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Episode 36: The Extended Mind with Annie Murphy Paul image

Episode 36: The Extended Mind with Annie Murphy Paul

S2 E36 ยท CogNation
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In Annie Murphy Paul's new book, "The Extended Mind", the philosophical idea of our minds extending beyond the physical boundaries of the body are explored. Rolf and Joe talk to Annie about the implications of this idea, and how it might be used to improve the way we think in a number of contexts.

Special Guest: Annie Murphy Paul.

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Transcript

Introduction & Book Overview

00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to this episode of Cognation. I'm Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy. In this episode, we'll be talking to Annie Murphy-Paul, who is the author of the very recently published book, The Extended Mind, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Annie is also the author of a book on prenatal learning called Origins.
00:00:37
Speaker
which also was a popular TED Talk and has done science writing for the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American and the Best American Science Writing. Annie, welcome to the show.

Theory of Extended Mind

00:00:51
Speaker
Glad to be here. Annie, the book is called Extended Mind. Could you tell us a little bit about what is the Extended Mind and what were some of the big ideas behind writing the book?
00:01:06
Speaker
Sure. So the theory of the extended mind was first proposed in 1998, a paper that was published in 1998 by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. So it's not my idea. I want to be really clear about that up front. I think it's an amazing, interesting, generative idea, but it was not mine to start with. And I came across it after years of writing about the science of learning and cognition and thinking generally. And
00:01:36
Speaker
The reason it excited me so much is that it pulled together all these different strands of research that I'd been exploring, and knowing that they were connected in some way, but I couldn't quite put my finger on how, say, embodied cognition or situated cognition or socially distributed cognition, these bodies of research that I found so fascinating, how they related to each other. And so it was really when I read this paper
00:02:05
Speaker
on the extended mind, which I should say, proposes that the mind isn't limited to the skull to the brain, it actually extends out into the world, it draws in external resources. And when I say external, I, you know, I mean, things like our, our smartphones are other kinds of tools, physical spaces in which we learn and work the
00:02:30
Speaker
relationships we have with other people, but also our bodies, which is outside the brain, but of course not external to us. So it's a pretty capacious category. But the idea is that thinking doesn't only happen in the brain. It's spread across all these extranural resources. And
00:02:48
Speaker
You know, another reason that that idea appealed to me so much was that I saw this kind of idealization or fetishization of the brain going on in a lot of the popular science that I was watching and reading and
00:03:07
Speaker
you know, this idea that the brain is this amazing, extraordinary thing, the most complex structure in the universe. And yet we all know that our brains fail us all the time, right? So it felt like there was this disjunction, like, well, is it just my brain that's not so amazing? You know, because sometimes I forget things and I can't pay attention or whatever. And so the extended mind offered this bridge to me between the fact that our biological brain is
00:03:33
Speaker
quite limited in many ways, but at the same time, human beings are able to do amazing things. And the way that they're able to do that, the way that they're able to transcend the limits of the biological brain is by relying on these outside the brain resources. And that just seemed like such a cool idea to me.

Smartphones as Mind Extensions

00:03:53
Speaker
Great. So one of the things that most people I think would be immediately familiar with or this might resonate with is just the idea that you can use your cell phones for a lot of thinking or it feels, you know, maybe that feeling that if you lose your cell phone, you've lost, you know, a part of your brain almost. Yes.
00:04:17
Speaker
So maybe describe this a little further, how you think of maybe even the relationship that you have with your cell phone and what other things it extends to beyond that immediate thing that we would think of.
00:04:35
Speaker
Yes. And Clark and Chalmers' original paper, they were really focused on the role of technology as the primary mental extension that they were talking about. They actually weren't talking about smartphones because this is back in 1998. They used as their main example a notebook, that if you have a notebook that
00:04:55
Speaker
that you may listen and record your thoughts in, maybe draw a diagram in, and you have that notebook with you pretty reliably within arm's reach all the time, then that notebook, they said, has become essentially a part of your thinking process. It's a part of your mind.
00:05:15
Speaker
And it's interesting to me now to look back at the reception of this paper, which has since become one of the most cited papers in philosophy. But at the time, a lot of people reacted to it both inside and outside the field of philosophy with a lot of skepticism and some derision even, like what a wacky idea. But then it was actually
00:05:39
Speaker
the introduction of the smartphone, you know, the app first iPhone was introduced by Apple in 2007, that started to make this idea this previously, sort of out there idea seem
00:05:52
Speaker
much more plausible. And in fact, the philosopher Ned Block at NYU has said that the theory of the extended mind was false when it was written, but subsequently became true, which I think is sort of funny. It's funny. Yeah. But that aside, it is actually the case that human beings have been extending their minds from time immemorial.

Historical Mind Extensions

00:06:17
Speaker
And as I was alluding to before, it's part of what makes human beings such amazing.
00:06:21
Speaker
thinkers and creators but you're right that technology is kind of the easiest way into the idea of the extended mind because we are all familiar with the way that we
00:06:32
Speaker
offload our mental contents onto our smartphones. We rely on them to function as a kind of external memory for us. None of us remember phone numbers anymore now that our phones do that for us. And there's a sense, of course, in which our devices are designed to do that. They're actually designed to be extensions of our minds. So it can be a little bit of a
00:06:57
Speaker
Right, we see the kind of predictive algorithms on phones that we don't have on a book. It's not trying to anticipate us in any way. Well, if the author's really good, sometimes you have the feeling that they have anticipated your questions. But yes, you're right. And our devices are getting ever better at sort of functioning as parts of our minds. And that's why so many of us feel disoriented when
00:07:23
Speaker
when we lose our phone or don't have our phones at arm's length. And in fact, there's this story that Andy Clark, the philosopher who helped create the idea of the extended mind, a story that he tells about having left his laptop behind on a train at one point. And he felt that he sustained some kind of temporary brain damage, which really contributed to his sense that like,
00:07:50
Speaker
my mind is not just in my head. It's now really a lot of it, quite a bit of it is in my computer. And when my computer is gone, so is my mind. But it can be a little bit of a bigger leap to think of other things, things other than our technologies and our devices as extensions. One of the primary extensions that I write about in the extended mind is our bodies.

Embodied Cognition & Emotion

00:08:20
Speaker
And that kind of goes up against a whole tradition in Western thought that says that mind and body are separate. But this emerging field of research called embodied cognition is really pushing back against that. Yeah, embodied cognition is a very interesting topic and something that I'm quite, you know, I find fascinating, quite interested in from a practical standpoint. One of the theories that you mentioned in the book
00:08:49
Speaker
is one of my favorite theories in psychology, the James Lang theory of emotion. Do you wanna talk a little bit about William James here and his ideas around this and how they might relate to embodied cognition?
00:09:04
Speaker
Yes, I always love to talk about William James because I feel like whenever one comes across a really cool idea in psychology, it turns out that William James had it for him. Yeah, always. Always, yes. So amazing. His theory of emotion
00:09:23
Speaker
Interesting because it goes against the way we we often think about emotion or experience emotion which is something happens we have a we have a feeling about it and then out of that feeling.
00:09:39
Speaker
you know, the brain directs the body to respond. So say, you know, this is this is James's example. Say we're in the woods and we come across a bear. We feel frightened that the emotion happens. And then the brain says to the body, you know, run, get going. And what James said is that no, it actually the causal arrow points in the other direction. You see the bear and immediately your body kicks in. It starts it starts running and then
00:10:09
Speaker
from the embodied experiences you're having, your heart is beating, your legs are pumping, and your hands are sweating, your brain deduces that you must be frightened. And you process that bodily information and construct it into an emotion. And what's interesting is that a new generation of research by neuroscientists and others using the kind of
00:10:37
Speaker
investigative technologies that James had no access to is confirming that this is really something more like how it works. Yeah, there's sort of no question at this point that interpretation of these bodily processes is important in your experience of emotions. But I guess it's also about the case that the brain isn't involved at all. I mean, the brain, of course, is processing visual information to identify that the bear is there.
00:11:06
Speaker
I guess the, the, the, the twist is in the theory, right? Is that it's not that like you say, Oh, there's a bear. I should be scared. Then you get scared and then you run. It's everything's happening in parallel. Everything's happening very quickly. And you're actually, the way your body responds, which is of course mediated through your brain is interpreted by some other process in the brain. You know,
00:11:31
Speaker
as the conscious experience that you then interpret as fear, essentially.
00:11:39
Speaker
The researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett has done interesting work showing that emotion feels to us like it's so automatic and it comes to us as a package, already labeled fear or anger or whatever, but she has shown that
00:12:03
Speaker
we actually we take these raw materials of our bodily reactions and we construct our experience of emotion and that we can actually intervene in that process, you know, because, for example, the experience of nervousness and the experience of
00:12:19
Speaker
excitement on a bodily level are almost indistinguishable. So if this is not actually her work, this is I'm thinking of another researcher, Alison Wood Brooks, but you can intervene in that process by instead of telling yourself, God, I'm so nervous, I'm so nervous, or even worse, calm down, calm down, which is what we tend to do. But of course, that's trying to quash those bodily sensations is kind of a fool's errand. But if you can instead
00:12:47
Speaker
cognitively reappraise those embodied experiences of erasing heart and sweaty palms as excitement that actually has a very different valence, a very different flavor to us, and it can actually, you know, affect and improve our performance.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, and there's this recent book, and I'm forgetting the author right now, The Upside of Stress, which is a similar kind of thing that people consider stress to be something that's always bad. But if you can reappraise it as something that's motivational or has a purpose to it, it can be actually something useful. And it doesn't have to be experienced as this awful thing.

Environment's Role in Cognition

00:13:28
Speaker
Right. Now, you can see it as your body preparing you to take on a challenge. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:33
Speaker
So, OK, so, you know, one thing that may be tricky to get our minds around and no pun or anything intended here, but how do you think of so if if there is some extended thought, how do you think of the thought that is going on in some external object or whether it be a notebook or, you know, something that's just forms part of the structure of the environment that can help you think?
00:14:03
Speaker
How do you think of thought going on in that external thing? Because it's hard to intuit the idea that our cell phone is doing anything that's like cognition. If it may have information in it that we can access. But how does that interface with us to make it into a thought?
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, you know, this is something that I mentioned the reaction, the reception of the the Clark and Chalmers paper. And this is something that has given philosophers something to think about and argue about now for more than 20 years. And my own take on it is a pretty loose one in the sense that I don't I think it's I wouldn't say it's just semantics, but I'm not that
00:14:58
Speaker
I'm not so interested in the debate over, you know, is it really your mind? Is it really? Is the notebook or the smartphone really? Has it become part of your thinking process? To me, it feels pretty
00:15:16
Speaker
intuitive or pretty. I guess I'm just at ease accepting the idea that these external influences are part of my thinking process and the debates about whether it's really a part of your mind
00:15:33
Speaker
I think I'll leave to the philosophers, but. Maybe, you know, I guess one thing I'm also thinking of too is, you know, if you just extensions of self and, you know, we we do naturally form extensions of ourselves where, you know, we're great at using tools. And, you know, when we're, you know, if we have a lot of experience driving, when we get in our car, it feels like, you know, an extension of our personal space. And that that feels very natural. And I
00:16:04
Speaker
And I'm trying to think of a cell phone as sort of an extension in the same sort of way.
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, Clark and Chalmers have a principle they talk about the parody principle, which is if the object or the, you know, if we're talking about a body part, or if we're talking about of some layout of physical space, if it if it performs the same function that we would call thinking, if it happened inside the mind, then then by definition, they they, you know, they include that in
00:16:38
Speaker
in what we would normally consider the mind. It's interesting, not just our everyday technologies, but as the science of sort of prosthetic devices and rehabilitative kind of technologies advances, I think that question is going to be posed more and more
00:17:01
Speaker
keenly, sharply to us, you know, what what is the mind and where does it end? Yeah, absolutely. You know, to say it ends at the skull just is not going to be a sufficient answer anymore.
00:17:14
Speaker
The second part of the book talks about situated cognition and the role of your environment on your thinking and feeling, I guess, as well. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you have come across and been thinking about in situated cognition?
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I find that stuff super interesting as I sit here in my office, looking around at how I've arranged it, and then looking out the window at the outdoors, which is another kind of context for thinking in. To me, this gets back to this very common, very central metaphor that we all draw on, even without realizing it, this analogy that compares the brain to a computer.
00:18:01
Speaker
And, you know, it's so embedded in the way we think that and the language we use, we don't even we're not even always aware of it, but it's a flawed metaphor in a lot of ways. And I think one of the places that shows up is in the role of context and place, you know, a computer, my laptop here that I'm using to record this podcast, it doesn't care in the sense of it doesn't operate any differently here on my desk than it would if I
00:18:31
Speaker
took it to a park and sat on a bench and used it there. But that's not how the human brain operates. We're actually really exquisitely sensitive to context, whether that's being outdoors versus indoors, being in an urban environment versus a more pastoral environment, being in a social environment as opposed to being alone.
00:18:51
Speaker
All these things affect the way the brain works and the way that it operates and the way that it thinks.

Jackson Pollock & Environmental Influence

00:18:57
Speaker
And so we can be really led astray by this computer metaphor because it's not an accurate rendering of how the human brain works. Interesting, yeah.
00:19:08
Speaker
What I was thinking when you were saying that, and I was reading this part of the book as well, I was thinking about the work of JJ Gibson and direct perception from the perspective that, you know, the environment, you know, I guess the role of inputs in the process of thinking and the role of effectors in the process of thinking. So in the human experience, unlike a computer,
00:19:38
Speaker
We are so much impacted and affected and even controlled by our environment in the sense of all the inputs that we're receiving through our senses. And then also how that interfaces with our effectors. So our ability to move our arms, our ability to move our legs, to move around, but also to speak. All of these things interface and interact with our environment.
00:20:04
Speaker
in the ways that are complex and interacting. And so in the case of JJ Gibson, he talks about the idea of direct perception where you're not, you know, the affordances of the environment are sort of directly experienced by the mind, if you will. And I feel like there's an interesting kind of
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, relationship between that way of thinking and this idea of situated cognition, it's not like you can abstract out the mind from its environment. It's really embedded in its environment and co-creates its environment as well.
00:20:46
Speaker
Absolutely. Joe, and to follow up on this, too, and the Gibson quote that I like that I think might be relevant is when he says, don't ask what's inside your head, but ask what your head's inside of. Oh, that's so cool. I've never heard that. Oh, great. OK, yeah. I thought that might be relevant. It's an epigraph or something.
00:21:06
Speaker
It's yeah, I mean, and I like that because it's more of a focus on it's sort of a switch in focus than necessarily, you know, that, you know, everything is outside the brain. It's just, well, look at all this information is out there for you to be used. And and that approach yielded a whole lot of great insights about how vision works just by understanding how optic flow and, you know, all of these things work and how you can just take direct advantage of them.
00:21:36
Speaker
Yeah, and I think to me it's a very useful and practical message because it counteracts the message that we get from the rest of the culture, which is you should be able to do your thinking anywhere, anytime. A lot of us had to really completely readjust our working
00:21:57
Speaker
spaces and schedules and practices with the advent of the pandemic. I think a lot of people experience the fact that you can't just order the brain to operate independently of its environment, the environment
00:22:15
Speaker
really affects cognition in ways that are pretty significant. And so, but that's, you know, again, we're kind of, we kind of expect the brain to operate like a computer as if we can push, you know, press on and it will work the same way anywhere, anytime. Yeah. In the book you talk about Jackson Pollock and his work and how that was affected by his, you know, physical situation as he moved from Manhattan.
00:22:41
Speaker
to long out. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I really love that story because he, interestingly, Jackson Pollock painted in a very distinctive way when he was living and working in New York City in downtown Manhattan. But as we all know, he was a very volatile personality and was struggling with depression and alcoholism while he was in the city. And after having visited
00:23:10
Speaker
along the east end of Long Island, which is not quite how we think of it today. It was a much more kind of pastoral, verdant
00:23:20
Speaker
quiet place, which is mostly inhabited by fishermen and farmers, when he visited some friends out there and found, again, that the space really affected his mood. It affected the way he was thinking and feeling. He decided that he and his wife, Lee Krasner, should move there. So they bought this old farmhouse in Springs, Long Island, and Pollock had a studio out back that had big windows that let in all this light and views of
00:23:50
Speaker
views of nature. And apparently he spent many hours sitting on the back porch of his house looking out at the trees and the greenery. And what's so fascinating to me is that his style of making art changed profoundly once he moved out to Springs. And he'd started to make what we all know him for, these drip paintings.
00:24:15
Speaker
you know, I don't know how deeply you want to get into this, but there's this fascinating sideline in the book I talk about where fractals are a kind of measure of the complexity of information in a given scene. And it turns out that if you, on that dimension, these famous drip paintings of Pollux are very similar to
00:24:40
Speaker
the way that information is organized in the natural environment. There was something about what he was seeing in nature that he brought into his art, which I think is just is so beautiful, because of course, these are abstract paintings. When you look at them, you don't you don't see trees or birds or anything like that. But he captured kind of the essence of of nature and put it down on a canvas. That's fascinating. There's some really interesting research on natural scenes perception where the
00:25:11
Speaker
The amount of processing that the brain needs to do or the amount of energy that it needs to expend to process that information is actually relatively low compared to built environments or artificial environments. Makes sense, right? The brain is set to respond to things that are novel or unusual or
00:25:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's what takes work. The things that are there sort of, you know, expect or natural or sort of congruent don't take as much. So it's interesting to think about how a painter like Jackson Pollock, who is so abstract, his work might be taking advantage of some of these regularities that exist in the natural environment that we don't, yeah, that we on a conscious level can't appreciate that relationship between
00:26:00
Speaker
between the work that he does and the environment. That's fascinating. Yeah. And mine explains some of the enormous...
00:26:07
Speaker
affection that people have in these paintings. You can get lost in them. I've spent many an hour looking at them at MoMA. But I think it's also interesting to think about in terms of our own personal experience of nature. And I think we all know that nature makes us feel good, that we often feel relaxed and at ease in nature. I mean, one of the things I like best about this body of research is that it helps explain why that would be the case, beyond just kind of a
00:26:38
Speaker
I and nature are one kind of thing. Like it has more to do with as you were saying about perceptual fluency, the kind of the way that our sensory faculties are tuned to the kind of to the way that information is presented in nature and how
00:26:55
Speaker
being in built or urban settings is actually quite cognitively challenging and draining and that's why it can be so useful to sort of replenish and refresh our attentional faculties by going out into nature.
00:27:09
Speaker
So another thing that you talk about, so extending beyond cell phones and other technologies and nature too, is that you can invest your mind in other people.

Group Cognition & Education Reform

00:27:25
Speaker
So we're part of a community. So what sorts of advantages can you get by thinking this way?
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah, I'm thinking of this scene that I opened one of the chapters with, of a crew on a ship, a US military ship, and also on board that ship was Edwin Hutchins, who was a
00:27:49
Speaker
a cognitive scientist who wrote this wonderful book called Cognition in the Wild, which I think is such a great title. And he was there to observe how the crewmates on a huge ship like this, so complex and so just unfathomably complicated to operate, how they put their minds together as one in a sense to make this ship
00:28:20
Speaker
you know, operate in the way it should and pilot it safely into the harbor. And the story in the book is, you know, there's an emergency and an unanticipated event where in an especially dramatic way, the crew really had to come together and
00:28:38
Speaker
on the fly integrate their thinking to save the ship and the people on the harbor from certain disaster. But in the less dramatic ways, I think it's just the case that groups of people thinking together can do things that
00:28:55
Speaker
an individual thinking alone can't. And that's increasingly the case, you know, as our world becomes more complicated, as our expertise becomes more specialized, it's just much, much more difficult for an individual to do it on his or her own. And so I think that's something that our
00:29:15
Speaker
educational system hasn't quite caught up with. We don't really learn how to think together, at least how to think successfully and effectively together in groups. And that's something that should absolutely be part of what we learn because that's so much of what we do in the workplace.
00:29:33
Speaker
And that seems to be related to ideas of individualism and community too, because I think, I guess it's obvious when you think about it, it's obvious that one person couldn't have created an iPhone just by mining materials and putting it all together themselves. And that some of the enormous complexity, building a pyramid or any large scale project is gonna require
00:30:01
Speaker
cooperation and that cooperation is going to require some shared cognitive resources too so that people are on the same page and operating in a way that they can produce more than they ever could individually. Yeah. Well, our habits of what you might call cognitive individualism really haven't caught up with the reality of our
00:30:24
Speaker
of our world. I talk in the book about how traditional apprenticeships were based on the idea that the expert could show the novice what they were doing, whether we're talking about a blacksmith or a tailor or a carpenter, and then the novice could see for himself and try it and be guided by the expert and
00:30:48
Speaker
That was a very effective way of learning that obviously served humanity well for centuries. But what we do now is so much our work so often is knowledge work is internal. And so we haven't quite developed
00:31:03
Speaker
adequate systems for transferring internal knowledge, knowledge that's held inside our heads from one person to another. And that's especially the case when we're talking about experts teaching novices. Because as we know, experts, in the process of becoming experts, what they know becomes organized in a way that makes it actually quite inaccessible to novices. They chunk information.
00:31:31
Speaker
they know what to look for in ways that novices don't yet know. And so, you know, there's really interesting research suggesting that experts not only don't tell a novice everything that they know when they're trying to teach them, they actually can't because that knowledge has been so automatized. So I think we need to think about better ways of effecting a transfer of knowledge from one mind to another.
00:31:57
Speaker
That's an interesting example. Yeah, that comes up a lot in technology. I work in the tech space and in writing software.
00:32:08
Speaker
It's a classic example where you can Google almost anything in software and find something that someone has written that is helpful or useful in some way. But to become an expert in a particular field, you really do need to interact with other experts and to learn from them by working on a project together, by working on a team. And the importance of teams in that space is
00:32:35
Speaker
something that is appreciated, but I think not appreciated enough or in the right ways that we're still learning a lot about how to make those teams effective and work well together.
00:32:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think part of it is that our model of learning is a solitary person sort of hunched over a desk reading a book, you know, and learning it's really works best when it's social. And yet we think of social life as a kind of frivolous distraction from real learning or real thinking, you know, so we haven't really integrated
00:33:08
Speaker
our incredible social capacities as human beings with the way we learn. And I think that's another thing that I'd like to see change in our education system and our workplace training. Why don't we take a short break here and we'll get right back to some of this.
00:33:43
Speaker
Well, welcome back.

Language's Role in Cognitive Extension

00:33:44
Speaker
We've been talking about this wonderful book, The Extended Mind, and looking forward to continuing the conversation here. So as we've been talking about in this last section, the role of thinking with other people, caught me thinking about the idea of the role of language
00:34:10
Speaker
And also the idea that maybe is like, in some ways, human language, one of the first biggest examples of the extended mind that really allows human beings in evolutionary history to extend their influence well beyond their physical presence at any given moment through interacting and sharing ideas and co-creating ideas with language.
00:34:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that has to be the case, right? I mean, I know you're talking about language generally, including spoken language, but I think particularly of written language and, you know, in my own experience, the challenge of writing a book. I mean, can you imagine? You know, I've relied so much on so many different kinds of manifestations of written language, you know, my database of
00:35:08
Speaker
research citations and all the books I consulted when I read this book and my own notes, which I needed to see in front of me and move around on my screen and all that. It makes me think of
00:35:24
Speaker
the work by Walter Ong and others about how before the advent of written language, people used all kinds of other devices like mnemonic kind of devices and repetition and, and traditional story structures, you know, I'm thinking of like Homer and like the the bards who like had these ways of
00:35:46
Speaker
who had these ways of keeping track of what they were saying and telling a consistent story and how much written language does that for us now. Yeah, for sure. As you were talking about that, I was thinking about how much the act of writing actually has a role in creating the thought itself.
00:36:13
Speaker
Does that resonate with you? I mean, just the idea that like you will have thoughts when you're writing that you would never have if you were just sort of, you know, either idly thinking about things or even reading.
00:36:30
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think most writers would say that they discover what they think through writing it. And, you know, I think of what the psychologist Daniel Riesberg says about the detached, what he calls the detachment gain that by taking
00:36:49
Speaker
the thoughts out of our heads and putting them down on paper. Actually, this is going back to Gibson. You create a different set of affordances once you download or offload your thoughts onto paper like that. And Riesberg was saying, you can then inspect it with your senses. You can reflect on it because you've put a little space between yourself and your thoughts. And it's almost like a whole different process than when you're thinking those thoughts in your head.
00:37:20
Speaker
It's a funny thing, too. So getting something out of your head and onto the page and putting it in a book, I think a lot of people might assume that everything in that book that you've written must be immediately accessible to you. And you know every word that's in the book. I think maybe students think this about a textbook writer or something. Oh, yeah. And it's not true. Sometimes that knowledge is maybe a little distant from what you can immediately call the mind.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yes. In fact, recently I was interviewed about a book I'd written years ago that came out in 2004. So it was really quite a long time ago. My book I wrote about, it was a cultural history and scientific critique of personality testing. And I was being interviewed for a documentary film about personality testing and I had to keep consulting my own books to remember.
00:38:12
Speaker
And when I read it now, it's really like someone else wrote it. Talk about the detachment gain. I'm so detached from it that I don't even remember it or remember writing it. But that's kind of the miracle of written language that it fixes our thoughts in place in a way that is really useful for thinking about those thoughts. Yeah. Sometimes it's funny when you go back and maybe you'll find a note or something and you're like reading it and
00:38:38
Speaker
Maybe you didn't even realize that it was something you wrote. And I'll sometimes do this and I'll be like, oh, that was, who wrote this? This is terrible. Oh, that's really insightful. That's great. Oh wait, I wrote that. Yeah. And if it wasn't in your own handwriting, you almost wouldn't believe that it was good. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's funny.
00:38:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's an interesting bit on ownership of I mean, your thoughts, I guess, that, you know, when you're thinking a thought immediately and then it dissipates, you you take full ownership of it, but you you know, you you're not going to you're not going to feel responsible for that fleeting thought that you had 20 years later in the same way that you might be held accountable for something you wrote in a book, I suppose.

Debate: Individual vs Group Cognition

00:39:17
Speaker
So maybe there's something unfair about that.
00:39:21
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it also speaks to the idea, I mean, in the context of the extended mind, right? And the social environment in which ideas happened. It also speaks to this idea of, as you mentioned, the idea of ownership.
00:39:35
Speaker
I think our model is so much of intellectual property and ownership of ideas. It's so much this idea that ideas and these thoughts and intellectual property are developed inside one person's skull. So often it's hard to attribute really the genesis and origin of an idea or several researchers in different parts of the world will simultaneously have the same insight or write down at least the same insight at the same moment.
00:40:05
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, that makes me think of an experience I had recently. I live in New Haven, and I often teach and interact with Yale students. And I was meeting with a group of them recently and explaining to them the extended mind. I was sort of interested to hear what a bunch of, you know, 20-somethings would think about it because these are people who've grown up with using their smartphones as extensions of their minds. They don't, you know, they've never experienced anything different.
00:40:31
Speaker
And as I was talking about the idea of the extended mind, I noticed that this one student was looking more and more perturbed, more and more upset and distressed. And finally, he sort of burst out and said, this is a very dangerous idea. And I was surprised. And I asked him to elaborate. And listening to him, I realized that
00:40:50
Speaker
this Yale student was someone who'd been striving his whole life based on this idea of individual achievement. And the idea that ideas are not and the products of our intellect are not maybe necessarily ours alone was threatening to him. I found that very interesting.
00:41:10
Speaker
I think it speaks to how deeply the commitment to individualism goes in our culture. We like to hold up lone geniuses. It's just getting less and less possible, I think, for any one person to make a really transformative contribution. Not that
00:41:30
Speaker
Not that it can't happen, but so often, if you look at team science, for example, and there are papers now, scientific papers that have literally thousands of authors. So I think those kinds of developments are going to challenge our sense that
00:41:46
Speaker
as you were saying, this assumption that ideas are the product of one mind. Interesting connection and to circle this back around a little bit. So I know that in Andy Clark and Chelmer's original paper, one of the things they talked about is that for something to feel like it's part of your mind or it feels like an extension of your mind is that it has to feel like it's attributable to you.
00:42:15
Speaker
that you need to feel it coming from yourself. And that's a funny thing because we feel this all the time that it's our conscious will that's causing something. But that's just it. It's a feeling or it's a sense of attachment to an idea and not necessarily something that's absolutely real. And it's maybe not something that would generate directly from us.
00:42:43
Speaker
It's interesting that the feeling of something external being a part of yourself would relate to how much ownership you take over that. So there's some connection in that way.
00:42:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's interesting to think about the relationship we have with our devices. There was some survey done recently that showed that some enormous percentage of people had their smartphones within arm's reach all the time, including when they were sleeping. I don't think
00:43:21
Speaker
Clark and Chalmers even could have imagined how when they wrote their paper, how hard it would be to take the phone away from someone else. What a perfect example of their thesis, the smartphone would be. They were very fortunate in a way that they were very prescient, I guess, in the sense that
00:43:43
Speaker
their ideas were born out so conclusively by reality. As we're thinking about this and thinking about these extensions of mind, it actually brings me back to something, Ralph, that you and I have talked about in the past, which is the idea of if you could connect
00:44:11
Speaker
your mind directly to another person's mind through a neural interface. Sure, and all this stuff Elon Musk is working on. Yeah, exactly. Rolf, do you want to talk a little bit about that and your thoughts? Oh, yeah. Well, gosh, I don't know what I can put together that would sound good, but I do remember... Well, certainly, I mean, one of the things that seems...
00:44:35
Speaker
valuable about having external information is being able to, if you can access it immediately, that would be great. And writing's a little slow for that. So in order to go through a book, it takes a long time to access something versus which you could access in your mind, I suppose. So this is science fiction when Elon Musk does get that cable that runs from our brain and we can just interface it.
00:45:02
Speaker
That sure would be a nice advantage of being able to process information in a way that a computer processes it to be able to have that common language because I guess there's maybe there's a little bit of translation in order to get other kinds of information into our minds in this way.
00:45:21
Speaker
And would that cable connect two brains, two people? I guess that's the idea. The idea is that it actually connects a whole network of brains. So like the internet is now an internet of brains, essentially.

Primitive Tech & Collective Thinking

00:45:34
Speaker
Right. Right. And one of the challenges that we've realized is thinking about that is that.
00:45:39
Speaker
If I could get all the information from your brain injected directly into my brain, even with the highest possible fidelity, what I actually understand what it is you were saying or trying to say, right?
00:45:55
Speaker
I don't, we're not sure. We don't know that that's that that wouldn't work that way. Well, that's I mean, I guess what you're talking about, Joe, is just sort of the problem of other minds kind of thing. Could you know the what is it like to be a bat kind of question? Can you understand? Can you understand from the complete contextual point of view of the other person, what it is that they're exactly thinking?
00:46:18
Speaker
And without having had the embodied experiences of learning those things, it's almost like you can hand someone a physics textbook and they can read the words, but did they really take that in and understand it probably not? Yeah, and that's why Nagel, I think, uses the example of a bat, too, because it's hard for us to imagine the embodied experience of a bat flying through the air.
00:46:44
Speaker
especially processing echolocation. It's a sense that we don't have. Yeah, but you know what I find really interesting too is that we already have these kind of natural technologies of
00:46:58
Speaker
transferring information from one brain to another. I mean, as we were saying earlier, they don't always work as well as we would like. But there's all these ways of bridging the gap that we have, that we've evolved as human beings to participate in what we might call the group mind. And what's fascinating to me is that
00:47:22
Speaker
they're often so visceral or so primitive almost. I mean, I'd write in the book about synchronized movement and how that this is a, it's a very primitive kind of technology that is used by militaries and churches and groups of all kinds to get people on the same page. And we look at scans at it now because it feels, it can often feel like a kind of scary group thing. But human beings are,
00:47:51
Speaker
are evolved to work together and to think together. And we have all these ways of doing it. It's not science fiction. It actually is happening right now. It's real technology, right? I mean, the idea of ritual movement, of synchronizing people in dance or other types of ritualized movement, especially in the context of music or other sounds that are at a certain pace or cadence.
00:48:15
Speaker
I mean, that's ancient, ancient technology and it really works. I mean, uh, it gets people connected in ways that are, you know, advantageous to, to groups in certain, certain contexts can also be negative in other ways. Yeah. And this, um, I think of Douglas Hofstetter, uh, did some work, maybe you know this too. Uh, so he thought about overlap between different people. And I think he had this term called Parisans that was sort of, um,
00:48:42
Speaker
You know, sort of like Venn diagrams of two people overlapping in the place where they intersected was sort of their common shared experience. And that was what he called a person so that there was, you know, and that sort of went along with the idea that maybe when you died, that, you know, part of your mind was left in in other people's minds also. So it's distributed in that way.
00:49:04
Speaker
Yeah. No, that makes me think of his book, I Am a Strange Loop, and his incredibly poignant reflections on his wife who had died and how much he felt her living on in him. It was such a beautiful exposition of that idea. Yes. And I know you talked about loops and you talk about loops and their relevance in your book too. So maybe that's a tangent that we can't fully explain, I suppose, but it's certainly an interesting one.
00:49:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think the idea of loops, again, pushes back against this computer metaphor of the brain where everything is sort of linear and its input output. Actually, the human brain works very differently where we are thinking benefits from being passed in and out of these loops, you know, into the brain, back out into the world through the brain, the minds of other people onto the page, back into our minds, you know, and
00:49:57
Speaker
That's not how computers work, but it is how human brains work. Yeah. I mean, you can argue that there's some interesting developments in our AI that take advantage of similar feedback loops in different ways. But again, that's all just by all way of saying that artificial intelligence still has a lot to learn from the brain. Right. Let's say that the human way of thinking or human experience of thinking
00:50:27
Speaker
that it helps to have a body for one thing, which is an interesting direction that AI is going. Yeah, the inputs and outputs and being able to move through the world and seek out specific sets of inputs and have the direct interaction between input and output in that loop is so incredibly important to our way of experiencing the world.
00:50:49
Speaker
Right, right. Well, Annie, as we as we think about wrapping up in respect to your time, I want to make sure we get to a practical question.

Practical Advice on Cognitive Enhancement

00:51:01
Speaker
So through this whole process of writing the book, what are the what are the most practical things that you've found in everyday life that that help you think a little better and use your environment to externalize?
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah, well, I write in the book that I don't think I could have pulled this book off, which, you know, it was quite an ambitious project to look at how all these things. Yeah, it is an ambitious book. Yeah, I don't think I could have written it without what I learned from writing it in terms of how to externalize thoughts, how to offload, how to extend your mind with external resources. So
00:51:41
Speaker
you know, some of the practical things I did, I definitely use nature as a way and movement in nature, you know, it's great when you can combine two or even three different things like talking with a friend as you walk in nature, or, you know, you're killing three birds with one stone. But, you know, I definitely thought in terms of
00:52:05
Speaker
rather than mustering mental resources from within, which is what we're often encouraged to do by society and by, you know, some, some popular psychology ideas like grit or the growth mindset that it's all kind of internal, like I definitely tried to think in terms of
00:52:20
Speaker
Well, how can I change the external situation such that my mind responds by thinking better? So it might mean taking a walk outside if I felt like my attention was fading, or it might mean finding someone to bounce my ideas off of rather than trying to struggle on with it alone.
00:52:41
Speaker
But an emphasis in general, sort of an emphasis on maybe focusing on the external environment as a source of information rather than huddling and concentrating harder, right?
00:52:54
Speaker
Right, and being aware of how limited the brain on its own is, which is not the message, as I was saying, that we get from society. We're kind of expected to, we expect so much of our brains and they're really not always up to the job, in part because of the mismatch between what our brains evolved to do and what we ask of it in our modern knowledge-centric society. So I
00:53:19
Speaker
Try to think in terms of, well, what is the brain good at? It's good at sensing and moving the body. It's good at navigating through three-dimensional space. It's good at connecting with other people. And the more you can leverage those natural human strengths to do these other things that the brain is not really so well-suited to do, like wrestle with counterintuitive ideas, the easier and the more efficient and effective your thinking will be.
00:53:47
Speaker
Well, that's great. Well, Annie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. And the book, again, is called The Extended Mind, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy-Paul. Thank you very much. Thanks. This has been a pleasure.