The mind is what the brain does.

According to Annie Murphy Paul, thinking “inside the brain” occurs when the mind is making a statement, reaching a conclusion, answering a question or solving a problem. With rare exception, it limits itself to what it thinks it knows…to what it thinks it understands. This tendency explains ignorance of what Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham aptly characterized (in 1955) as “the unknown unknowns.” That is, ignorance of one’s ignorance.

She observes, “Our culture insists that the brain is the sole locus of thinking, a cordoned-off space where cognition happens. This book argues otherwise: it holds that the mind constructs our thought processes from the resources available outside the brain. These resources include the feelings and movements of our bodies; the physical spaces in which we learn and work; and the other minds with which we interact—our classmates, colleagues, teachers, supervisors, friends. Sometimes, all three elements come together in especially felicitous fashion, as they did for the brilliant intellectual team of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The two psychologists carried out much of their groundbreaking work on heuristics and biases—the human mind’s habitual shortcuts and distortions—by talking and walking together, through the bustling streets of Jerusalem or along the rolling hills of the California coast. ‘I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos,’ Kahneman has said.

“Many tomes have been written on human cognition, many theories proposed and studies conducted (Tversky’s and Kahneman’s among them). These efforts have produced countless illuminating insights, but they are limited by their assumption that thinking happens only inside the brain. Much less attention has been paid to the ways in which people use the world to think: the gestures of the hands, the space of a sketchbook, the act of listening to someone tell a story or the task of teaching someone else. These “extra-neural” inputs change the way we think; it could even be said that they constitute a part of the thinking process itself.”

Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain was published by Mariner Books (June 2021).

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out two others:  Marty Neumeier’s Metaskills: Five Skills for the Robotic Age and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.