When people think about thinking, they typically conceive of the brain as some kind of machine or muscle strictly confined to our skull. Like Rodin’s famous sculpture From the thinking man who rests his chin on his hand, we imagine that the mind is all in our head.
But what if those typical metaphors in our brain limit our ability to think and learn?
That’s the question posed by science journalist Annie Murphy Paul, who points to research that emphasizes the many ways in which thinking is influenced not only by what’s inside our skulls, but also by signals from our body’s movements, by our environment and by other people we are with. interacting with.
Paul, who says he reads academic journal articles for fun, first encountered this argument when he came across an article from 1998 by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who argued that the human mind extends to the world around it. And that sparked his interest in delving into the scientific research on learning that he has brought together in a recent book: “The extended mind: the power of thinking outside the brain.”
Those who design our technology, he argues, are particularly prone to a brain-limited view of the mind, forgetting that users of smartphone apps and computers are situated in bodies and move around the world in physical space with others.
EdSurge recently sat down with Paul to dive deeper into his arguments about rethinking how we think and what educators can learn from research.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: What do you think is overlooked in popular notions of our minds?
Annie Murphy Paul: Our educational system is largely dominated by what we might call a brain-bound model, which is the idea that thinking occurs inside the brain. It’s sort of sealed inside the skull. And furthermore, that intelligence is the kind of mass of things that is larger or smaller, and we can weigh it through tests and evaluations.
And that is challenged by the notion of the extended mind, which as I mentioned comes from philosophy. … It was an article by philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark, and they started that article by saying, ‘Where does the mind end and the rest of the world begin?’
And that to me was a really provocative question, a potentially generative question, partly because it seems to have an obvious or conventional answer, which is, ‘Well, the mind stops at the skull, right?’ The mind is somewhat identical to the brain. And that is the type of model that dominates our educational system.
But what Chalmers and Clark were saying was that the mind extends beyond the head, to the rest of our bodies, to our physical environment, to our relationships with other people, to the use of our devices, our technologies. And that to me was a really exciting idea because it meant that if we could improve the quality of those raw materials that we think with, and if we could improve our abilities and skills in using those resources outside of the brain, that was kind of a new way to become smarter. It didn’t mean that our only option was to exercise our brains or make them smarter or stronger. In fact, we could improve the quality and use of all these resources outside the brain as a way to become smarter and more effective.
You talk about three main ways the mind can be thought of as extended, and I hope to go through them one by one. The first thing you talk about is “embodied cognition.” What is that and why is it important?
Embodied cognition is the idea that we don’t just think with our brain, but we think with the sensations, movements, and gestures of our body. So I’ll start with the first: sensations. Actually, that has a less slang name, which is based on our instinct.
We all know what that means, that there is a kind of wisdom or a kind of informed sense that our bodies seem to have that might elude our conscious mind. And there’s a term called interoception that describes that flow of internal sensations and signals that our educational system and our culture in general tend to tell us to ignore. But what embodied cognition suggests is that we should actually become much more attuned to those interoceptive sensations through meditative practices like body scanning, and that those interoceptive sensations actually have a lot to tell us about the situations we find ourselves in.
How is this developed in the classrooms?
Yes, so the brain-based approach to thinking and learning, which is dominant in our education system, suggests that all we need is the head. And nowadays, especially when we’re in Zoom meetings, we can feel like we’re heads, or a brain and a tub. But in fact, the human organism thinks with our entire body, which includes our internal sensations and our physical movements and our gestures. So the more we can get the body to learn, the better. I think we’re good at doing that with early education toddlers, we think it’s okay for them to run around and interact with materials and use manipulatives. But as students get older, we have the notion that they should put all that aside and start doing things just in their heads.
But what the science of embodied cognition shows is that the more we can externalize our thoughts and our thought processes, get them out of our heads and express them through our bodies, or learn through our bodies and our senses, the better our learning will be. . be. So I think we need to carry some of that early education spirit of the body being part of the learning in middle school, high school, college, all of that, because we are embodied creatures. We cannot be anything more than embodied creatures, even when we are adults. And so embodied cognition suggests that this head- or brain-centered approach to learning is really wrong.
What about the second category of research you address in the book, known as situated cognition?
Situated cognition is the idea that where we are, our physical environment, affects the way we think. And that’s one of the things where our brains are really different from, say, a computer, which works exactly the same way. My laptop works the same way in my home office as if I took it to a park and sat on a bench. But the human brain is not like that. They are exquisitely sensitive to context and we think differently, say, outdoors than in an indoor space. So, since it is a good idea for us to be aware of how our physical spaces are affecting the way we think, and we can use them intentionally in the sense of going outside to restore our attention and replenish it, or we can design our interior spaces, our learning and working spaces to support intelligent thinking in ways that the brain-linked model doesn’t really allow for.
The third area you explore in the book is distributed cognition. How is that?
That goes against another very strong current in our culture, which is the idea of this individualistic streak: that ideas and thoughts belong to a brain, that they are sealed inside an individual head, when in reality we are fundamentally social creatures who we learn. to think and we learn to speak the language in a social context. And thinking and learning are always irreducibly social, shared and collective.
Another way to think about intelligence is that it’s not a bunch of stuff sealed inside a person’s brain. It is truly a collective enterprise in which we must think in social terms.
Some of these ideas you’ve talked about sound a little like common sense. Why has it taken so long, or why may many people still not realize the things you’re talking about?
Yes I agree. The extended mind, which is a relatively new idea in philosophy, simply reminds us of what has always been true: that human beings have bodies. We are embedded in physical spaces and are part of these dense social networks that describe us as full human beings. And, unfortunately, in many environments, including educational ones, but also work environments, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as just brains, just heads. And so, the extended mind invites us to remember what we have forgotten as a culture.
What are some takeaways for higher-level educators to act differently based on this research?
I’ll take one from each area of research.
One is to incorporate the body into learning: to incorporate physical movement and gestures into the classroom as much as possible.
The second would be to think very carefully about the spaces in which we have children learn and try to get them outdoors as much as possible. And then when they’re inside, they think about what kind of cues and cues are present in the physical environment, and I think identity cues are particularly important. Children should be able to look around them and see signs that remind them of who they are in that particular environment, what role they are playing as a scholar, artist, or thinker. That’s why I think it’s helpful for teachers and others to look around and see, ‘What do my kids see when they walk into their classroom or their school?’
And then the third is this social piece. I think now that we’re all back together in person and we’re not doing so much remote learning, we can really take advantage of what psychologists call “groupness.” That’s a real scientific term. And that refers to the feeling that a group of people is not just a set of individuals. They are truly an entity unto themselves: a group. And that sense of grouping tends to get people on the same page, they learn better, think better, and remember things better when they do it together with other people in that cohesive, connected way.
Note that there are issues of equity in education that arise from this research.
One of the most interesting things to me about the extended mind is that it is another way of looking at issues of equity and equality. We have this idea that we can classify people by the amount of intelligence they have in their brains, but if we move on to look at things through an expanded mental lens, then it’s really about, well, what is the quality and the accessibility of information. Resources outside the brain that this person has?
Because our students don’t have anything close to equal access to, let’s say, the freedom to move their bodies, or access to green spaces, or to safe spaces, to quiet spaces. They don’t have the same access to helpful mentors, truly skilled teachers, or motivated peers. And if all of those things really matter in determining how effectively intelligent and academically successful a person can be, then we need to stop thinking that intelligence is something sealed inside a person’s head; It’s more out here, in the world.
Listen to the full interview on the EdSurge podcast.
