Being Smart Isn’t About The Brain

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Being Smart Isn’t About The Brain

Our bodies & surroundings matter a lot

18.12.2021

‘Use your head,’ people often say, when they urge someone to apply their intelligence. But it’s actually the other way around, we think better when we think outside our heads, says science journalist Annie Murphy Paul in her book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside Our Brain. Cognition does not occur merely in the lump of tissue inside our skull.

Brainbound thinking is inadequate for complexity of modern life, says the book. We need to recruit extra-neural resources, to listen to feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, the minds of the other people around us. This is what brings focus, comprehension and creativity.

When the philosopher Andy Clark lost his laptop on a train in 2007, he experienced it as a sort of disorienting brain damage, prompting him to wonder where the mind ends and the brain begins. This is the ‘extended mind’ hypothesis, much debated since, about how cognition involves unconscious interactions between the brain, body and environment.

Paul’s book gathers all the neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology around this idea, shows how it is intuitively practised by artists, scientists, educators and leaders, and suggests how we can actually extend our own minds, by understanding embodied cognition, situated cognition and distributed cognition.

First, listen to what your body is telling you. It senses patterns and guides the brain with a tensing of the muscles or a quickening of the breath, a shiver or sigh. Being aware of these subtle nudges and prods is interoception. Financial traders who have it make better decisions than those who calculate, and they describe their decision-making as a sort of nameless sensing, like having whiskers or antennae.

Paul recommends shuttling, periodically checking in with one’s physical self in the middle of mental activity, now and then. Research shows that bodily activity and mental acuity are linked – so movement, gesture, even standing boosts cognition.

This is why classrooms and offices that link work to sitting run counter to our biological wiring, says Paul. Our surroundings vitally shape our thought, as anyone who comes back restored from time spent in nature can attest to. Green spaces engage a different part of our being, and tend to help our thoughts flow in a diffuse, more creative way.

While many people work in openplan offices or coffee shops, the most inspiring work environment is something like a monastery, with its solitary cells as well as cloisters and communal spaces. We need others, their company and stimulation, to think well.

The book makes a case for apprenticeship and imitation as a way of extending our minds. Mimicking the masters is a traditional way of learning new skills and making intelligent decisions, because it works.

Paul offers many tips on extending our own minds – offloading thoughts on paper or a device, to make a problem concrete rather than abstract, something that can be touched or tweaked physically, like a board. It is crucial to be able to alter one’s own mental state, take a walk or listen to one’s body when mentally overwhelmed.

The radical takeaway from this book is that intelligence is not a fixed lump, and people are not innately smarter than others. Rather, it is a transaction, a fluid interaction between our brains, our bodies, our spaces and our relationships.