to bring in these outside the brain resources.

[17:47] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think that's so interesting to think about what our brains are adapted to do. If you look at the size of the computer necessary to do multiplication, the tiniest calculator can do multiplication problems that would be virtually impossible for us to do in our heads. And yet things like vision, being able to sense movement 100 yards away, like the, the, the level of computer that's required to do that kind of processing is extraordinary, right? Like only recently have we, you know, built computers that are even capable of doing that kind of thing, like for self-driving cars.

[18:20] SPEAKER_00:

Right. Right. And often not even as well as, as Alison Gopnik, the psychologist at university of California, Berkeley has said a lot of, artificial intelligence can't even do things as well as a four-year-old. So it is useful to think about, well, what is the brain really good at? What did it evolve to do? And in many ways, it evolved to move the body, navigate through space, interact with other people.

[18:46]

And so the more we can make learning conform to those real strengths of the brain, then the better the brain functions and the better we can achieve those goals that right now we're trying to sort of use the brain in the wrong way, if that makes sense. So the fourth way of extending the mind is with other people's brains. And, you know, this is another place where we have a sort of mistaken idea of how thinking should happen. We have an image of the You know, I think of the Auguste Rodin sculpture of the thinker with like his chin on fist kind of pondering the world when really humans evolved to think socially, to think in interaction with other people. And that's still the way thinking happens best. So when we engage in social activities like telling stories and teaching other people and even debating and arguing with other people.

[19:40]

There are cognitive processes that get engaged that don't happen. They remain dormant when we think by ourselves. And there's even interesting evidence that some of the cognitive biases that have been studied by people like Daniel Kahneman, the Princeton psychologist, Those are a product of reasoning alone, and they tend to disappear when we reason with other people. So, you know, and again, it's like we need to think about how the brain evolves, what it's for, what it's good at. And one of the things it's good at is interacting with other people. And again, that's something we sometimes left out of.

[20:18]

education. We feel that students should put their social lives aside when they come to school and focus on their academic work, when actually the more we can leverage that social capacity that students naturally have, the better their learning will be.

[20:33] SPEAKER_01:

I'm reminded of the unpleasantness of class discussion boards. I don't know, for anybody who's ever taken an online class where the discussion doesn't happen in real time because you're not there in person in a classroom. And to facilitate discussion, you're supposed to comment on three other people's posts or their draft work or whatever, and they comment on yours. And it just is not the same. What's happening in that social context? Like if we think about a great classroom environment where kids really are learning from one another, the ideas are out there.

[21:05]

They're not just, you know, I have an idea. Now you respond to my idea, and then I will respond to your response. I feel like there's a magic that happens beyond the robotic kind of turn-taking that happens in maybe an online course or a message board. Any thoughts on that?

[21:21] SPEAKER_00:

Well, sure. Yeah. I mean, there is a kind of magic about in-person interaction, and that's something we've really, I think, missed and we've really seen the importance of over this past year of pandemic remote learning. And there's a phenomenon that psychologists call social presence, which is the sense we have that another person is there, is listening, is engaged with us. And when we feel a sense of social presence, we're more engaged and alert. There's even evidence that measures of physiological arousal, they shoot up when we feel like there's a person there.

[21:57]

And so, again, that social mode of thinking in order to... relate to another person. It's just so much more motivating and so much more engaging for the human animal than putting your thoughts down on a piece of paper or typing it into a computer. And I think...

[22:16]

We need to think about ways that social presence is a resource that we need to learn how to engage and leverage rather than to kind of sweep the social aside when we're trying to learn because actually social interaction is such a key part of learning that we can't push it aside in the interest of focusing on the academic content because it's really the social aspects of learning that make it come alive and make it happen.

[22:45] SPEAKER_01:

So, Annie, I want to emphasize how much research went into this book and how many thousands of articles you read and studies you reviewed to figure out the aspects of the extended mind. And I just have to ask, along the way, you probably encountered quite a few myths that have been busted that perhaps we're still clinging to in the education profession. What did you discover from the latest research by way of myths to bust?

[23:09] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so one of the most persistent myths, and it's one of those myths that just won't die, is learning styles. It's a really appealing idea, and I understand why, because teachers really want to customize and personalize their teaching in ways that... allow each student to take advantage of their teaching. But there really is no evidence supporting learning styles.

[23:32]

And what I like to tend to tell people about learning styles when they ask about it is that there is a learning style. There's a human learning style. You know, there are universal kind of ways that humans learn best. And we don't incorporate those. We're not currently incorporating those into our efforts to into our efforts to educate students. And if we paid more attention to those universal aspects of the brain and of human nature that show up again and again, and it's a lot of what we've talked about here, that the brain learns by grounding things in the body, the brain learns things by moving through space.

[24:12]

The brain learns by interacting with other people. Those are the learning styles that we should be paying attention to and implementing, not this idea that there are visual learners or auditory learners, because the evidence just isn't there for that.

[24:25] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Annie, I really appreciate the way you have kind of expanded our minds about where the thinking that we do happens, not just as a result of what's in our brains, but of our surroundings, the physical environment, the tools we use, the people around us that we're talking with. For school leaders who are looking at their classrooms, they're looking at teacher practice, they're seeing students at work, what are some of the lessons that you hope school leaders will take away as we strive to improve learning for our students?

[24:54] SPEAKER_00:

I'd love for school leaders and teachers to take a look at what they're already doing through a kind of new lens and notice how brain-centric and how brain-focused their current methods are and to think in terms of giving students a second education. I mean, we give them this education about how to think with their brains, how to internalize information, how to self-motivate and self-discipline. But what if you were to approach education as the project of teaching students to think outside the brain? Teaching them the skills, using their bodies, of deliberately arranging their spaces, of structuring their interactions with other people in order to promote learning, that's like a whole new vista and a whole new dimension.

[25:50]

of learning that we haven't even taken advantage of. And what I find so exciting about this idea is that there's so much still to be learned. I mean, as you say, there's thousands of studies covered in this book, but there's still so much. We're really just on the cusp of figuring out how to teach students to think outside the brain. And I think there's all this unrealized potential that is out there. And that's the message that I'd like to leave school leaders with.

[26:15] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The Extended Mind, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Annie, if people want to learn more about your books or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[26:26] SPEAKER_00:

That would be my website, which is www.anniemurphypaul.com. I have a newsletter and also there's a lot of content on my website there and also a place where you can ask me questions because I know the idea of The Extended Mind is a little mind bending at first. And so I invite people to ask me whatever questions they have in mind.

[26:45] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Annie, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[26:49] SPEAKER_00:

Me too. Thank you so much.

[26:50] Announcer:

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