Extend Your Mind Beyond Your Brain With Annie Murphy Paul

We are sensing the world around us all the time. We often do not recognize the information picked up by our bodies. Do you want to extend your thinking beyond your brain? Do you want to learn how to use your body to enhance your use of information in the world around you? In this episode of “Your Life in Process,” Diana discusses why and how to expand our thinking beyond our brain with acclaimed science writer, Annie Murphy Paul.

Transcript

Do you want to learn how to extend your thinking beyond your brain and even how you can use your body or the space that you're in or other people to think more effectively?

That's what we're going to explore today with Annie Murphy-Paul on your life in process.

Oftentimes when we think about thinking,

We think about it as existing within our brains,

But Annie Murphy-Paul has a different perspective on thought.

She believes that our thinking extends beyond our brain to our body.

We can think with our sensations,

We can think with how we move,

And we can think with our physical gesture.

She also argues that our thinking exists within our surroundings,

Our natural spaces,

Our built spaces,

Or even the space of ideas impacts how we think,

And we can use those spaces to think better.

Finally,

Annie talks about how we think within our relationships.

When we're working with experts or our peers or in groups,

These types of social interactions impact our thinking,

And we also can use those different groups to expand our thinking.

I'm excited to share this episode with you because so much of what Annie Murphy-Paul talks about,

I imagine you already intuitively do,

But she has the science behind it.

And for a long time as a therapist have felt like so much of my therapy extends beyond just talking.

It's the nonverbal communication that I have with my clients.

It's the emotional sensations that I'm feeling or they're feeling in the moment.

It's even how I've set up my office to make it feel like it's a healing,

Peaceful,

Or safe environment.

How we think has a lot to do with stuff that we don't even think it has to do with.

And that's what Annie Murphy-Paul has been exploring in her book,

The Extended Mind.

Annie Murphy-Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine,

Scientific American,

And the Best American Science Writing among other publications.

And her latest book,

The Extended Mind,

Was selected as editor's choice by the New York Times Book Review.

She's also the author of Origins,

Named the New York Times Book Review as a notable book,

And the cult personality.

Her TED Talk has been viewed more than 2.

6 million times,

And she's been the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships,

And is a graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

You'll love her,

And you will also learn to love the sound of her cat in the background.

So I learned about halfway through the episode that Annie puts her laptop on top of her cat condo,

And the cat is scratching in the background throughout.

But once you know it's the kitty cat scratching in the condo and not some other annoying scratching sound happening,

Maybe you can just imagine a happy cat with its owner working at home,

Like you may be as well.

All righty,

So enjoy the podcast.

I'm curious where you are when you're listening to it,

And what environment you're in,

And if you're moving your body,

Because all of those things impact our learning.

I read a lot of these books,

Or at least listen to a lot of these books on my runs,

And I can remember the different chapters of the book as they link up to the different parts of my run.

So I do wonder,

Where are you right now?

What are you doing when you're listening to this,

And is it enhancing and extending your mind?

I'll see you on the other side,

Where I'll give you some tips to try out this week.

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Okay.

So here we are with Annie Murphy-Paul,

And I've actually mentioned you already on this podcast because it's my favorite book of 2022,

Even though it came out in 2021.

And I read it in 2022,

And I read a lot of books.

And what I am excited about is that I think that it not only,

The title of it is The Extended Mind,

But it extended my mind in so many ways.

And I feel like a lot of times I read things that have already been said,

And you were able to say things in a really fresh perspective that I apply now to my clinical practice,

To my parenting,

And to my training of professionals.

So I'm thrilled to talk with you today about The Extended Mind.

Well,

Thanks,

Diana.

I mean,

Two things that come to mind when I listen to you give me that lovely introduction.

One is that it's so important to me as a writer to be saying something new.

I mean,

If I'm just sort of rehashing what's already out there,

It's like,

Why bother?

And it took me kind of a long time to find my way to this idea.

And in a way,

It's ironic that we should be talking about fresh ideas because actually this is a borrowed idea.

I borrowed it from a couple of philosophers.

It's not my idea,

But I do hope,

And this speaks to the second thing I was thinking,

That I was able to take an idea and make it really practical.

That was also really important to me to not have it be an ivory tower or pie in the sky kind of thing,

But something that people could really put to use in their everyday lives.

And I've found that to be the case in my own life.

So that's,

It's really nice to hear that that has been the case for you too.

So your book takes the concept of the mind,

Which we think of it as being in the head,

Which psychology is guilty of.

And you take it out of the head and into all of these different places.

So the thinking with our bodies,

Thinking with the spaces that we're in,

And then also thinking with our relationships.

And I think it would be nice for us to go through each one of those categories.

And maybe you can talk a bit about some of the research behind thinking in these different ways within those categories,

But also talk about,

Like you said,

How you're applying this in your life.

And I can give a little bit about how I'm applying it in my life as well,

How I'm thinking about things differently with the extended mind.

Let's start with our bodies.

And I was so excited that you started at that spot.

So how do we think with our bodies?

How does our mind extend to that?

Yeah,

I think it's an important place to start.

It's almost like the most important and fundamental place to start.

And yet so many of us don't really think with our bodies.

And I'm as guilty of this or more guilty of this than anyone.

And I always say that writers write what they need to learn because I am myself someone who lives in my head a whole lot.

I've been a freelance writer for 20 years and I spend my day thinking about ideas and working with words.

And so it's very easy for me to forget that I have a body.

And I think that that's even more of a danger now that we're on screen so much.

We can spend an entire day not even relating to another body in person,

But actually just kind of being in our head.

So what I mean when I say that we can think with our bodies and should think with our bodies is that we should be,

I don't want to say should,

It would benefit us so much if we were able to remember that we can think not only with our brains,

But with the internal sensations that are always flowing within our body.

That's a capacity that scientists call interoception that we can think with the gestures of our hands and not just with the words that we,

The verbal language that we utter.

And also that we can think with the physical movements of our body,

The gross,

Big movements of our bodies as well as hand gestures.

I'll just say one more word about how I've applied that in my own life.

The interoceptive research has been especially profound for me because I find that our world is so busy and so full of stimuli that's always reaching out to grab our attention that it's very easy to always be looking outward.

And there's this internal flow of sensation that's very quiet and subtler than all the noisy stuff outside.

And so it's very easy to forget that that's there.

And once I started reading about the benefits of tuning into our interoception,

I started making time to pause and kind of ask myself not only what's going on in my external world,

But what's going on in my internal world.

And once you do that,

It's just amazing how much there is to feel and how much there is going on on the inside.

And it really is a capacity that we can develop and cultivate and become ever more sensitive to.

And so that's been a really wonderful discovery for me.

So I highlighted in the book where you wrote that clinical psychologists are the champions of interoceptive awareness.

And I was like,

Yes,

Not only are we the champions,

We're also,

It actually is a hard thing to be so interoceptly aware.

Sometimes I felt like,

You know the movie Ghost,

Where I think it's Whippy Goldberg goes inside of Patrick Swayze's body or something like that and then comes out of it again and feels so exhausted.

I feel like that with my clients,

That I have this awareness of not only what's happening in my body,

But I also try on what's happening in their body.

And interoceptive awareness is not only helpful for us as individuals,

It's helpful for us to be able to empathize and have compassion and be able to understand what's happening with others as well.

So I love that part of the book where you talk about the benefits of interoceptive awareness in our relationships.

Yeah,

What researchers call social interoception.

Yeah,

I love that too because it made so much sense to me to understand the mechanism by which that happens that we don't have direct access to what another person is thinking.

You can't go inside,

Literally go inside the head of your patient or your client when you're working with them.

So how do you know what they feel?

The reason I said that clinical psychologists are the champions of interoception is that they actually,

You guys actually are trained and actually cultivate your ability to sense within your own body what your patient is feeling and what they may not even be able to say at that point.

And so it's so interesting to hear you say that actually it can be exhausting or it can be,

You know,

You're really almost taking on the emotions of somebody else because of your extreme sensitivity.

And I think it's interesting to think about how medical doctors who have to often,

You know,

Sometimes have to cause pain in order to speed healing.

Like if you have to give someone a shot or draw blood or a surgeon has to actually cut through someone's flesh,

They actually become very adept at subduing their interoception because if they felt what their patient felt every time they did a procedure,

They would be,

They'd burn out pretty fast.

But for you to do your job well,

You have to cultivate and make that capacity of interoception ever keener.

So that's,

It's a big ask,

You know,

It's really like an admirable thing that people in your profession do on behalf of their patients.

Well,

I've worked with it over the years to be able to do it without it,

You know,

Getting into that fatigues state.

But early on my my early research was actually on interoception and it was on interoceptive awareness.

I worked with eating disorders and what's interesting about folks with eating disorders and especially folks with anorexia is not only have they shut off their interoceptive awareness of their hunger and fullness,

They have anorexia,

Like they don't actually feel hunger anymore.

They also shut off their emotional awareness.

So it's alexithymia,

Which is the inability to name or or even understand your own emotions.

So part of the recovery from that is training people to become more interoceptively aware of what's happening inside of your body.

And there's so much that happens in there,

You know,

There's emotions that happen in there and sensations and all sorts of things.

So it was really fun to learn about how actually having that awareness increases our cognition and helps us think better.

And some of the research that you talk about with stock exchange folks,

Because I can use this now with my clients,

I can be like,

It's not only just,

You know,

Beneficial for you in this way,

It's also going to make you make money,

But be more effective at your job.

Yeah,

I mean,

A couple of thoughts there.

One is that increasingly,

Researchers are connecting all kinds of mental health conditions to impaired interoception,

You know,

Not just eating disorders,

But also addiction,

You know,

The cues that lead people to seek out drugs or alcohol and also anxiety and panic disorders,

Which can be a case of kind of being oversensitive to the body's signals and assuming that,

You know,

A little shortness of breath means that you're you're not able to breathe and then that leads to a spirals into a panic attack.

So working with our interoception is really important for our psychological health and well-being and for our emotional lives,

As you suggest,

Because our emotions,

Researchers are increasingly aware that our emotions are constructed from the basic building blocks of our of our bodily sensations.

And when we know that,

We can kind of intervene in the process of constructing an emotion and reinterpret the bodily signals of say,

You know,

A racing heart or sweaty palms,

That as so much as anxiety,

As excitement and being how your body's getting you ready for a challenge,

You know,

Which is actually something speaking of how we apply this in our everyday lives is something I do before I give a talk,

For example,

Before I engage in public speaking,

I'll say instead of saying.

I'm so nervous or calm down,

Which is like telling your body not to do what it knows how to do and not to respond to the situation,

Which is no good.

I tell myself,

I'm so excited.

I'm really psyched for this.

You know,

It works.

It's really it may sound a little silly,

But it actually it really works.

But then back to the the stock traders that you mentioned,

That was a study that looked at the interceptive acuity or sensitivity of stock traders on the London trading floor versus the interceptive accuracy of just sort of people off the street,

A control group.

And in fact,

Not only were the stock traders more interceptively aware,

They were more in tune with their body signals.

The among within the group of stock traders,

The ones who were most successful,

Were the most interest,

Acceptively aware.

So even in this enterprise,

This activity where we think that,

You know,

A big brain,

It's all about having a big brain and sort of crunching the numbers.

It turned out that in the really fast paced and dynamic work of betting on stocks,

It really helps to have access to that sort of gut instinct.

And the more you're tuned into your body,

The more you can draw on that stored that stored wisdom that is signaled to you by your bodily cues.

Yes.

So more reasons for those stock traders to take up yoga practice or exactly clinical psychologists to take on a second career of stock trading,

Maybe.

I know.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

So this is this is a super skill.

Some of the other things that were really new and fresh to me that I'm applying in my practice and this has to do with the body too,

Was the gesture aspect.

I consult with therapists a lot.

So I was working with this therapist who was talking about one of her patients and while she was talking about her patient and how she felt so stuck with this patient,

She was doing this gesture of like almost like pulling as if she's pulling on a rope.

I just get,

I get in with the patient and I feel so stuck with her and I just want to get her to change.

She's pulling on this rope and I was reading your book at the time and I started pulling on the rope and I was like,

It's sort of like you're doing this with her.

And it was a way of actually identifying what was going wrong in the therapy session,

Even though she wasn't saying what was going wrong.

Obviously,

It might not have had conscious access really,

But it was being being belied by her gestures.

That's so interesting.

Wow.

So tell me about gestures and how we think with gestures and why they're so helpful also with kids too was the other aspect that was interesting.

Yeah,

That was the gesture literature was incredibly fascinating to me too,

Because again,

As a writer,

I focus so much on language,

Spoken language and written language.

So it was fascinating to learn that actually rather than being a sort of clumsy tag along,

You know,

To our verbal language,

Gestures are often a couple steps ahead of where we are in terms of being able to,

To articulate and verbalize what we're thinking.

You know,

Our gestures are actually kind of leading the way and may even be informing what we're saying.

And when and we know that in part because when people are inhibited from gesturing,

When they're prevented from gesturing,

They think less cogently.

They come up with,

You know,

Less complete explanations for things.

Their speech is less fluid.

So gesturing is actually an integral part of the communication process.

It's not just about communicating your thoughts to other people.

It's actually a part of your,

It's an integral part of your own thinking process.

And what strikes me about the story you just told,

Diana,

Is that,

You know,

The brain evolved not to think about symbolic concepts and abstract concepts,

But rather embodied experiences that we have in the real world.

And so the brain tends to translate abstract concepts into like embodied,

It tends to use embodied metaphors.

So that patient,

Sorry,

The therapist that you were discussing the patient with,

She was translating her experience,

Which maybe was hard to put into words,

Into this bodily experience of pulling on that rope and not maybe not getting where she wanted to go.

And that was so evocative of her experience,

But not something she could put into words at that moment.

She could just express it with her hands and was able to communicate that to you.

And you picked up on that,

Which is so interesting.

That's one thing that we don't tend to do is pay enough attention either to our own gestures or to other people's gestures,

But there's a real wealth of information that's there if we start paying attention.

Oh yeah,

It's changed my therapy practice.

It's also,

It's changed how I'm working with kids because of what you shared around language development and the importance of gesturing with children to help them develop their language,

As well as my online trainings.

I'm using a lot more gesturing even as now as we're talking,

I'm trying to use more gesturing because of these suggestions that you've made based on research in terms of extending our cognition and benefiting our cognition.

Yeah,

No,

The idea,

I'm thinking of the research on the importance of using gesture with children along with lots of verbal expression,

Which of course I think we all know about at this point.

It's important to talk to kids and have them just be bathed in verbal language,

But it's also important to be gesturing with them.

And in fact,

Disadvantaged kids,

There's a sort of gesture gap that shows up along with the better known word gap where kids in less fortunate socioeconomic circumstances tend to see many fewer gestures than more affluent kids.

And so they end up,

That's part of the explanation for why they end up having smaller vocabularies when they start school.

Another piece of the research around kids and gesture that I found fascinating was this idea of mismatch that kids will sometimes will often be gesturing with their hands in a way that shows their emerging understanding before their verbal language reflects that emerging understanding.

And it's when kids have that mismatch,

When their gestures are saying one thing and their words are saying another,

That they're especially receptive and open and ready for instruction.

If they get instruction at that moment,

They're ready to run with it.

So when teachers and parents can pay attention to how kids are moving their hands and what they're saying and notice when there's a gap between those two things,

That's what a moment when we can intervene really effectively.

Yeah,

It's great.

So thinking with our bodies,

Another aspect that you talk about is thinking with our spaces.

And of course,

This makes me think about my therapy space,

Think about my home environment,

Think about all sorts of spaces and how much our spaces impact our cognition,

Impact our mood.

You talk about natural spaces and built spaces.

So let's start with natural spaces because there are certain things that I intuitively have done in my office.

I always have fresh flowers in my office.

When I was setting up my office,

I put it so that my client would be facing the doors that open up to outside as opposed to facing the other way.

So there's just ways that I kind of intuitively sensed it out,

But I think I was following some of the research that you outlined so well around natural spaces and their impact on our thinking.

Yeah.

Well,

From here,

Your space looks like a tree house almost.

You have a lot of natural light and views.

So in a way,

It's to respond in the way that you have to the outdoors and to want to bring it indoors is really following the blueprint of our evolutionary history because human beings evolved in the outdoors.

All our perceptual systems,

They evolved to process the kind of information and the kind of stimuli that we encounter outside.

And so this world that we inhabit now where we're inside almost all the time,

Either in our cars or inside buildings or in an urban built up kind of setting is very unnatural in the sense that those aren't the conditions under which we evolved.

And so I think you're right,

Diana,

That we have a kind of intuitive sense that when we go outside,

And this is another thing I loved learning about because I love learning the why of why something,

You know,

You may believe something or feel something,

But then to know why is so interesting.

So we all have that sense or many of us have that sense that when we go outside,

It's calming,

It's relaxing.

We know that if we spend some time outside,

We feel restored and relaxed.

But why is that?

It's because,

Again,

The kind of stimuli that we're taking in outside all those beautiful green leaves and the clouds in the sky and the grass and the flowers that we're looking at,

Those sights and sounds are really easy for our brains to process.

It's really effortless to process those things,

Unlike the very hard edge detention that we have to bring to say,

You know,

A screen full of symbols and numbers.

So we're kind of refilling our attentional tank when we're outside.

We're refilling the tank of our attentional resources.

So then when we come back inside and we need to focus on our work,

Whether it's working with a patient or turning to a screen,

We have more of those attentional capacities at our disposal.

And so I find it useful to think about not just spending attention or directing it or managing our attention,

But actually when are you restoring your attention?

When are you refilling that tank?

We think so much about the demands on our attention,

But not so much about how to replenish the supply.

I loved what you wrote about fractals in nature.

And it just makes me so the fractals being those repeated patterns.

And I'm looking at the sunflowers behind me or a succulent that in Santa Barbara we have a lot of succulents because we have no water.

But how just resting our eyes on fractals changes the way that we feel.

Can you share a little bit about that?

Yeah.

So as you mentioned,

Fractals are repeated patterns,

Often repeated the same shape repeated at different scales.

So if you think of like a fern,

The frond of a fern,

There's that same sort of scroll like shape,

But it's repeated from the tiniest leaves at the tip all the way to the big leaves at the bottom.

And the reason that fractals,

The reason scientists believe that fractals are so calming and restorative for us to look at and fractals are found everywhere in nature and in the ocean waves and coastlines and mountains and clouds and also most visibly in plants.

The reason they're so relaxing for us to look at is that scientists increasingly think that the brain is like a prediction machine.

It's always trying to predict what will come next.

And with fractals,

It's very easy to make that prediction because it's one shape after another just sort of varying in size.

So again,

The brain has this very satisfying and very effortless experience of predicting what it will see next and then having that prediction come true over and over again when we're outside in nature.

So when we're in an urban space,

The reason we can find that so jangling and jarring is that there may be an old elaborate building next to a sleek modern one.

It's like our brains never know what's going to come next.

So that's one reason why we find being outside so much more relaxing and restorative than navigating an urban setting.

Beautiful.

So that's a good tip for all of us that when we can take these sort of like mini restorative moments to go outside,

Look at a repeating pattern in nature,

And that kind of gives our brain a little bit of a rest.

And a lot of times we go to our phone to scroll thinking that we're going to get a rest,

But that's not actually giving us that restoration.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Because there's another part that's about having the experience of awe,

Which is much more likely to happen in these vast spaces of nature than in looking at our tiny little screens.

There's also a benefit in terms of what's known as cognitive offloading.

I find it interesting that we tend to celebrate the ability to do things in our heads.

We admire people like a chess grandmaster who can plan out multiple moves in advance and do that all in their heads,

Or a mathematician who can do really complex operations in their heads.

But in fact,

It's usually more efficient and effective to get ideas and information out of our heads and onto physical space where we can then relate to that information differently.

We can manipulate it and move it around like it's a three-dimensional object,

Which we can do with Post-it notes,

For example.

I'm a really big fan of Post-it notes when I'm planning out a chapter or an article.

And we can also navigate through a landscape of information when we've sort of spread it all out like on a big whiteboard or a big bulletin board.

And when we do that,

We can bring in all these embodied resources that otherwise get wasted.

When we just have information inside our heads,

Like our spatial memory,

For example,

Human beings have this really powerful spatial memory where we remember where things are.

And so when things are sort of stably located,

Once we've sorted them out into categories or columns,

Then we can use our spatial memory and sort of navigate through that landscape of information like it's a three-dimensional landscape.

Whereas things on our computer are windows and are scrolling and are kind of zooming in and out,

We lose a sense of the physical placement of things.

And so that can be more cognitively draining and less helpful in terms of thinking about complex information.

There's two ways in which I use this as a psychologist.

One is there's actually this really useful tool called the chain analysis that was developed in dialectical behavior therapy.

And what you do in a chain analysis is you write down like a problem behavior and you actually take a piece of paper,

You sit down next to your client and you're like,

What's your problem behavior?

And you're like,

I yelled at my kids this morning.

And then you go through and you make these little links,

Like chains going back in time and going forward in time.

And as you make the links and chains in the chains going back in time,

You have the client write down in those links,

What were the links that led up to that yelling at your kids?

So it could be like,

I didn't have breakfast and I read this email.

And then you also look at the links in terms of the consequences.

And when you map that out with a client and you can actually see these links on a piece of paper,

Then you have a better sense of where you could have intervened.

And then also the consequences and how they are related to the thing that you want to change.

It's super helpful.

And I never had an understanding of that what we're actually doing there is thinking about it outside of our heads and actually on paper.

I wonder if putting it down on paper also allows people to take a step away from it,

You know,

A helpful,

It gives a helpful kind of psychological distance that they wouldn't get if it were still inside them,

You know,

Inside their heads.

And break it up because I think a lot of times we think of our experience as just one big thing.

And when you can put it on paper,

Sort of like the post-it note,

When you can make it into these moving parts,

Then you can work with it better.

But then the other way that I use that as a therapist and your work kind of helped me see this is in actually writing down things and moving them about in the office.

Like,

You know,

How close is your critic to you right now?

Is it right up next to your eyes or is it like,

You know,

All the way across the room?

And in that using space in that way as well,

I think is another way of kind of communicating metaphorically about what's happening internally in our experience.

Because sometimes our thoughts can feel really right up close and sometimes they can feel further away.

So,

And those are really grounded embodied metaphors too.

They really draw on the body's feelings of is this person or this,

You know,

Mental image close to me or far away?

Like that's,

That seems really,

It seems to really draw on the body's resources in a skillful way.

Yeah.

So if you're the type of person that wants to put things on post-it notes and make lists and diagrams and all of that,

It's actually a helpful cognitive tool.

It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you that you can't just keep it all in your head,

Which I think some of us feel that way.

Yeah.

And that's something I wanted to push back against with this book is the idea that it only,

That thinking only counts if it goes on inside your head.

You know,

Thinking is useful and valuable wherever it happens.

And in fact,

Some of the most adept thinkers,

You know,

Experts in their fields tend to be more adept and more frequent users of thinking outside the brain.

That's a skill that they have acquired that I think the rest of us could emulate when we want to think well as you know,

Too.

In your book,

You talk about everyone from Jackson Pollock to Darwin to,

You know,

All these different big thinkers and creators and how they've used these different practices of thinking outside in different ways.

One more thing I want to touch on as we're talking about thinking in spaces is just our workspaces and what you learned about in terms of what are the most beneficial ways to set up our workspaces.

Because we started out with like walls and getting your office,

And then we moved to these big open floor plans where everyone can talk to everyone and hear everyone else on the phone.

And what did you learn through your research there?

Yeah,

That's the best way to set up our workspaces.

You know,

The book makes a really passionate case against the open office because it's so poorly designed to work with the human tendency to be distracted by auditory and visual stimuli.

I wonder if the pandemic kind of took care of the open office because lots of us are working at home these days.

But then again,

It may actually have accelerated some elements of that trend towards an open office because I'm hearing from people in corporate settings and organizational settings that people don't have their own desks anymore because people aren't coming in every day.

And so there's a trend afoot that I'm kind of concerned about,

Which is some people call it hot desking or hoteling,

Which means that instead of having,

You know,

Your own desk or your own office area,

You kind of grab whatever space is available.

And it wasn't where you were yesterday and it won't be where you are tomorrow.

And that worries me because so much of what I discovered in the research for the chapter on thinking with spaces is that it's really important for us to have a space that we feel to work and think in a space that we feel like is ours,

That we feel like is our turf,

You know,

And that we have power and control over.

And also that we filled with our own what researchers call evocative objects,

You know,

These signs and cues and symbols that either remind us of who we are,

You know,

That are cues of identity or that remind us of groups that we belong to,

Valued groups that we belong to.

So cues of belonging.

And so,

You know,

Fortunately for those of us who work at home,

We have control over our space and that's something we can readily put into action in our space at home.

And I've even heard of people in these new kind of hybrid offices having a locker,

You know,

Where they keep photographs of their family or the little objects that really are meaningful to them and they take them out and array them on their desk,

Whatever desk they're at that day.

So I think there are ways to work with even the new pandemic era arrangements.

Yes,

What was it the CEO of Airbnb that is now saying that everyone can go in his office,

They can all work from home and kind of encouraging people to go to Airbnb and work in all these different places around the world.

But that's wonderful.

There's something freeing about that.

But then there's also something that's ungrounding about it,

You know,

In terms of when we have the cues that remind us of work or remind us of belonging or for me,

It's like I know that when I walk in my therapy office space,

This is where I do therapy.

And there's like a different feeling that washes over me when I come into this space as opposed to when the times that I have done therapy in my guest room or,

You know,

It just,

It feels a little bit ungrounded to me.

So in our home spaces where I see people having more trouble is it's not their coworkers walking in on them.

It's like their dogs and the FedEx person and their kids and the refrigerator that's right there and so distracting because you can get a snack anytime you want.

You know,

Those kinds of things are challenging for folks.

And that speaks,

I think,

To the fact that we have many identities,

You know,

And the things that are around us,

The objects and spaces that we see can cue or prime one or more of those identities.

And so some of the trouble that we may have working from home is that,

You know,

Being home primes this identity of being someone who's cleaning up the house or who's taking care of kids and not the professional identity that in that moment we want to be inhabiting.

So I think that's another reason to think about when you are working,

What are the objects,

What are the signs and symbols that you see around you and are they affirming that particular identity of a worker,

A thinker,

A creative person,

You know,

Whatever it is you need to be in that space.

Yes,

I was just,

My husband's been home this past week working from home because he had a little bit of a cold and he didn't want to go in and spread it.

And it was like 10 o'clock in the morning and I was working on something and he came and he said,

I have all this work to do.

I think I'm going to roast some coffee.

I was like,

Right,

Because you're home and just get more fun to be in the identity of a coffee roaster than do those emails.

So yeah,

We have to kind of adopt that identity.

Okay,

So I don't want to neglect the third area that you talk about in terms of thinking outside the brain and this is in the area of relationships.

So of course I loved these chapters so much and in the relationships with experts,

Relationships with our peers and the relationships with groups within groups.

So let's talk a little bit about experts because one of the things that you talk about there is the real benefit of mimicry and copy.

And that's something that therapists do a lot of already,

But maybe in other areas it's not seen so positively.

Yeah,

I'm sure that I would think therapists do a lot of mirroring,

Right?

Literal mimicking and mirroring of other people's facial expressions as a way of first of all,

Making them feel heard and seen.

And also as we were saying earlier in our,

When we were talking about introception as a way of getting a little piece of what they may be feeling.

And then there's the larger sort of matter of imitation and mimicry as sort of the fastest and most efficient and most effective way to mastery of a new domain.

And it's unfortunate that imitation doesn't get used as a form of learning as often as it should be because I think our culture has such a bias towards originality,

Towards being the first to do something.

Whereas I think older generations,

Going back to the ancients,

To the ancient Greeks and Romans knew that imitating the masters is the best way to develop that skill for yourself.

And once you've done that,

Then you can put your own twist on it,

Your own,

You can get your own,

Put it your own take on it.

But there's nothing shameful or embarrassing or morally compromised about imitating,

As long as we're all clear that it's meant to be a process of learning.

So one way to learn from experts is through imitation.

I think athletes do this,

Right?

I think about my young athletes,

They watch Stephen Curry and how he shoots the ball and they imitate that even though they're.

.

.

And so it's a way of learning.

I think in the field of therapy,

The way we do that is through role play and modeling through that.

Another area of learning and cognition is through our peers.

And I was interested in some of the research there of like how much our social cognition as social creatures,

We think so much better when we're in groups and when we're with peers than when we're on our own,

Even though we think of thinking as being an individual thing.

Exactly.

I think we've got that really backwards.

We think if we're doing real thinking,

Serious thinking,

That we should go into a room by ourselves and close the door and be still,

Right?

All these things that are actually not facilitative of good thinking because when we're socially interacting with other people,

There's this whole suite of cognitive processes that get activated that remain dormant when we're thinking by ourselves because human beings are such fundamentally social creatures and that sociability doesn't just come out during happy hour or during lunchtime.

We're social all the time.

And so the more we can leverage our social natures in the service of thinking and learning,

The better off we are.

And so I write in that chapter about the value of bringing in social activities like storytelling and debating and arguing and teaching other people,

Teaching our peers,

And using those social activities to kind of supercharge our own thinking.

So how I'm applying that to my therapy practice after I learned about that,

Especially the teaching one,

I was like,

How do I use teaching to instill skills into my clients is one of the things that I've asked clients to do is go home and tell somebody about something that you learned in this therapy practice and share it.

Especially with like,

When I work with teens,

It's like go home and tell your parents about something that you learned.

And it's so true that as soon as you become,

You step into that role of teacher,

It just strengthens your learning so much more as opposed to being the recipient of it.

So it's just a great concept of like making things relational and make it in a way that you are teaching it if you want to learn it.

It's the best way to learn.

What about groups?

How do we think?

I love the term that you said,

Not group think,

But group mind,

Which is a little bit different.

Yeah.

And groupiness,

Which is a real term,

Meaning because we've all been in on teams or in groups that never really cohere,

That just remains sort of a bunch of individuals.

And then we've all been,

I think,

Part of groups that really managed to create something like a group mind where you're thinking together,

You're thinking in sync and you have a collective intelligence that is greater than the intelligence of any one of the members.

And so then the question becomes,

How do you create that sense of groupiness?

And I really came away from the research with a strong belief that it requires people being in the same space at the same time,

Engaged in the same activities.

So that's a real kind of thing for us to think about when we do conduct so much of our lives online these days,

That the value of being in person with people really can't be overstated.

The richness of the signals that we exchange with each other when we're in person,

When we're body to body or we're sharing the same space just can't really be replicated online.

That's something that I really missed with online therapy.

Actually,

The research shows that online therapy is as effective as in-person therapy,

But I still prefer in person.

I like seeing the whole body.

I like to see the foot that's tapping,

Even though the rest of the body is completely still or how we walk into a space and where they choose to sit down.

Are they sitting at the far end of the couch?

They get as much distance as possible,

Or are they sitting closer to me?

All these different little things that are lost when we're not seeing each other in person.

So as we think about these three big categories,

And there's so much in your book,

You could read it three times and still feel like you could read it again to get a new perspective and new information.

How has this work influenced you in your life and your work and how you're approaching things after getting through this project?

Well I definitely am much better able to see how very brain bound our culture is.

That's a word again that I borrowed from the philosopher Andy Clark.

He talks about brain bound as the opposite or counter to the extended mind.

Our culture is so very brain bound in the way we approach things like education and the work that we do in our workplace.

And I recognize and realize how brain bound I have been for most of my life and how much more dynamic and fruitful it is to bring in all these outside the brain resources.

So I try to do that as much as possible now to bring in my body,

Bring in my physical space of the physical surroundings and bring in my social nature into my thinking.

It doesn't come naturally to me,

But that's what I like about the extended mind is that it's a skill that can be cultivated and so I'm trying.

Yeah,

Wonderful.

Well,

Thank you.

I just look forward to learning more from you and always excited to know what you're going to be onto next.

You're an incredible science writer and creative thinker.

So thank you for bringing this book to life.

I know Imogen has a lot of work.

Thanks so much.

It's been a pleasure talking with you.

So if we want to think outside of our brain,

It's helpful to use our bodies,

Our surroundings and our relationships to do so.

And here's some things that you could try this week to extend your mind.

First,

Try thinking with gesture.

We talked a bit about this on the show and gesture is a great way to enhance your communication with your kids to help your kids learn,

But also a nice way to mirror communication back from somebody else.

Notice other people's gesturing when they're talking and increase your gesturing as well,

Especially if you're in an online format.

There's some research that Annie talks about in the book that gesturing enhances the learner's experience and the other person's experience when you're seeing them on a screen.

So practice with some gesture and go ahead and watch the YouTube video of this so you can see me gesturing with Annie as we're talking.

Second,

Think with your surroundings and I'd love for you to try out the micro restorative practice of looking for fractals in nature.

I've been doing that a lot since I read this book and I find it incredibly fun.

Everything from palm trees to the swirl in the back of a snail.

It can be really soothing to spend some time mindfully looking at a fractal.

If you get stuck in thinking maybe you're writing a blog post or you're working on your taxes or doing something else where you find that you have a furrowed brow and a stuck mind,

Go outside for 30 seconds to a minute and look at a fractal and see if it changes your stuckness.

And then finally,

Thinking with our relationships.

Bring a group or another person into something that you usually think about alone and notice if it changes how you think about it.

For example,

Sometimes I'll call up colleagues to consult on cases that I've been working on for a while but could use a different perspective on.

And every time I do that,

It really helps my approach on the case.

So where do you tend to work alone and could you bring another person into that work to extend your mind outside of your own brain?

Most likely it will help.

All right,

Try those three things this week.

Think with your body,

Think with your surroundings and think with your relationships.

And I look forward to hearing from you.

Share with me on Instagram,

Share with me via email or send me a little voice memo.

It's always good to hear from you.

And thank you to those of you that are sticking with me in this.

It really motivates me to keep going when I do hear from you.

It feels a little bit solo and I could use some of these relationships to continue to extend my mind on this podcast.

Also a big shout out to those of you that have given me ideas of people that you want to hear on the show.

I always welcome that because it keeps me fresh.

Sometimes I stay within my little safety zone of books and concepts that I find really interesting,

But I'd love to hear what you would find interesting as well so that we can explore those concepts together.

Take care and look forward to seeing you next week.

Reviews

Digging this topic! Y'all made it really approachable and I'll eager to read the book and give these concepts a whirl.