Thinking Outside the Brain (ft. science writer Annie Murphy Paul)

Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Scientific American,  among many other publications. She’s the author of a number of books, including her latest, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, which just came out last month. The extended mind is a really interesting notion that we don't just think with our brains. We also "think with" the sensations and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people we know.  Adam Grant selected it as one of 12 books every leader should read this summer, and in their review in the Wall Street Journal called it “Fascinating, sure-footed and wide-ranging.”

I wanted to speak to Annie since it seems obvious to me that if we want to have better outcomes as a society and make better predictions about where things are going, surely we have to learn to think better, no? So that’s some of what we talk about today: how we can become better thinkers by being aware of our bodies and how our surroundings can impact our thoughts, how we’re very unlike computers and probably need to stop trying to emulate them, and even how we can learn to better collaborate with other minds to achieve better outcomes.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

Transcript

FUTUREPROOF - Thinking Outside the Brain

Jeremy Goldman: So Annie welcome to FUTUREPROOF.

Annie Murphy Paul: Oh, thanks. I'm so glad to be here. 

Jeremy Goldman: I think your work is really interesting.

And I know I'll have some of this intro, but how do you define your work and who are you and what what do you do on a day to day basis? 

Annie Murphy Paul: I am a journalist who writes about psychology and cognitive science. I am a magazine journalist and a book author, and I have a new book out called the extended mind which is the fruition of years.

And I don't even want to say how many years of research in in a bunch of different disciplines and what I like to do as. As a writer. And what I have done for most of my career is it's synthesized is pulled together insights from different disciplines,  different genres and try to weave them together into a coherent story for readers that hopefully will change the way they think about themselves in the world.

That's the goal. Anyway. 

Jeremy Goldman: Yeah. And I think that you're saying it's really interesting to me because, and this work in general, because as I was reading about it, I started thinking a little bit differently about the mind and about my hope for how we will be able to understand the way we think a little bit.

Over time, we definitely want to talk to you about, in a nutshell, how do we eat? We use our entire bodies to think outside the brain, because I feel like it's a very interesting concept that a lot of people might not intuitively be thinking about on a day-to-day basis. 

Annie Murphy Paul: We don't intuitively think that way because we've really been conditioned by Western culture to think of the mind and the body as separate.

And. More and more scientists are discovering that's not the case. That thinking is a full-body activity. And that happens on a couple of different levels, a few different levels. One is that our thinking is informed by the internal sensations that arise within the body. We have. Obviously all these ways to S to sense external information, with our ears and our eyes and so on.

But there's also a range of internal sensations that are being generated all the time. And we are, there are individual differences in how attuned we are to those those internal sensations. Some people, if you ask them, when does your heartbeat tell me when your heart beats, which is a standard test of interoception, which is this capacity.

Since your internal signals, some people will say, oh, I'm always attuned to that. And other people will say, what are you talking about? I can't feel my heart. And the reason that it is important to be attuned to those internal signals is that they carry a lot of valuable information that we're missing out on.

If we're not sensitive to  those internal signals, what those gut feelings are telling us what that's all about, because I think there's a lot of mystery or old wives tales around gut feelings, but there's really a there's a scientific explanation for what's going on when you have that interest.

Sensation that's telling you to act one way or another. And that is that, as we go through our days were encountering all kinds of experiences and we're noting regularities and patterns in those experiences. And we're putting them together into patterns.  Too complex to maintain in the conscious mind, but we are noting and keeping track of them in our non-conscious minds.

And the way we have access to that sort of stored information is through the body. The body with those internal signals is like giving us a a tub on the elbow or, a little poke saying. You've seen this before, and this is how you reacted. But in a previous instance, this is how you should react to this time.

And people who are more attuned to those internal signals can make better use of those signals. I talk in the book about this study that showed that financial traders on a trading floor in London, the ones who were better able to. Say when their hearts were beating better too, into their internal states, they were the ones who made more money and were more likely to hang on for a long time in this, volatile profession where there's a lot of turnover.

It's odd because we think of finance as this kind of very cerebral intellectual kind of enterprise. But it was actually those traders who could tune into their bodies who were the more successful. So that's an example of how. Thinking happens with the body in ways that we don't often know about or acknowledge.

Jeremy Goldman: And I think that's really interesting because I know that we received these constant messages, like you're referring to from our body and, like that gut feeling deep down, like a sense of foreboding or clammy hands, and it seems to me that we're almost going full circle as a society.

Where previously, like we would always follow these things and then we were almost shamed for following or like bus rise above it. And some news it's full circle to speaking to somebody like you. Who's actually there are reasons why we should be in sync with our body and basically be thinking little bit more deeply, a little more.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, no, I think that's so profound. I really agree that there's a feeling of shame attached to the body and paying attention to the body and it's as if it connects us to our animal natures and we're always wanting to rise above that and show how we're so rational. And, humans are not a part of the natural world, but we are.

And I think that impulse to to separate mind and body to. Treat the brain as if it's a computer, that's a metaphor that gets used a lot. That's led to a lot of mistaken and regrettable kind of practices in terms of what we do in education and the workplace. When we're trying to think when we're trying to learn, when we're trying to do complex mental work, we have a flawed model about how that happens and where it has.

Jeremy Goldman: And also seems to me, I think that this is a little bit in line with the fact that we're now trying to compete more and more with computers. And it seems to me that we're almost okay with the fact that somebody could compare our brain to that of a computer, but how dare you compare us in our physiology to an animal when technically.

The animals and not one of the computers. 

Annie Murphy Paul: We're much more like animals non-human animals than we are like. And then we are like computers. It's really, it's a self flattering description to liken ourselves to computers, but in a way, it's insulting to humans to compare them to computers because what we are able to do is so much richer and so much more complex than any computer that we have available.

Jeremy Goldman: And how does  this theory that most people have now, that we should all train our brains to act to perform as if we were computers. How is that something  that does a disservice to to us all, if it 

Annie Murphy Paul: does, I think it does. I think it does for sure.

And the other major metaphor out there, conventional metaphor is the brain as a muscle that you know that to, to think you need to. Work that muscle, push it as hard as possible to exercise it as much as you can. And that in ideas from psychology, like grit or the growth mindset, and also the popularity of things like cognitive fitness exercises.

If you want to improve your memory, people jump on Lumosity, and do those exercises, which you know, more and more research is showing. They just don't work. You get better at the little games that you do on the cognitive fitness. Training pro platform, but that doesn't transfer to to the tasks of everyday life that's, which presumably is the point.

And there's some interesting evidence that I've written about suggesting that we've actually reached the capacity, like the full potential of our biological brains. And which means that the only way for us to get smarter right now that's available to us right now is just. Thinking beyond the brain or outside the brain and making better and more skillful use of these external, extra neural resources.

In other words, outside the brain resources. And that's not something we, it's not a talent or a skill that we cultivate right now. It's not even one that we think about, but we could get much better at learning to think outside the brain. And I think that's our best shot at handling the incredibly complex world that we live in.

Jeremy Goldman: There's another element that you talk about, which is really interesting to me is how our. Physical surroundings and our relationships allow us to think outside the brain, which I thought was a really interesting going a little bit further along those same lines.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, 

Annie Murphy Paul: right? Yeah. I structured the book to be kind of concentric circles, the brain, sorry. The brain thinks with the body and then with our spaces and then even further out with other people. Yeah. And again, that's not something that we're used to.

Thinking about in terms of the physical environment affecting the way we think in part, because of that computer metaphor, my, my laptop here is working. It's working just the same here as it would. If I brought it to the park and use it there on set it down on a park bench. But the human brain is not like that where the brain is really exquisitely sensitive to context to its surroundings.

And we tend to not give enough thought to our physical environment and how it's affecting the way that we think. But when we do turn our attention to that, we can use the environment we can deliberately change or alter our contexts in order to change the way we think. When we're in nature, we think differently than when we're in an urban setting or in a built interior setting.

And that's because, over eons of evolution, our brains became tuned to the kind of sensory information that it, that we encounter in HR, which is very turns out to be very different from the kind of information that's embedded in. Urban and built environments and it's I think we all know on an intuitive level that we find being in nature.

Relaxing. And it puts us at ease, but there's a scientific reason for that, which is that our brains find it very easy to process the information that we encounter in a natural setting. And I think about how we, we spend so much time thinking about how we direct our attention and spend our attention and manage our attention.

But we don't often think about filling the tank back up, replenishing our attention and making sure that there's enough of it. It turns out that the best way to do that is to spend some time in nature. 

Jeremy Goldman: Yeah, which is also an interesting thing because it feels that generally speaking, I think in society, we're two steps forward one step back.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who do go into nature to replenish, but I would imagine that number is going a little bit down year after year. And I don't have data on this, but this is the very fact that, we're sitting.

Two network devices right now, having this conversation on a nice day makes me think that, 

Annie Murphy Paul: yeah, I think the pandemic was a mixed blessing in that regard because a lot of us feel like we've been brains in front of screens for 14 months, but on the other hand, many of us who were working remotely had more of a chance to take a break, walk outside.

I see a lot more people walking around my neighborhood, for example. So I hope that change if people are getting out into nature a bit more. I hope that. Persist as we, as the pandemic receipts. 

Jeremy Goldman: And yet, and this is just as I'm thinking about it, given the fact that as human beings, we're drawn to innovation and progress, and I'm putting the Eric quotes up there, it doesn't necessarily feel to anybody, sitting underneath the tree and closing your eyes as progress.

Like I think that obviously that can serve us quite well, but is there. Any realistic sense that those moments of quiet where we can replenish is that something that we're realistically going to find the time for as we keep  innovating?

Yeah. 

Annie Murphy Paul: One thing, if I've learned one thing from reporting and researching like psychological findings for them, Whatever 25 years. I it's, that we often don't know what's good for us. Even though it's the case that if we did take that break, if we did engage in physical movement, if we did go outside, rather than using our breaks to just do more of what drains our mental resources, like you just do, you stay at your computer, you just do something different at your computer.

You turn to Twitter or the news or whatever, and then you returned to work after your break. More frazzled than when you left it. Whereas if you were to do something different, like use your body, be physical, be outside you could return to work. With more focus with more attention, with more sort of executive function.

And I hope that if people experience that for themselves, they would realize that, oh, this is actually a good thing for me to take a few minutes to do this and to think about my, how I spend my breaks differently. I hope that can. 

Jeremy Goldman: Yeah, I think that it's, I definitely am hopeful versus, thinking that it's absolutely going to happen, but you're right.

We have to, at the very least have some prescriptive Sense of where things ought to go in order to possibly get there. It does seem that it is a little bit tricky for people to keep those good habits because you might get up for a 15 minute break and then your executive function is replenished, but then how easy is it to keep that habit going in our society two weeks in three weeks?

And at some point there are a lot of people who just naturally lose that habit. So it is a interesting. 

Annie Murphy Paul: I wonder if one of the keys here might be institutional support for making some of these changes. Our schools and our workplaces are set up around this very, what you might call brain bound model, which is very focused on the brain and working the brain rather than bringing in these extra neural resources.

And I think it is hard for individuals to make changes completely on their own. If our institutions were to be more informed by this perspective and change their own practices and their own expectations accordingly, I think that might promote change on a wider scale. 

Jeremy Goldman: So I know that you rate that networked organisms who move around in these shifting surroundings and environments.

And it is really interesting. The more you look at it that how, like our thinking is not a monolith and that we do have the power to transform our thinking. So can you go into that a little bit? What do you mean by that? 

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. So that brain bound model that I was mentioning before, that is a term coined by Andy Clark, who is the philosopher that one of the two philosophers who advanced this idea of the extended mind in the first place.

So the brain bound model suggests that we have a lump of stuff in our head and it's bigger or smaller, it's better or worse. And we rank people according to how good their brains are. And that's where thinking happens. And It's fixed and innate and internal and either, yeah you've got a brain that works well or you don't.

And I see it very differently. The theory of the extended mind takes a very different perspective, which says that no thinking is a dynamic ongoing process of assembling our thought processes from the raw materials that are available in our environment. 

Jeremy Goldman: Yeah, as I was reading a little bit more about that, it really got me thinking  that we're not as in control as we might think. And some, in some sense that's not hopeful, but then the flip side of that is, is that we have the ability to structure.

Things a little bit differently and to be thinking a little bit differently. So what are some of the ways that, the average person can just work to push their mind in the direction that they want to go to B2B making better decisions on an ongoing basis? 

Annie Murphy Paul: I liked the way you put that, because that is the main overarching strategy that, that I would advise people to adopt, which is to stop thinking about mustering, these resources from within and instead think about regulating yourself from the outside in it's actually much more.

Effective much more efficient, much easier. And yet, we have these, we have this ethos in our culture that it's got to start from within and power through. And so my focus is instead on changing the context or changing the environment in which we're doing our thinking, and that might mean as we were saying, spending time outside, but it could also have to do with how you arrange your, where are working and learning spaces.

 They can support our identity as thinkers and workers and students. If we display for ourselves, what are, what psychologists called cues of identity, signs that, of who we are in that place that helps to prime us prime our brains to think. In the way that we would like to pay attention to, and remember things, because we all have so many identities, you need to remind yourself of who you are in that space, in that role.

And that's something that concerns me about this trend of hoteling or hot desking as we return to the office, post pandemic, there's a lot of companies that are adopting a model where you just grab a desk and it wasn't your desk yesterday, and it won't be your desk tomorrow. And I think what we know about.

The importance of having a sense of ownership and control over your space. And then also pointing that space with cues of identity and also cues of belonging, signals that tell you that reminds you of the meaningful groups to which you belong. I just think that a hoteling or hot-desking situation is.

It's going pretty much op it's going up pretty much orthogonal to, in an opposite way to what we know really works for people and for people trying to do good cognitive work. 

Jeremy Goldman: Yeah. It strikes me as something that, there, there's obviously a reason why companies are going in this direction, but then at the same time, if you have the ability to optimize, let's say.

Your work environment for the best possible critical thinking. And then you don't have as much agency on your space at work. Then all of a sudden the value of being in that workspace doesn't necessarily hold what it would have held a pre pandemic. So in some ways you're just maybe facilitating or encouraging people to stay working at home.

In that other work environment where they've optimized it in order to make them as productive as possible or have the best critical thinking as possible. 

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. And then there are many companies that are saying we went remote during the pandemic and it was fine. So we're just going to do that from now on.

 I think we're, that's another kind of mistake that's being made and that touches on the. Part of the book, which is about how we think with other people. And there's, I think there's considerable evidence suggesting that, that kind of thinking together and in particular, the creation of a sense of groupiness, the sense that, which is an actual term that psychologists use a groupiness is what you feel when a collection of individuals has established its own identity.

As a group, you have a kind of shared. Spirit or sense of belonging to this group together. And that's pretty hard to establish remotely, and people need to be thinking, feeling, acting in close proximity to each other at the same time. And so I think there's an opportunity here to reinvent the way we work and even the way we go to school.

But I'm hoping that it's going to be informed by what we know about what really are the optimal conditions for things. 

Jeremy Goldman: And I'm glad that you mentioned the idea of community and it. The very fact that groups play, significant impact in terms of the way that we think it got me thinking to some extent about, people think of group think as this negative term, because people are, will start to automatically just start to think like the people who they're surrounding themselves with.

And w how valuable is it when people want to have a very critical mind? To surround themselves with all different perspectives rather than just people who are echoing back the way in which we're already 

Annie Murphy Paul: thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Which does happen. Group think is a real phenomenon and and I think we all know that group work can be very frustrating and very ineffective.

It's not as if you can just bring a group of people together and magic happens. And my view about that is that we really have not developed the practices and the structures. That would allow us to think together well as a group, it's not something that we explicitly are taught or that or trained to do.

And so we bring in our habits of individual thinking that kind of thinking that we do in our own heads, we bring those into the group setting and they, it just, it doesn't work very well. So I think we need to evolve a whole new set. Practices and structures for thinking together as a group that can avoid some of those pitfalls, think and allow a collective intelligence to emerge.

That's greater than the sum of its individual.

Jeremy Goldman: That just really got me thinking a little bit further just about how you structure those brainstorming meetings. And you could even have a situation where, you're trying to anticipate where a particular. Thing is going, trying to make a particular forecast about the future. And then you might bias yourself with other people's opinions and sometimes it's better to develop your own conclusion, then come together with other minds and then collaborate and figure out a little bit.

Why did you come to a different conclusion than me? Maybe we can coalesce around something and five forecasts when average down. Be more accurate than any one of those forecasts individually as has been shown by research. 

Annie Murphy Paul: And the problem is that we often, we cut, we go in, we file into a conference room and we just start talking and there's no structure or arrangement to how we do it.

And what often happens. And this is what happens in group think is that the leader speaks first and because humans are higher hierarchical. The subordinates depend on the leader and want to please him. They end up echoing what the leader says. So it, we can turn that around and we can draw on the intelligence and the expertise of those people who are not the leader when we have them speak first, for example, or when we have people write down what they think before going into the meeting room and pass those notes around.

And then everyone is heard in a way that often doesn't happen when we just Go about our group, thinking in an unstructured and unorganized way, 

Jeremy Goldman: and this might be controversial because obviously there's a lot of efforts right now to have a greater diversity equity inclusion in the workplace.

And what you're saying now gets me thinking, are we thinking just about people's skin tone or religion or ethnicity, or are we thinking about diversity of thought to make sure that we have people who come from different perspectives and not just cosmetically look different, but also have different ways of thinking because those different ways of thinking might actually be beneficial.

To build a group like that, as opposed to a group that looks very different, but thinks very similarly. 

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. Cass Sunstein, who was a Harvard Harvard professor, but also worked in the Obama administration and had to lead meetings. And that role has this great Term that he uses that he said there, there are certain groups and sometimes it's racial groups.

Sometimes it's women. Sometimes it's people who have less education or less experienced that they engage in self silencing. And when they self silence, because they're afraid to speak up often for good reasons, then the group loses their knowledge, their perspective. And so what Sunstein advises is.

The leader to engage in some self silencing, which I think is probably a hard thing for many leaders to do, but they need to be the ones who hold back and don't speak up immediately. But rather they need to be the ones who invite the widest variety of comments from the people gathered in the room.

And that's how you maximize the collective intelligence. That's. 

Jeremy Goldman: And in a weird way and that to get a little, but it makes me think coming out of a pandemic when you have a leader of a political party that comes out and says something that may or may not be informed by science and everybody in their party, basically calls online and says we can't contradict the leader.

And as a result of a conversation, that's not led by the scientific minds, but it's led by political figure. 

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, that makes me think of the part of the book  in which I read about the research of these cognitive scientists, dance, Berber and Hugo Mercier, who say that they point out that there's all these options.

Built in flaws and human cognition, the body of work on heuristics and biases done by dental economists and others that suggest that we just, we're prone to confirmation bias, for example. And there's nothing we can do about that. We just have to be aware that happens and mercy, and Sperber's say no, actually  problems like confirmation bias.

They emerge when we use reason. Setting it, for which it didn't evolve, which is thinking alone. And of course, most of we do a lot of our thinking alone and that, that kind of bias which can seem so in escapable , we're not actually not so susceptible to it when we reason in the context, for which reason.

Originally evolved, which is social and that when we engage in argument, and then this is the key. When we engage in argument with the shared goal of getting as close to something like truth as possible, then we can take advantage of this amazing human ability to advance our own best arguments, but also see all the flaws and pick apart other people's arguments.

If we can do that on our own behalf, but then allow other people to do that to us. That's where our strengths lie and harnessing that particular ability that will allow us to to get to something close to the truth. Now that doesn't look like most of our political discussions. It's true, but I like to think that's a model that we could maybe inspire.

Jeremy Goldman: Are we faded to make the same mistakes and thinking we've always made,  are we going to essentially devolve to making the same mistakes that it seems like we've been making since time immemorial? 

Annie Murphy Paul: I don't have a crystal ball, but I think I would say that we may be pushed to adopt a different and better and more accurate view of thinking just because right.

What we're doing right now is not working that well for us. And that will motivate us to to seek out new and better ways of of thinking that involve these extra neural resources and becoming more skilled at using the external resources. Because if we have reached the. Limits of the biological brain.

And if our culture continues to become more complex, which I think is inevitable, then we're going to be actively looking for better ways to engage in thinking. And the extended mind is ready and waiting to provide those ways. So I'm hopeful that that people will be drawn to it and motivated to, to use it's it's the advice that has to.

Jeremy Goldman: Which I definitely hope that they do. Why is it so important for us to understand the brain and human nature in general, in order to understand where we're going as a society? I think a lot of people focus on technology and innovation, but I think it's also important to talk to people like you to better understand.

How we think because technology alone, doesn't matter if you don't understand how humans are going to interact with these things. 

Annie Murphy Paul: Absolutely. I couldn't agree with that more. I think it's really important that we understand what kinds of creatures we are. And that rather profound question to me is what the extended mind is all about.

It's saying no, we're not we're not machines. We're not Our brains aren't muscles that, get better with exercise so much as we are, the One of the metaphors that I like to use to replace these sort of limiting metaphors of the computer and the muscle is something more like an orchestra conductor.

Obviously the brain is still at the heart of all the thinking that we do. I'm not saying that the brain isn't important, but it's the role that we expect the brain to play. That I think could be usefully different. And if we think of it, not as a workhorse that we just have to keep lashing, to keep it, to keep pushing, to make it work harder and harder to lesser and lesser effect.

If we think of it instead as like an orchestra conductor, that's bringing in skillfully all these different external resources and the right one at the right time. Then we, thinking becomes this kind of beautiful. Collage, that is so much richer than anything that could happen just inside, inside the dark space, inside our skull.

So I see it as a very hopeful and optimistic vision and one that one that importantly can help us understand ourselves better. That's what I really like it. Yeah. 

Jeremy Goldman: Said, I think that's a perfect spot to end on ending. This was really terrific. Thank you. So yeah. Thank you so much for making the time.