We don’t just think with our brains.
What?!
How can that possibly be true?
I struggled to understand it if myself for quite a while, until I read the fabulous English philosopher Andy Clark’s description of what happens when someone writes, which essentially involves ideas flowing down the arm and hand, through the pen and ink, across the paper, up to your eyes, and back to your brain.
The ideas don’t literally flow, of course, but the process of writing alters the process of thinking - which is why research has shown that processing traumatic memories through journaling about them is more useful just thinking about them - the act of writing about them changes our interpretation of them in a way that just thinking about them doesn’t.
The challenge with school-based learning, of course, is that it’s primarily concerned with the brain. Our task is to remember facts and ideas so we can recount them when asked about them at a later time. Children who fidget are told to sit still, when the research that Annie Murphy Paul cites in her new book The Extended Mind indicates that this instruction is entirely misplaced - fidgeting can be a way of managing excess energy, and movement can actually help us to remember things more effectively than we otherwise would.
In this episode we learn many of the different ways that we our brains interact with the outside world to learn in ways that we might never have considered up to now.
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The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (Affiliate link).
Jump to highlights
01:00 Looking at the idea that our mind isn't actually only located inside of our brains
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