How We Think: Amazing Science of Thinking Not with the Brain, But with the World
“By going beyond the brain, we are able to focus more attentively, absorb more fully, and create more imaginatively — to entertain concepts that would be practically unimaginable by the brain alone,” says author Daniel Dennett.
The teenage Virginia Woolf noted in her diary at the beginning of the 20th century that “our thoughts are all linked together, and all the universe is mind.” The middle-aged Santiago Ramón y Cajal was developing a new science in Spain at the same time as it was greatly reducing our understanding of the mind and greatly expanding our knowledge of the brain. In the succeeding half-century, neuroscience would become both a tremendous leap forward and a great leap back in its valiant attempt to understand what William James so lyrically referred to as the “blooming and buzzing jumble” of consciousness. Its insightful but unfinished findings would repeatedly be exaggerated and oversimplified into a form of neo-phrenology that confines some of our most expansive human experiences and capacities — love and grief, intelligence, and imagination — to specific brain regions with specific neural firing patterns.
We are only now starting to come to terms with the rising realisation that consciousness is a full-body experience, possibly even a phenomenon outside the body, a century and half after Descartes split Western consciousness into its disembodied dualism.
According to Annie Murphy’s book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain Paul combines a century of scientific research with centuries of first-hand knowledge from the lives and correspondence of great artists, scientists, inventors, and businesspeople to explore the most exciting frontiers of this expanding understanding. She dispels the cultural myth that thinking only occurs inside the brain by illuminating the many ways that we “use the world to think,” from the sensemaking language of gestures that we learn as infants long before we can speak concepts to the unique fuel that time spent in nature provides for the brain’s most potent associative network.
This recalibration of understanding is summarised by Paul:
“Thinking beyond the brain refers to the art of skilfully drawing into our own mental processes things outside of our heads, such as our bodies’ feelings and motions, the actual places where we learn and work, and the minds of those around us. We are able to focus more attentively, grasp more fully, and create more imaginatively by using these “extra-neural” resources, which allow us to entertain thoughts that would be practically unthinkable using only our brains.”
Even our metaphors for the mind have distanced us from our true nature as creatures that are shaped by our surroundings and interactions with other creatures, dishonouring Rachel Carson’s scientifically based poetic insight that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” After emerging from Plato’s cave of consciousness, we were constrained by Descartes and the Industrial Revolution to reduce the mind to the brain, then to a machine, explaining how it worked by using analogies to current technology: the brain was a loom, the brain was a telegraph, the brain was a computer.
An industrial palace as a man 1926 by Fritz Kahn
Paul compares the mind to a magpie—that evolutionary relative of crows and ravens, famed for its unusual intellect and ability to create cluttered yet intricate nests out of whatever its environment has to offer—in what is still one of the most creative metaphors in the history of science.
How We Think: Amazing Science of Thinking Not with the Brain, But with the World
She writes: “Given how fundamentally this comparison reframes our comprehension of brain processes:
“Thought occurs both inside and outside the skull; it is a constant act of assembly and disassembly that uses resources from sources other than the brain. Another reason is that the kind and standard of the thinking that can be generated depend on the resources that are accessible to “think with.” Last but not least, the ability to think clearly, or to be clever, is not a constant quality of the person but rather a changing state that depends on having access to extra-neural resources and being aware of how to use them.”
Jackie Morris’s poem “Magpie” comes from The Lost Words. In light of the mesh model of the mind, which parallels our recent understanding of the “thinking” and “feeling” of trees, Paul continues:
“We go beyond our limits by sprinkling the environment with rich materials and incorporating them into our ideas rather than by pumping our brains up like a machine or building them up like muscles.”
Our ability to interocept—an awareness of the interior bodily sensations that provides us a form of non-conscious knowledge that we may name intuition but that is anchored in concrete embodied experience and physical pattern-recognition—is a key component of this extended mind. Although we may not be consciously aware of the signals, we nonetheless react to the information they carry.
Paul claims:
“Our interoceptive faculty alerts us when a potentially significant pattern is found, either with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath, or a tensing of the muscles. To make us aware of this important and otherwise inaccessible information, the body is rung like a bell. Although we frequently assume that the brain directs the body, the body also influences the brain through a variety of subtle nudges and prods. This road map is what one psychologist refers to as our “somatic rudder.” Because it alerts its occupant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have been looking for, researchers have even managed to capture the body mid-nudge.”
Referring to ourselves as “inhabitants” of our bodies is an interesting idea. I’m reminded of Walt Whitman (but then, I’m always reminded of Walt Whitman).
“What would the soul be if the body weren’t there?”
Whitman continued by pondering “the fathomless human brain” and asking:
“What is reason, then? what exactly is love? what is life, exactly?”
In the remainder of The Extended Mind, Paul goes on to explore the three most intriguing areas of growing understanding as we reorient our minds to our brains and bodies: embodied cognition (the empirical counterpart to the Austrian playwright and poet Thomas Bernhard’s observation that “there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking”), situated cognition (the empirical counterpart to the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s observation that “place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered”), and distributed cognition (the empirical echo of Woolf’s insight that “all the world is mind”) — ideas affirming quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s startling and stunningly reasoned statement that “the over-all number of minds is just one.”
