The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

By Annie Murphy Paul

 

PART I Thinking with Our Bodies 1 Thinking with Sensations

Interoceptive Awareness leads to better success in financial traders

• Interoception is, simply stated, an awareness of the inner state of the body. Just as we have sensors that take in information from the outside world (retinas, cochleas, taste buds, olfactory bulbs), we have sensors inside our bodies that send our brains a constant flow of data from within. These sensations are generated in places all over the body—in our internal organs, in our muscles, even in our bones—and then travel via multiple pathways to a structure in the brain called the insula.
• Coates shares these reflections in a captivating book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, which draws on his years as a trader as well as on his surprising second career as an applied physiologist. Coates and his new colleagues examined a group of financial traders working on a London trading floor, asking each one to identify the successive moments when he felt his heartbeat—a measure of the individual’s sensitivity to bodily signals. The traders, they found, were much better at this task than was age- and gender-matched group of controls who did not work in finance.
• What’s more, among the traders themselves, those who were the most accurate in detecting the timing of their heartbeats made more money, and tended to have longer tenures in what was a notably volatile line of work. “Our results suggest that signals from the body—the gut feelings of financial lore—contribute to success in the markets,” the team concluded.

Heartbeat Detection Test

• All of us experience these bodily signals—but some of us feel them more keenly than others. To measure interoceptive awareness, Scientists apply the heartbeat detection test, the one John Coates used with his group of financial traders: test takers are asked to identify the instant when their heartbeats, without placing a hand on the chest or resting a finger on a wrist.
• What we do know is that interoceptive awareness can be deliberately cultivated. A series of simple exercises can put us in touch with the messages emanating from within, giving us access to knowledge that we already possess but that is ordinarily excluded from consciousness—knowledge about ourselves, about other people, and about the worlds through which we move.

TO UNDERSTAND HOW interoception can act as such a rich repository, it’s important to recognize that the world is full of far more information than our conscious minds can process. Fortunately, we are also able to collect and store the volumes of information we encounter on a non-conscious basis.

• As we proceed through each day, we are continuously apprehending and storing regularities in our experience, tagging them for future reference. Through this information-gathering and pattern-identifying process, we come to know things—but we’re typically not able to articulate the content of such knowledge or to ascertain just how we came to know it. This trove of data remains mostly under the surface of consciousness, and that’s usually a good thing. Its submerged status preserves our limited stores of attention and working memory for other uses.

Conscious awareness 

• Participants in Lewicki’s experiment were directed to watch a computer screen on which a cross-shaped target would appear, then disappear, then reappear in a new location; periodically they were asked to predict where the target would show up next. Over the course of several hours of exposure to the target’s movements, the participants’ predictions grew more and more accurate. They had figured out the pattern behind the target’s peregrinations. But they could not put this knowledge into words, even when the experimenters offered them money to do so. The subjects were not able to describe “anything even close to the real nature” of the pattern, Lewicki observes. The movements of the target operated according to a pattern too complex for the conscious mind to accommodate—but the capacious realm that lies below consciousness was more than roomy enough to contain it.

 

But—if our knowledge of these patterns is not conscious, how then can we make use of it? The answer is that, when a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath, or a tensing of the muscles.

• The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. (One psychologist has called this guide our “somatic rudder.”) Researchers have even captured the body in mid-nudge, as it alerts its inhabitant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have known she was looking for. Such interoceptive prodding was visible during a gambling game that formed the basis of an experiment led by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, a professor at the University of Southern California. In the game, presented on a computer screen, players were given a starting purse of two thousand dollars and were shown four decks of digital cards. 
• What the experimenters had arranged, but the players were not told, was that decks A and B were “bad”—they held lots of large penalties in store—and decks C and D were “good,” bestowing more rewards than penalties over time. As they played the game, the participants’ state of physiological arousal was monitored via electrodes attached to their fingers; these electrodes kept track of their level of “skin conductance.” When our nervous systems are stimulated by an awareness of the potential threats, we start to perspire in a barely perceptible way. This slight sheen of sweat momentarily turns our skin into a better conductor of electricity. Researchers can thus use skin conductance as a measure of nervous system arousal.
• Damasio and his colleagues noticed something interesting: after the participants had been playing for a short while, their skin conductance began to spike when they contemplated clicking on the bad decks of cards. Even more striking, the players started avoiding the bad decks, gravitating increasingly to the good decks. As in the Lewicki study, subjects got better at the task over time, losing less and winning more.
• Yet interviews with the participants showed that they had no awareness of why they had begun choosing some decks over others until late in the game, long after their skin conductance had started flaring. By card 10 (about forty-five seconds into the game), measures of skin conductance showed that their bodies were wise to the way the game was rigged. But even ten turns later—on card 20-all indicated that they did not have a clue about what was going on. It took until card 50 was turned, and several minutes had elapsed, for all the participants to express a conscious hunch that decks A and B were riskier. Their bodies figured it out long before their brains did. Subsequent studies supplied an additional, and crucial, finding: players who were more interoceptive aware were more apt to make smart choices within the game. For them, the body’s wise counsel came through loud and clear. 
• The body not only grants us access to information that is more complex than what our conscious minds can accommodate. It also marshals this information at a pace that is far quicker than our conscious minds can handle. The benefits of the body’s intervention extend well beyond winning a card game; the real world, after all, is full of dynamic and uncertain situations, in which there is no time to ponder all the pros and cons. If we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose. 
• HERE, THEN, is a reason to hone our interoceptive sense: people who are more aware of their bodily sensations are better able to make use of their non-conscious knowledge. Mindfulness meditation is one way of enhancing such awareness. The practice has been found to increase sensitivity to internal signals, and even to alter the size and activity of that key brian structure the insula. 
• One particular component appears to be especially effective; this is the activity that often starts off a meditation session known as the “body scan”. 
• The aim of this practice is to bring nonjudgmental awareness to any and all feelings that arise within the body. In the rush of everyday life, we may ignore or dismiss these internal signals; if they do come to our notice, we may react with impatience or self-criticism. The body scan trains us to observe such sensations with interest and equanimity. 
  • But tuning in to these feelings is only a first step. 
  • The next step is to name them. Attaching a label to our interoceptive sensations allows us to begin to regulate them; without such attentive self-regulation, we may find our feelings overwhelming, or we may misinterpret their source.

• Research shows that the simple act of giving a name to what we’re feeling has a profound effect on the nervous system, immediately dialing down the body’s stress response. 
• In an experiment conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, study subjects were required to give a series of impromptu speeches in front of an audience (a reliable way to induce anxiety). Half of the participants were then asked to engage in what the researchers call “affect labeling,” filling in responses to the prompt “I feel______,” while the other half were asked to complete a neutral shape matching task.  The affect-labeling group showed steep declines in heart rate and skin conductance compared to the control group, whose levels of physiological arousal remained high. Brain-scanning studies offer further evidence of the calming effect of affect labeling: simply naming what is felt reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain structure involved in processing fear, and other strong emotions. Meanwhile, thinking in a more involved way about feelings and the experiences that evoked them actually produces greater activity in the amygdala. 
• The practice of affect labeling, like the body scan, is a kind of mental training intended to get us into the habit of noting and naming the sensations that arise in our bodies. Psychologists recommend keeping two things in mind as we try it. 
  • The first is to be as prolific as possible: the UCLA scientists reported that study participants who came up with a larger number of terms for what they were feeling subsequently experienced a greater reduction in their physiological arousal.
  • The second is to be as granular as possible: that is, to choose words that are precise and specific when describing what we feel. Accurately distinguishing among interoceptive sensations is associated with making sounder decisions, acting less impulsively, and planning ahead more successfully- perhaps because it gives us a clearer sense of what we need and what we want. 

• But does the body really have anything to contribute to our thinking—to processes we usually regard as taking place solely in our heads? It does. In fact, recent research suggests a rather astonishing possibility: the body can be more rational than the brain. 
• Outcomes like these may result from the fact that the body is not subject to the cognitive biases that so often distort our conscious thought—the glitches that appear to be hardwired into the human brain.
• Take, for example, our stubborn tendency to insist on notions of fairness, even at the cost of spiting ourselves. In the “ultimatum game,” an experimental paradigm often employed by behavioral economists, participants are paired up with a partner; one of the partners is given a pot of money to divide as she wishes. The other partner may then choose to accept or reject the proposed division. 
• Accepting even a very low offer is more rational than rejecting the offer outright, which leaves the receiving partner with nothing. Yet studies consistently find that many players decline low offers out of a sense of being unjustly wronged a sense that they should have gotten more. 
• In a study published in 2011, researchers from Virginia Tech scanned the brains of two groups of people as they played the ultimatum game: a group who regularly practiced meditation and a group of control subjects who did not meditate. The scans revealed that in the meditators, the insula—the brain’s interoceptive center—was active during gameplay, indicating that they were relying on their bodies’ signals to make their decisions. The controls exhibited a different pattern: their scans activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that makes conscious judgments about what’s fair and unfair.  The two groups also diverged in their behavior, researchers reported. The interoceptive aware meditators were more likely to elect the rational option of accepting a low offer over no money at all, while the cogitating controls were more apt to snub a proposed division that was titled in their partner’s favor. 
• Mark Fenton-O’Creevy, a professor of organizational behavior at The Open University in the UK, was once a believer in this highly brain-bound approach. Then he conducted a series of interviews with expert traders at six investment banks and found that they almost never proceeded in this fashion. Instead, the traders told him, they relied heavily on the sensations they felt stirring within their own bodies.
  • “Having a feeling is like having whiskers, like being a deer; just hearing something that the human ear can’t hear, and all of a sudden you’re on edge. Something somewhere just gave you a slight shiver, but you’re not quite sure what, but it’s something to be careful about, something’s around.”

• Successful financiers are exquisitely sensitive to these subtle physiological cues, Fenton-O’Creevy discovered. What’s more, they seem to pick up on such signals early on, just as the feelings start to emerge—and act on them at that moment, rather than diminishing them, suppressing them, or holding them off for later inspection.
• Because this approach proceeds rapidly and with little mental effort, it’s much better suited to addressing the complex, fast-paced decisions that many of us are called upon to make, says Fenton-O’Creevy. And going around our cognitive biases in this way is more effective than laboriously trying to correct them. 
• “De-biasing approaches which rely primarily on shifting cognition from System 1 to System 2 are unlikely to succeed,” he maintains. “The human capacity for self-monitoring and effortful System 2 cognition is limited and is rapidly depleted. Attempts to reduce biases by learning about biases and engaging in self-monitoring rapidly come up against human cognitive limits.” 
• In his lab, he had participants play a specially designed video game called Space Investor; as part of the game, they periodically estimated how fast their hearts were beating. The more accurate their guesses, as gauged by a wireless sensor placed on the chest, the more game points they accrued. Fenton-O’Creevy reports that repeated play appears to produce lasting improvements in participants’ interoceptive awareness.  This approach suggests a novel way to support smart decision making: not through the application of painstaking deliberation and analysis, but through the cultivation of what we might call “interceptive learning.” 
  • This is a process of learning, first, how to sense, label, and regulate our internal signals—and second, how to draw connections between the particular sensations we feel within and the pattern of events we encounter in the world. 

Interoceptive Journal

• We can clarify and codify the body’s messages by keeping an “interoceptive journal”—a record of the choices we make, and how we felt when we made them. Each journal entry has 3 parts.
  • First, a brief account of the decision we’re facing. 
  • Second, a description—as detailed and precise as possible—of the internal sensations we experience as we contemplate the various options available. An interoceptive journal asks us to consider the paths that lie before us, one by one, and take note of how we feel as we imagine choosing one path over another. 
  • The third section of the journal entry is a notation of the choice on which we ultimately settle and a description of any further sensations that arise upon our making this final selection.

• Over time, you may perceive that these moments arrange themselves into a pattern. Perhaps you’ll see in retrospect that you experienced a constriction in your chest when you contemplated a course of action that would, in fact, have led to disappointment—but that you felt something subtly different, lifting and opening of the ribcage when you considered an approach that would prove successful.

The Body as a Guide to Decision Making 

• The body and its interoceptive capacities can also play another role: as the coach who pushes us to pursue our goals, to persevere in the face of adversity, to return from setbacks with renewed energy. In a word, an awareness of our interoception can help us become more resilient.
• Resilience is rooted in our awareness of the sensations that originate in our organs and extremities—and the more alert we are to these inner signals, the more resilient we are able to be in the face of life’s hardships.
• Interoception acts as a continually updated gauge of our present status. Its cues let us know when we can push ourselves and when we have to give ourselves a rest. They help us match our effort to the magnitude of the challenge and pace ourselves so that we can see it through to the end.
• And just as some people are better than others at using bodily sensations to guide their decisions, some people are better than others at using interoceptive signals to monitor and manage their moment-by-moment expenditure of energy.
• With their replies, his subjects sorted themselves into two distinct groups: high resilience and low resilience. By their own accounts, when faced with adversity or challenge, the high-resilience group was likely to push on through to success, while members of the low-resilience group were more likely to struggle, burn out, or give up.

Interception on Resilience

• Paulus found an additional difference between the two groups: on average, the low-resilience individuals exhibited poor interoception, as measured by the heartbeat detection test, while the high-resilience people possessed a keen sense of their internal world.
  • In order to explore such intriguing findings, Paulus has devised a protocol that exposes volunteers to a challenging internal experience as their brains are being scanned. Over the past decade, Paulus has administered this regimen, called the inspiratory breathing load task, to hundreds of people. One of the most famous of his guinea pigs is the champion swimmer Diana Nyad- world-record holder in distance swimming, Nyad made history in 1975 by becoming the first woman to swim around Manhattan Island. Four decades later, at the age of sixty-four, she set out to swim from Cuba to Florida. Nyad was a model of resilience as she battled fatigue, nausea, and potentially deadly jellyfish stings over the course of the 110-mile swim. She failed four times in the attempt before trying and succeeding, in August 2013. Nyad is truly an outlier, but Paulus has found the same pattern in elite performers of all stripes. Astonishingly, putting these individuals through an extremely unpleasant interoceptive experience actually improves their cognitive performance.
  • These champions have a superior ability to sense their bodies’ cues and are therefore better able to monitor and manage their bodies’ resources as they rise to meet a challenge. They are like efficient, well-calibrated motors that don’t waste even a bit of power, keeping plenty of energy in reserve.
  • People with low resilience, by contrast, present a very different profile. When undergoing the inspiratory breathing load task, their brain scans show a pattern that is the opposite of Diana Nyad’s: low levels of activity before a stressor, and high levels during and after the stressor. The self-management of these individuals is sloppy, all over the place, like poorly calibrated motors that leak power. They are brought up short by challenges, and then waste energy in the scramble to catch up. They begin to struggle to answer the test questions. Discouraged by their failures, their energy reserves depleted, they lose motivation and give up. 
  • Like the expert traders interviewed by Mark Fenton-O’Creevy, and like the elite athletes studied by Martin Paulus, Stanley has found that the most cognitively resilient soldiers pay close attention to their bodily sensations at the early stage of a challenge, when signs of stress are just beginning to accumulate. She instructs her workshop participants to do the same, using mindfulness techniques similar to the ones described by Jon Kabat-Zinn. By remaining alert to these preliminary signals, she says, we can avoid being taken by surprise and then overreacting, entering a state of physiological arousal from which it is hard to come down. (Stanley notes ruefully that many of us take just the opposite approach, as she once did: pushing aside internal red flags in the hope that we can “power through” and get the job done.)

Shuttling Technique 

• Stanley also demonstrates for her students a technique she calls “shuttling”—moving one’s focus back and forth between what is transpiring internally and what is going on outside the body.
• This alternation of attention can be practiced at relaxed moments until it becomes second nature: a continuously repeated act of checking in that provides a periodic infusion of interoceptive information. The point is to keep in close contact with our internal reality at all times—to train ourselves “to pay attention and notice what’s happening while it’s happening,”
• The vision of resilience she offers is not a formidable display of will and grit of the kind she once would have embraced; it is, rather, flexible, moment-by-moment responsiveness to changing conditions—both inside and out.

Feeling Emotions 

• Research finds that people who are more interoceptive attuned feel their emotions more intensely, while also managing their emotions more adeptly. This is so because interoceptive sensations form the building blocks of even our most subtle and nuanced emotions: affection, admiration, gratitude; sorrow, longing, regret; irritation, envy, resentment. People who are more interoceptive aware can interact more intimately and more skillfully with the emotions that interoceptive sensations help construct.
• In fact, the causal arrow points in the opposite direction. The body produces sensations, the body initiates actions—and only then does the mind assemble these pieces of evidence into the entity we call an emotion.

Cognitive Reappraisal 

• Psychologists who study the construction of emotion call this practice “cognitive reappraisal.” It involves sensing and labeling an interoceptive sensation, as we’ve learned to do here, and then “reappraising” it—reinterpreting it in an adaptive way.
• We can, for example, reappraise “nervousness” as “excitement.” Consider the interoceptive sensations that accompany these two emotions: a racing heart, sweaty palms, a fluttering stomach. The feelings are almost identical; it’s the meaning we assign to them that makes them, variously, an ordeal to be dreaded or a thrill to be enjoyed.
• Before beginning the activity, participants were to direct themselves to stay calm, or to tell themselves that they were excited. Reappraising nervousness as excitement yielded a noticeable difference in performance. The IQ test-takers scored significantly higher.
• The speech givers came across as more persuasive, competent, and confident. Even the singers performed more passably (as judged by the Nintendo Wii Karaoke Revolution program they used). All reported genuinely feeling the pleasurable emotion of excitement—a remarkable shift away from the unpleasant discomfort such activities might be expected to engender.
• In a similar fashion, we can choose to reappraise debilitating “stress” as productive “coping.” A 2010 study carried out with Boston-area undergraduates looked at what happens when people facing a stressful experience are informed about the positive effects of stress on our thinking- that is the way it can make us more alert and more motivated.  Before taking the GRE, the admissions exam for graduate school, one group of students was given the following message to read: “People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better.  This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well. A second group received no such message before taking the exam. Three months later, when the students’ GRE scores were released, the students who had been encouraged to reappraise their feelings of stress scored an average of 65 points higher. 
• In the GRE study, saliva samples were collected from all the participants and analyzed for the presence of a hormone associated with nervous system arousal. Among the students who engaged in reappraisal, the level of this hormone was elevated—suggesting that their bodies had identified the presence of a challenge and were mounting an effective response, enhancing their alertness and sharpening their attention. 
• Another study explored the neural effects of the reappraisal technique on students who struggle with math anxiety. Their brains were scanned twice as they completed a set of math problems inside an fMRI machine. Before the first round, participants were told to use whatever strategies they usually employed. Before the first round, participants were told to use whatever strategies they usually employed. Before the second round, participants were given instructions on how to engage in reappraisal.  When employing the reappraisal approach, the students answered more of the math questions correctly, and the scans showed why: brain areas involved in executing arithmetic were more active under the reappraisal condition. The increased activity in these areas suggests that the act of reappraisal allowed students to redirect the mental resources that previously were consumed by anxiety, apply them to the math problems instead.
• Psychologists offer two additional points of interest for those adopting the strategy of reappraisal. 
  • The first is that reappraisal works best for those who are interoceptive aware: we have to be able to identify our internal sensations.
  • Second, the sensations we’re actually feeling have to be congruent with the emotion we’re aiming to construct. We’re able to reappraise nervousness as excitement because the physiological cues associated with the two emotions are so similar; if what we’re feeling is a heavy sense of apathy. 

Connecting with Others

• Becoming aware of our internal sensations can help us handle our own emotions. Perhaps more surprisingly, the body’s interoceptive faculty can also bring us into closer contact with other people’s emotions.
• Interpreting others’ spoken words and facial expressions may yield only a coolly abstract sense of the emotions that churn within. The body acts as a critical conduit, supplying the brain with the visceral information it lacks. It does so in this way: When interacting with other people, we subtly and unconsciously mimic their facial expressions, gestures postures, and vocal pitch.  Then, via the interoception of our own bodies’ signals, we perceive what the other person is feeling because we feel it in ourselves. We bring other people’s feelings onboard, and the body is the bridge. 
• When people can’t engage in such mimicking, they have a harder time figuring out what others are feeling. A striking example: people injected with the wrinkle reducer Botox, which works by inducing mild paralysis of the muscles used to generate facial expressions, are less accurate in their perceptions of others’ emotions.  On the other end, interoceptive attuned people are more likely to mimic the expressions of others, and more accurate in their interpretation of others’ feelings, than are people who are less aware of their bodily sensations. 
• Via mimicking, all of us “feel” the pain of others: research demonstrates that the areas of the brain involved in sensing our own pain are also activated when we see other people experience physical harm. But when interoceptive attuned people view someone experiencing pain, they rate the other person’s pain as more intense. 
• Studies also show that when interpersonal situations become challenging—when we feel socially rejected or excluded, for example—we tend to shift our focus away from our own internal sensations and toward external events, perhaps in an urgent effort to repair the breach. This shift, however well-intentioned, may cut us off from a source of insight about the other person just when we need it most. Better to attempt a flexible back-and-forth movement between attending to others’ social cues and to our own interoceptive signals (a process that recalls Elizabeth Stanley’s technique of “shuttling”). By drawing on data from both sources, we can feel our way into the other person’s emotional world while maintaining a vivid sense of our own.

2 Thinking with Movement

Power of Walking for our Decision Making 

• With a colleague, Fidler designed a study to test his hunch. Radiologists inspected a batch of images while seated, and while walking on a treadmill at one mile per hour. The participating physicians identified a total of 1,582 areas of concern in the slides and rated 459 of these as posing potentially serious risks to the health of the patient. When they compared the “detection rates” they achieved while sitting and while moving, the results were clear: radiologists who remained seated spotted an average of 85 percent of the irregularities present in the images, while those who walked identified, on average, fully 99 percent of them.
• Other evidence supports Fidler’s findings. A study conducted at the University of Maryland Medical Center, for example, found that radiologists reviewing images of patients’ lungs were more likely to identify potentially problematic nodules if they walked rather than sat as they worked.
• And a study conducted by physicians in the radiology department of the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, found that radiologists who used a treadmill workstation did their work faster, with no loss of accuracy.

When we’re engaged in physical activity, our visual sense is sharpened, especially with regard to stimuli appearing in the periphery of our gaze. This shift, which is also found in non-human animals, makes evolutionary sense: the visual system becomes more sensitive when we are actively exploring our environment. When our bodies are at rest—that is, sitting still in a chair—this heightened acuity is dialed down.

• In recent years, however, researchers have begun to explore an exciting additional possibility: that single bouts of physical activity can enhance our cognition in the short term. By moving our bodies in certain ways, that is, we’re immediately able to think more intelligently.
• Scientists investigating this phenomenon have approached it from two different directions: the intensity of the movement and the type of movement. As we’ll soon see, low-, medium-, and high-intensity physical activity each exerts a distinct effect on our cognition.
• The tight connection between thinking and moving is a legacy of our species’s evolutionary history. The human brain is approximately three times larger than it “should” be, given the dimensions of the human body; according to fossil evidence, a remarkable expansion in the size of the brain took place about 2 million years ago.

Standing Desks in School

• Maureen Zink, a fourth-grade teacher at Vallecito Elementary School in San Rafael, California. Her students don’t sit still at their desks; in fact, most of them are not sitting at all. In 2013, the entire school replaced traditional desks and chairs with standing desks, and the school’s “activity-permissive” ethos allows pupils to stand upright, perch on stools, sit on the floor, and otherwise move around as they wish. The teachers noticed asountanding results with students more alert, attentive and engaged. 
• It’s a mindset shift- we still associate stillness with seriousness, steadiness, and higher-quality decision-making. We believe there is something virtuous about controlling the impulse to move. What is overlooked is our capacity to regulate our attention and behavior is a limited resource, and some of it is used up by suppressing the very natural urge to move. 
  • Christine Langhanns and Hermann Müller of Justus Liebig University in Germany. For a study published in 2018, they asked groups of volunteers to solve a set of math problems in their heads while staying still, while remaining relaxed “but without substantial movement,” or while moving slightly in a rhythmic pattern. All the while, the participants’ cognitive load—how hard their brains were working—was being measured with a brain-scanning technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The results were illuminating. Subjects’ cognitive load “considerably increased under the instruction ‘not to move,’ ” Langhanns and Müller report. Significantly, the stay-still command increased brain activity in the same area as did the mental calculations: the prefrontal cortex, responsible for carrying out intellectual tasks like arithmetic and for keeping our impulses in check.
  • Of the three conditions, the requirement to remain still produced the poorest performance on the math problems; the greater their overall cognitive load as registered by fNIRS, the worse the subjects did on the calculations. “Sitting quietly is not necessarily the best condition for learning in school.”

Bursts of Activity 

• Julie Schweitzer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, led a 2016 study of children aged ten to seventeen who had been diagnosed with ADHD. As the young participants worked on a challenging mental task, their movements were monitored by a sensor, called an actometer, strapped to their ankles. She found that more intense physical movement was associated with better cognitive performance on the task. The more the children moved, in other words, the more effectively they were able to think.
• One study found that people who were directed to doodle while carrying out a boring listening task remembered 29 percent more information than people who did not doodle.
• The proposed mechanisms by which these changes occur include heightened arousal (as Kahneman speculated), increased blood flow to the brain, and the release of a number of neurochemicals, which increase the efficiency of information transmission in the brain and which promote the growth of neurons, or brain cells. The beneficial mental effects of moderately intense activity have been shown to last for as long as two hours after exercise ends.
• Instead, we should be figuring out how to incorporate bursts of physical activity into the work day and the school day—which means rethinking how we approach our breaks. Lunch breaks, coffee breaks, downtime between tasks or meetings: all become occasions to use exercise to maneuver our brains into an optimally functioning state.
• This observation, too, is supported by research: scientists draw what they call an “inverted U-shaped curve” to describe the relationship between exercise intensity and cognitive function, with the greatest benefits for thinking detected in the moderate-intensity middle part of the hump. On the right downward slope of the curve, where high-intensity activity is charted, control over cognition does indeed start to slacken—but this is not always a bad thing.

 

Very intense exercise, extended over a relatively long period, can induce a kind of altered state conducive to creative thought.

• Scientists have a term for the “void” Murakami describes: “transient hypofrontality.” Hypo means low or diminished, and frontality refers to the frontal region of the brain—the part that plans, analyzes, and critiques and that usually maintains firm control over our thoughts and behavior. When all of our resources are devoted to managing the demands of intense physical activity, however, the influence of the prefrontal cortex is temporarily reduced. In this loose hypofrontal mode, ideas and impressions mingle more freely; unusual and unexpected thoughts arise. Scientists speculate that the phenomenon of transient hypofrontality may underlie all kinds of altered states, from dreaming to drug trips—but intense exercise may be the most reliable way to induce it. Low- and moderate-intensity exercise does not generate this disinhibiting effect. (Indeed, as we’ve seen, moderately intense physical activity enhances executive function).  Achieving transient hypofrontality generally requires exercising at one’s “ventilatory threshold”—the point at which breathing becomes labored, corresponding to about 80 percent of the exerciser’s heart rate for forty minutes or more. 
• It’s a daunting summit to scale, but when it is reached, observes Kathryn Schulz, another writer-runner, it can “provoke a kind of Cartesian collapse”: mind and body melding together in what she calls a “glorious collusion.” 
• Over the past several decades, the field of embodied cognition has produced persuasive evidence that our thoughts—even, or especially, those of an abstract or symbolic nature—are powerfully shaped by the way we move our bodies. This more recent corpus of research turns that causal arrow around so that it points in the opposite direction: we move our bodies, and our thoughts are influenced in turn.  The exciting implication of such findings is that we can intentionally enhance our mental functioning through an application of physical activity.
• Our memory for what we have done, however—for physical actions we have undertaken—is much more robust. Linking movement to the material to be recalled creates a richer and more indelible “memory trace” in the brain. 
• In addition, movements engage a process called procedural memory (memory of how to do something, such as how to ride a bike) that is distinct from declarative memory (memory of informational content, such as the text of a speech). When we connect movement with information, we activate both types of memory, and our recall is more accurate as a result – a phenomenon known as the “enactment effect.” 
• Tony Noice, a professor of theater at Elmhurst as well as a Chicago-area actor, has spent years studying actors’ ability to memorize pages and pages of lines. They have determined that during the performance, actors render written lines with 98 percent accuracy, on average; months after a play’s run has ended, the Noices found, actors can still recall verbatim some 90 percent of the script. How do they do it? Actors’ mental feats are intimately connected to the movement they make with their bodies. 
  • First: information is better remembered when we’re moving as we learn it. This is the case even when the movement is not a literal enactment of the meaning of the information to be recalled but simply a movement of the body, meaningfully related to the information and made at the same time the information is absorbed.
  • Second: information that has become associated with a movement is better remembered when we can reproduce that same movement later when we’re calling it up from memory. This may be possible in some situations—for example, when giving a speech for which we have practiced accompanying gestures—but moving while learning is still beneficial even when those movements can’t be replicated at the point of recall (during an exam, for instance).

• The research on using movement to enhance thinking identifies four types of helpful motion: congruent movements, novel movements, self-referential movements, and metaphorical movements.

Congruent Movement

• The first of these, congruent movements, express in physical form the content of a thought. With the motions of our bodies, we enact the meaning of a fact or concept. Congruent movements are an effective way to reinforce still tentative or emerging knowledge by introducing a corporeal component into the process of understanding and remembering. A familiar example is moving the body along a number line: children who are learning about math benefit from taking steps on an oversized number line placed on the floor as they count or as they carry out procedures like addition and subtraction. Students who practice connecting numbers with movements in this way later demonstrate more mathematics knowledge and skill.

Novel Movement

• Another kind of physical action capable of advancing our thinking is novel movements: movements that introduce us to an abstract concept via a bodily experience we haven’t had before. science class, students should not be relegated to the role of observer. Only those who physically participate will gain the deeper, from-the-inside understanding that comes from physical action.

Self- referential Movement 

• YET ANOTHER TYPE of motion with the capacity to improve the way we think is self-referential movements: movements in which we bring ourselves—in particular, our bodies—into the intellectual enterprise. Though it may seem “unscientific” to place oneself at the center of the action, scientists themselves frequently use their bodies as instruments of exploration, imagining themselves as the object of their investigation. In so doing, they cultivate a kind of “empathy with entities they are struggling to understand,”
• Albert Einstein, reportedly imagined himself riding on a beam of light while developing his theory of relativity. “No scientist thinks in equations,” Einstein once claimed. Rather, he remarked, the elements of his own thought were “visual” and even “muscular” in nature.
• Virologist Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, is another scientist who brought his body into his research. He once described how he went about his work in this way: “I would picture myself as a virus, or a cancer cell, for example, and try to sense what it would be like to be either. I would also imagine myself as the immune system, and I would try to reconstruct what I would do as an immune system engaged in combating a virus or cancer cell. When I had played through a series of such scenarios on a particular problem and had acquired new insights, I would design laboratory experiments accordingly.”
• We’ve evolved to understand events and ideas in terms of how they relate to us, not from some neutral or impartial perspective. Research has found that the act of self-reference—connecting new knowledge to our own identity or experience—functions as a kind of “integrative glue,” imparting a stickiness that the same information lacks when it is encountered as separate and unrelated to the self.
• To take one example: by moving our bodies, we activate a deeply ingrained and mostly unconscious metaphor connecting dynamic motion with dynamic thinking. Call to mind the words we use when we can’t seem to muster an original idea—we’re “stuck,” “in a rut”—and those we reach for when we feel visited by the muse. Then we’re “on a roll,” our thoughts are “flowing.” Research has demonstrated that people can be placed in a creative state of mind by physically acting out creativity-related figures of speech—like “thinking outside the box.”

 

Psychologist Evan Polman of the University of Wisconsin–Madison designed an experiment in which participants were asked to complete a creative thinking task. Some students carried out the assignment while sitting inside a five-foot-square cardboard box; others completed the task while sitting next to the box. The participants who did their thinking literally “outside the box” came up with a list of creative solutions that was, on average, 20 percent longer than the list produced by those who brainstormed inside the box.

Polman and his colleagues also tested the generative effect of enacting another metaphor: the use of the phrase “on one hand . . . on the other hand” to convey the consideration of multiple possibilities. This time, participants were asked to come up with novel uses for a new campus building complex; half of them were asked to hold one hand outstretched as they engaged in brainstorming, while the others were instructed to alternate holding out one hand and then the other. The study subjects who (unwittingly) acted out the metaphor “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” generated nearly 50 percent more potential uses for the building, and independent judges rated their ideas as more varied and more creative.

Another test presented participants with an evocative image, such as “a light bulb blowing out,” and asked them to come up with an analogous image (like, for example, “a nuclear reactor melting down”). Ninety-five percent of students who walked were able to do so, compared to only 50 percent of those who remained immobile. “Walking opens up the free flow of ideas,” the authors conclude.

Studies by other researchers have even suggested that following a meandering, free-form route—as opposed to a fixed and rigid one—may further enhance creative thought processes.

 

3 Thinking with Gesture

• Researchers who study embodied cognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and convey their thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of the hands and the rest of the body. Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch. Where language is discrete and linear—one word following another—gesture is impressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things look and feel and move.
• The special strengths of gesture are especially valuable in the effort to persuade or enlist others. Such movements visually place the gesturer at the center of the action, situating him at the locus of agency and control. When he talks, his words may describe or extol or explain—but when he gestures, he acts on the world (if only symbolically).
• At the same time, the gesturer’s motions render an abstract idea in human-scale, embodied terms, an act of translation that makes it easier for onlookers to mentally simulate the gesturer’s point of view for themselves.
• Perhaps most important, gesture generates the sense that an as yet immaterial enterprise is a palpable reality in the present moment.

Gesture brings an uncertain future into the observable present, imbues it with a realness that we can almost touch.

• colleagues reported that company founders who deployed “the skilled use of gesture” in their pitches were 12 percent more likely to attract funding for their new ventures.
• Research demonstrates that gestures can enhance our memory by reinforcing the spoken word with visual and motor cues. It can free up our mental resources by “offloading” information onto our hands. And it can help us understand and express abstract ideas—especially those, such as spatial or relational concepts, that are inadequately expressed by words alone.
• Moving our hands helps our heads to think more intelligently, and yet gesture is often scorned as hapless “hand waving,” or disparaged as showy or gauche. Research shows that we all engage in such “gestural foreshadowing,” in which our hands anticipate what we’re about to say. When we realize we’ve said something in error and we pause to go back to correct it, for example, we stop gesturing a couple of hundred milliseconds before we stop speaking. Such sequences suggest the startling notion that our hands “know” what we’re going to say before our conscious minds do, and in fact this is often the case. Gestures can mentally prime a word so that the right term comes to our lips.

Negative Impact of Not Gesturing

• When people are prevented from gesturing, they talk less fluently; their speech becomes halting because their hands are no longer able to supply them with the next word, and the next.
• Not being able to gesture has other deleterious effects: without gestures to help our mental processes along, we remember less useful information, we solve problems less well, and we are less able to explain our thinking.
• researchers have documented a link between a child’s rate of gesturing at fourteen months and the size of that same child’s vocabulary at four and a half years of age. Children learn to make these movements from the gesturing figures around them: adults. Studies show that children whose parents gesture a lot proceed to gesture frequently themselves, and eventually acquire expansive spoken-word vocabularies.
• High-income parents gesture more than low-income parents, research finds. And it’s not just the quantity of gesture that differs but also the quality: more affluent parents provide a greater variety of types of gesture, representing more categories of meaning—physical objects, abstract concepts, social signals. Parents and children from poorer backgrounds, meanwhile, tend to use a narrower range of gestures when they interact with each other. Following the example set by their parents, high-income kids gesture more than their low-income counterparts. In one study, fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gestures to convey an average of twenty-four different meanings during a ninety-minute observation session, while children from lower-income families conveyed only thirteen meanings. Four years later, when it was time to start school, children from the richer families scored an average of 117 on a measure of vocabulary comprehension, compared to 93 for children from the poorer families.
• Any parent can adopt the strategies suggested by these intervention programs: Engage in frequent pointing with young children, and encourage the kids themselves to point. Incorporate this same gesture into the reading of picture books; point to particular words or illustrations, and ask children to point to what they see.
• Come up with simple gestures to pair with real-life referents—a clawing motion for cat, a wiggling index finger for a caterpillar—and be sure to say the word aloud as the gesture is demonstrated.

Gesture Leads to Understanding

• When speech and gesture are both correct and congruent, it’s a given that the speaker has mastered the material. When speech and gestures match but both are wrong, we can assume that the speaker is still far from “getting it.” But when there’s a mismatch between speech and gesture—when a person says one thing but does something else with her hands—then that individual can be said to be in a “transitional state,” moving from the incorrect notion she’s expressing in words to the correct one she is expressing in gesture. In videos recorded by Goldin-Meadow of children carrying out conservation tasks, new understandings emerged first in a gesture some 40 percent of the time.
• Such mismatches appear to be a common occurrence across development: when ten-year-olds solve math problems, one study reported, their gestures represent strategies different from those found in their speech about 30 percent of the time. Another study found that for fifteen-year-olds working on a problem-solving task, the rate of speech-gesture mismatch was 32 percent.
• Furthermore, Goldin-Meadow has found, learners who produce such speech-gesture mismatches are especially receptive to instruction—ready to absorb and apply the correct knowledge, should a parent or teacher supply it. Even adults signal their readiness to learn through mismatches between what they’re saying and how their hands are moving.

 

WHY WOULD OUR “most advanced ideas” appear in our gestures before surfacing in our speech? Researchers speculate that gesture helps give shape to an incipient notion still forming in our minds.

• The role played by gesture in consolidating our initially inchoate thoughts is revealed by the changes our hand motions undergo as we begin to master new material.
• At first, we gesture profusely, and rather indiscriminately, as we attempt to wrap our heads around an unfamiliar idea. We gesture more when we are actively trying to apprehend or reason about a concept than when we are describing a concept we already understand. 
• As our comprehension deepens, our language becomes more precise and our movements become more defined. Gestures are less frequent, and more coordinated in meaning and timing with the words we say. Our hand motions are now more oriented toward communicating with others and less about scaffolding our own thinking.

 

• People are also more likely to remember what we’ve said when we deliver gestures along with our words. In one study, subjects who had watched a videotaped speech were 33 percent more likely to recall a point from the talk if it was accompanied by a gesture. 
• This effect, detected immediately after the subjects viewed the recording, grew even more pronounced with the passage of time: thirty minutes after watching the speech, subjects were more than 50 percent more likely to remember the gesture-accompanied points.

Seek out Gesture for Learning 

• It’s just these benefits of observing gestures that should lead us to take a second step: seeking out educational resources, for ourselves and others, in which the instructor makes proficient use of physical movement.
• Videos that incorporate gestures seem to be especially helpful for those who begin with relatively little knowledge of the concept being covered; for all learners, the beneficial effect of gesture appears to be even stronger for video instruction than for live, in-person instruction.
• Designed gestures offer another benefit as well: they are especially effective at reinforcing our memory. That’s because gesturing while speaking involves sinking multiple mental “hooks” into the material to be remembered—hooks that enable us to reel in that piece of information when it is needed later on. There is the auditory hook: we hear ourselves saying the words aloud. 
• There is the visual hook: we see ourselves making the relevant gesture. And there is the “proprioceptive” hook; this comes from feeling our hands make the gesture. (Proprioception is the sense that allows us to know where our body parts are positioned in space.) Surprisingly, this proprioceptive cue may be the most powerful of the three: research shows that making gestures enhances our ability to think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view.

PART II Thinking with Our Surroundings 

4 Thinking with Natural Spaces

Our environment shapes our thinking more than we know…

• ARTISTS LIKE Jackson Pollock are not the only people whose mental activity is shaped by their surroundings; all of us think differently depending on where we are.
• The field of cognitive science commonly compares the human brain to a computer, but the influence of place reveals a major limitation of this analogy: while a laptop works the same way whether it’s being used at the office or while we’re sitting in a park, the brain is deeply affected by the setting in which it operates.
• And nature provides particularly rich and fertile surroundings with which to think. That’s because our brains and bodies evolved to thrive in the outdoors; our ancient forebears practiced a lifestyle that would look, to us, like “a camping trip that lasts a lifetime,” as a pair of ecologists has put it.
• Only about 7 percent of our time is spent outdoors. More than 60 percent of American adults report spending five hours or less outside in nature each week. Children, too, engage in outdoor recreation far less frequently than earlier generations; only 26 percent of mothers report that their kids play outside every day. Such trends are likely to continue: more than half of Earth’s humans now live in cities, and by 2050 that figure is predicted to reach almost 70 percent.
• “Natural scenery,” wrote landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, “employs the mind without fatigue and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.”

 

IT’S NOT SIMPLY that we prefer such settings. They actually help us to think better—in part by relieving our stress and reestablishing our mental equilibrium. Drivers who travel along tree-lined roads, for example, recover more quickly from stressful experiences, and handle emerging stresses with more calm, than do people who drive along roads crowded with billboards, buildings, and parking lots.

• Yet another way that nature helps us think better is by enhancing our ability to maintain our focus on the task in front of us. People who have recently spent time amid outdoor greenery catch more errors on a proofreading assignment, for example, and provide quicker and more accurate answers on a fast-paced cognitive test, than do people who have just finished a walk in an urban setting.
• a twenty-minute walk in a park improved children’s concentration and impulse control as much as a dose of an ADHD drug like Ritalin. “ ‘Doses of nature’ might serve as a safe, inexpensive, widely accessible new tool in the tool kit for managing ADHD symptoms,” the researchers concluded.

 

5 Thinking with Built Spaces

• “Neuroarchitecture” has begun to examine empirically how the brain responds to buildings and their interiors, and to theorize about how these reactions might be shaped by our evolutionary history and by the biological facts of our bodies.

Spaces Impact on Children

• “Barker and his colleagues found that there was a great deal of order, consistency, and predictability in the children’s behavior.” But this order was not a product of the children’s personalities, nor their intelligence, or any other internal quality. Rather, the factor that overwhelmingly determined the way the children acted as the place in which they were observed. “The characteristics of the behavior of a child often changed dramatically when he moved from one region to another, e.g. from classroom to hall, to the playground, from drugstore to street, from a baseball game to shower room.”

Closing Your Eyes

• How much better we think when we close our eyes. Eye closure “helps people to disengage from environmental stimulation and thereby enhances the efficiency of cognitive processing,” one team of researchers reports.
• Temporarily relieved of such stimulation, people experience less cognitive load, are better able to engage in visualization, and can more readily retrieve elusive information when faced with one of those frustrating “tip-of-the-tongue” moments. They’re also much better at recalling details, both visual and auditory.
• One study reported a 23 percent increase in correct answers when participants closed their eyes as they answered questions about a film they had just watched.
• In a study published in 2012, he found that granting the workers greater privacy—concealing their activities behind a curtain—led them to become more innovative and more productive. They came up with faster and more effective ways of doing their work when the process of experimentation was shielded from view.

Make Your Space Your Own 

• When people occupy spaces that they consider their own, they experience themselves as more confident and capable. They are more efficient and productive. They are more focused and less distractible. And they advance their own interests more forcefully and effectively.
• A study by psychologists Graham Brown and Markus Baer, for example, found that people who engage in negotiation within the bounds of their own space claim between 60 and 160 percent more value than the “visiting” party.
• When we’re on our home turf, Meagher has found, our mental and perceptual processes operate more efficiently, with less need for effortful self-control. The mind works better because it doesn’t do all the work on its own; it gets an assist from the structure embedded in its environment, a structure that marshals useful information, supports effective habits and routines, and restrains unproductive impulses.
• Research finds that people who keep lines of communication perpetually open consistently generate middling solutions—nothing terrible, but nothing exceptional either.
• The best of all worlds is enjoyed by those who engage in cycles of sociable interaction and quiet focus. Just as we need walls to protect us from our propensity to be distracted, so we require walls to shield us from our susceptibility to social pressure.

 

WHAT ARRANGEMENT of space could support this way of thinking and working? A surprisingly apt model can be found in the one adopted by Jonas Salk and Louis Kahn: the monastery.

• In the popular imagination, monks are solitary, hermit-like creatures—but historically they have lived within a communal setting that balanced time spent alone in study and contemplation with time spent with others in robust social interaction.
• In describing the abbey’s architecture, Irvine observes that the buildings reflect their inhabitants’ daily cycles of intense engagement and hushed withdrawal, accommodating communal spaces like the library, the refectory, the workshop, and the courtyard, as well as the monks’ solitary cells.

Cues of Identity  

• Research shows that in the presence of cues of identity and cues of affiliation, people perform better: they’re more motivated and more productive. 
  • The first of these are the tangible signs and signals we employ to support our self-conception: we’re the kind of person who likes cats, or rock climbing, or “Far Side” cartoons.

• We use our space to advertise our hobbies, to show off our awards and honors, to express an unexpected creative streak or a quirky sense of humor. Such displays may sometimes be aimed at informing other people of who we are (or who we’d like to be), but often they are intended for a more intimate audience: ourselves.
• The material things we arrange around us help us maintain that sturdy self-conception. As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written, we keep certain objects in view because “they tell us things about ourselves that we need to hear in order to keep our selves from falling apart.” found that incorporating personal items into their workspaces helped them relieve the “emotional exhaustion” brought on by a stressful job. 

Conclusion

• Using “cognitive reappraisal” to reinterpret bodily signals, as we learned to do in chapter 1, can head off the performance-suppressing effects of anxiety.
• Adding “cues of belonging” to the physical environment, of the kind we explored in chapter 5, can generate a sense of psychological ease that’s conducive to intelligent thought. And carefully structuring the expert feedback offered to a “cognitive apprentice,” as we learned about in chapter 7, can instill the confidence necessary to overcome self-doubt.

The first set of principles lays out some habits of mind we would do well to adopt, starting with this 

1st Principle: 

• whenever possible, we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world. In its most straightforward form, offloading is the simple act of putting our thoughts down on paper—simple, but often skipped over in a world that values doing things in our heads. Externalizing information takes a more involved form: it may entail carefully designing a task such that one part of the task is offloaded even as another part absorbs our full attention. At times, offloading may be embodied: when we gesture, for example, we permit our hands to “hold” some of the thoughts we would otherwise have to maintain in our head. Likewise, when we use our hands to move objects around, we offload the task of visualizing new configurations onto the world itself,
• At other times, offloading may be social: we’ve seen how engaging in argument allows us to distribute among human debaters the task of tallying points for and against a given proposition; we’ve learned how constructing a transactive memory system offloads onto our colleagues the task of monitoring and remembering incoming information.

 

2nd Principle: 

• Whenever possible, we should endeavor to transform information into an artifact, to make data into something real—and then proceed to interact with it, labeling it, mapping it, feeling it, tweaking it, showing it to others. Humans evolved to handle the concrete, not to contemplate the abstract. We extend our intelligence when we give our minds something to grab onto: when we experience a concept from physics as a bicycle wheel spinning in our hands, for example, or when we turn a foreign language vocabulary word into a gesture we can see and sense and demonstrate to others.

3rd Principle: 

• whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor. The way we’re able to think about information is dramatically affected by the state we’re in when we encounter it.
• Effective mental extension, then, requires us to think carefully about inducing in ourselves the state that is best suited for the task at hand. We might engage in a bout of brisk exercise before sitting down to learn something new, for example; we might seek out an opportunity to engage in group synchrony and shared arousal when we’re expecting to work together as a team.  Deliberately altering our own state could entail taking a walk in a nearby park when our ideas are sound. 
• The brain is well adapted to sensing and moving the body, to navigating through physical space, and to interacting with other members of our species. 
• In order to succeed at the increasingly complex thinking modern life demands, we will find ourselves needing to translate abstractions back into the corporeal, spatial, and social forms from which they sprang- forms with which the brain is still most at ease. 

 

4th Principle: 

• whenever possible, we should take measures to re-embody the information we think about. The pursuit of knowledge has frequently sought to disengage thinking from the body, to elevate ideas to a cerebral sphere separate from our grubby animal anatomy. 
• Research on the extended mind counsels the opposite approach: we should be seeking to draw the body back into the thinking process. 
• As we’ve seen from research on embodied cognition, at a deep level the brain still understands abstract concepts in terms of physical action, a fact reflected in the words we use (“reaching for a goal,” “running behind schedule”); we can assist the brain in its efforts by bringing the literal body back into the act of thinking. 

5th Principle:

• Whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about. 
• Neuroscientific research indicates that our brains process and store information—even, or especially, abstract information—in the form of mental maps. We can work in concert with the brain’s natural spatial orientation by placing the information we encounter into expressly spatial formats: creating memory palaces or concept maps.  In the realm of education research, experts now speak of “spatializing the curriculum”—that is, simultaneously drawing on and strengthening students’ spatial capacities by having them employ spatial language and gestures, engage in sketching and mapmaking, charts,etc.. 

6th Principle:

• Whenever possible, we should take measures to re-socialize the information we think about. Research we’ve reviewed demonstrates that the brain processes the “same” information differently, and often more effectively, when other human beings are involved—whether we’re imitating them, debating them, exchanging stories with them, synchronizing and cooperating with them, teaching or being taught by them.  We are inherently social creatures, and our thinking benefits from bringing other people into our train of thought. 

Mental Extensions

• The final set of principles of mental extension steps back for a still wider view, taking up a rather profound question: What kind of creatures are we? 
• A clear-eyed acknowledgment of our quirks can lead us to create new kinds of mental routines, such as the one encapsulated in the seventh principle: 

7th Principle:

• Whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.  Something about our biological intelligence benefits from being rotated in and out of internal and external modes of cognition, from being passed among the brain, body, and world. This means we should resist the urge to shunt our thinking along the linear path appropriate to a computer- input, output, done- and instead allow it to take a more winding path.  What we shouldn’t do is keep our thoughts inside our heads, inert, unchanged by encounters with the world beyond the skull.

 

8th Principle: 

• Whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by creating cognitively congenial situations. We often find that the brain is an unreliable and even impertinent attendant: fickle in its focus, porous in its memory, and inconstant in its efforts. The problem lies in our attempt to command it. We’ll elicit improved performance from the brain when we approach it with the aim not of issuing orders but of creating situations that draw out the desired result.
• Instead of dictating to a student the information she needs to learn, for example, have her explain it in front of a group of her peers; the gestures she makes will generate a deeper level of understanding.
• of handing an employee a manual packed with guidelines, create spaces and occasions where stories—full of the tacit knowledge manuals can’t convey—will be shared among his co-workers.

Final Principle of Extension:

• The final principle of extension doubles back on itself with a self-referential observation. What kind of creatures are we? The kind who extend, eagerly and energetically, when given the chance.
• Consider: research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology indicates that when we begin using a tool, our “body schema”—our sense of the body’s shape, size, and position—rapidly expands to encompass it, as if the tool we’re grasping in our hand has effectively become an extension of our arm.

9th Principle: 

• Whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments. Picture, even, the indoor plants and “green” walls and roofs that help restore our attention by providing regular glimpses of nature. Once securely embedded, such extensions can function as seamless adjuncts to our neural capacity, supporting and augmenting our ability to think intelligently.
• Most intriguing, results from these studies show that skill at employing extensions, as assessed by a test, corresponds to real-world performance: empirical evidence that individuals who can extend their minds more fully can solve problems more effectively in everyday life.

 

Andy Clark—published a study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The researchers set out, they wrote, “to quantitatively assess a powerful, although understudied, a feature of human intelligence: our ability to use external objects, props, and aids to solve complex problems.”

A suggestive finding soon surfaced: test takers who took full advantage of the new interactive feature were often able to identify patterns that had not been apparent to them before they began shifting the pieces around.

An analysis of the moves they made while taking the test showed that these active extenders seemed to be running their thinking processes through successive loops—switching between external actions, which altered the problem-solving space in helpful ways, and internal evaluations of the new configurations thus created.

Final results demonstrated that the more test takers extended their minds using the movable pieces, the more successful they were at solving the complex visual puzzles.

 

What’s more, the researchers found, the extended-mind version of the test was better than the standard “static” Raven at predicting students’ intellectual performance outside the lab—in the form of the grades they received in their college courses.