The Embodied Brain: A Conversation With Annie Murphy Paul

Geoff Mitelman: Welcome, everybody, to Sacred Science. I am Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, the founding director of Sinai and Synapses. And I’m very excited to be sitting here with Annie Murphy Paul, who is a science writer. She is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time Magazine, and the Best American Science Writing, among other publications, and is the author of a book that is coming out next week called The Extended Mind, about the ways in which we think outside of our brains. There are so many interesting questions that she raises in her book, so I’m really excited to be talking with you here. Welcome, Annie.

Annie Murphy Paul: Thank you. Thanks, Geoff. I’m really pleased to be here.

Geoff Mitelman: So, one of the things that you talk about in this book, The Extended Mind, which is really interesting – that we have this metaphor. We talk about the brain and our mind in two main ways: as a machine and as a muscle. And we tend to think of our brains and the way we think is only in our head here. So, why do we use that as that metaphor? And what are the limitations of using it in that way?

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, the computer metaphor. The brain-as-computer metaphor is really common, and it’s implicit in a lot of the ways that we think and talk about our brain and about thinking. And of course, that got started in the middle of the last century, when the first computers were introduced. And what’s interesting is that initially those computers, those hulking big mainframe computers – at first, they were called electronic brains. We compared them to brains but from the other direction. And pretty soon that got turned around and we started thinking of our brains as a computer, which can be a useful metaphor, but it’s really limited – it’s not really that apt in many ways. And that’s because so much of our intelligence comes from the fact that we are embodied creatures who have bodies that sense and feel, because we’re creatures who are embedded in a physical environment and navigate through that environment in a way that a computer doesn’t – and because we’re such fundamentally social creatures, and so much of our thinking is shaped by our social interactions, so comparing the brain to a computer misses all of that, and it misses a lot of what makes humans intelligent.

I mean, what’s interesting is that artificial intelligence researchers are now catching on to that, and they’re starting to realize that to create, say, a robot that can really operate intelligently in our three-dimensional world, it has to have something like a body. So, it’s almost like we’re coming back to those core human strengths that, for a while, we pushed aside as we sort of elevated a computer-like intelligence is our ideal of what intelligence is.

And then, as you mentioned, there’s this alternative metaphor, which you can find in the popular psychology accounts, like growth, mindset and grit – that the brain is like a muscle, that the more we work it, the more we exercise it, the stronger it gets. And there, again, that can be a useful metaphor. But it also has its limitations. And I think we’ve kind of seen those limitations over the past year of the pandemic, when a lot of us have been working our brains harder than ever with fewer breaks and fewer social interactions and fewer trips outside the house. I wouldn’t say that many of us are feeling like we’re working at our very best under those conditions.

It’s actually the case that we need those kinds of other experiences – the experiences of our body, the experiences of being in new and stimulating places, and those in-person interactions that we’ve all missed over the past year. So, in the book, I propose a third metaphor, an alternative metaphor, which is a magpie, the bird that kind of draws all these shiny objects from its environment and weaves them into its nest. And I’d like to think of the brain as being like a magpie. It draws its raw materials for thinking from our environment. And so, that matters in the sense that the raw materials, materials that are available for thinking, are going to influence the quality of that thinking. So, that’s a really important reason to consider the environment in how well people are thinking.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and I think one thing that we often forget about, and one of my colleagues, Rabbi Josh Garroway, and he’s quoting one of his teachers – and I can’t remember which teacher he quoted – but it was that “Our brains didn’t evolve to be able to find truth. Our brains evolved to keep us alive.”

You know, other animals have claws or sharp teeth or great eyesight. And our brains, on the African savanna, that’s what helped us survive. And part of that is being able to have that level of sociality, of being able to know “Who can I trust, who can I rely on?” And the brain is – it’s an incredible organ, but it is a physical organ that needs other things to help us survive and reproduce.

Annie Murphy Paul: Absolutely, yeah. And I think it’s actually important to think about what the brain evolved to do, as opposed to what we usually ask it to do these days in our very complex, knowledge-centric modern world. We ask it to do a lot of abstract thinking, to deal with a constant flow of information that’s in this very abstract and theoretical form. And that’s not really what the brain evolved to do. It evolved to move our bodies through space, to interact with other people – to keep ourselves alive, as you said. And so, when we eliminate or when we push aside the body and physical space and social interaction, when we remove that from education or from the way that we do our work, we’re really kind of denying the very nature of the brain.

In order to do the kind of work and the kind of learning that we expect of our brains these days, the brain kind of needs help. It can’t do it on its own as the limited biological organ that it is. And so, the better, the more skillful we can become at drawing those external resources into our thinking process, the more the brain can overachieve, the more it can do what we expect of it at a at a high level.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and one of the reasons that the pandemic has been so challenging for so many people over the last several months is the level of isolation, and being able to have those kinds of spur-of-the-moment discussions with people. People talk about in synagogues – that, you know, the service is great, but it’s the oneg afterwards when you get to have [social interaction]. Or in church, it’s the coffee hour. People say “there’s the meeting, and then there’s the actual meeting that happens in the parking lot afterwards.” And we’ve lost that. Or I think we might say that this upcoming summer of 2021 is going to be an incredible summer as, God willing, people get vaccinated – more and more people get vaccinated, being able to actually have more and more of these in person interactions.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that I found most interesting in the research that I did for this book is that social activities like storytelling, and teaching other people, and debating, and arguing with other people – those activities activate cognitive processes that remain dormant when we’re thinking alone, which is often how we do our thinking and how in our culture we think we’re supposed to do our thinking. You imagine the Rodin sculpture of the thinker with his chin on fist. And a lot of us, when we need to do real thinking, we think we have to go close ourselves off in a room and kind of really bear down, think hard –when really engaging that social faculty is the smartest way to extend your intelligence. And it’s my contention that we need to leverage our social natures and bring that social interaction into education, into the workplace, in order to think better.

Geoff Mitelman: And, you know, in Judaism, that’s the way that we actually think and study text – that, you know, we don’t sit and like, read the Bible. In Judaism, they talk about it as chevruta, study of paired learning, where you go slowly – particularly it’s in Talmud study, but it also often happens in Torah study – where people will read a short little piece and they’ll stop, and then you’ve got to talk with at least one other person. If it’s Torah study, it’s 10 or 15 people. And we find that that actually generates so many more ideas, and so many more thoughts, and such a richer conversation than just sitting and reading a book cover-to-cover, for example.

Annie Murphy Paul: Right, right. It’s more fun, for one thing. And it also can push back against some of the biases and heuristics that the brain is liable to fall into. You know, if anyone out there has read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, you know that there are these biases that we’re all sort of liable to.

And one very interesting strand of research that I read about in the book maintains that a lot of those biases are the product of us reasoning alone. That reasoning evolved as a social strategy, and that’s how it needs to be engaged. And when we think by ourselves, which is often how thinking is done, we fall prey to things like the confirmation bias, because our faculty of reasoning evolved to put forward our strongest argument, and then to pick apart other people’s arguments, but not to pick apart our own. For that, we really need another person. So, when you reason socially, things like the confirmation bias actually kind of disappear.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the wonderful things about science, is that it’s designed to be sort of eliminating the biases that may happen. That’s why there are blind reviewers. And to be able to say, “This is not this person’s argument.” This is the argument here that allows us to not say, “Oh, wow, I really like that person and I’m friends with them, so I’m going to give them more credit.” I think that’s a wonderful thing to be able to do. But when you’re trying to advance knowledge, I think that trying to eliminate some of these […] biases and human foibles that we all [have], and trying to understand science is different than trying to understand other fields. But science is designed to be able to say, “This is not my friend’s argument. I am making an argument, and it’s going to be judged just on the arguments there, not because of the social relationship I might have with somebody.”

Annie Murphy Paul: Interesting. So, making it less personal.

Geoff Mitelman: Then, at least trying to understand – because I would think that there’s a lot of research, and people talk about the halo effect of somebody who comes across as really wonderful and bright and kind in one way is going to bleed into other ways, which may not necessarily be accurate there. And so, being able to eliminate, or at least lessen, some of the biases that we have, of trying to be able to say, “I think this is accurate.” The reason that we have peer review is so that other people can make those arguments as well.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. And I think our habits of thinking that have been handed down to us are largely habits of individual thinking. And that’s becoming a real problem, in the sense that expertise is so specialized and information is so voluminous these days that most things have to be done in teams. We mostly need to be thinking together, but we haven’t really evolved a corpus of strategies and techniques for thinking as a group.

And I think we all know how easily group work and group thinking can go off, can go wrong, can go off the rails. And so, this is a skill. It can be developed, it can be cultivated, but it’s not necessarily something we’re being taught in school, or even learning in workplace training. And yet, it’s really crucial to dealing with the modern world in all its complexity.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, you talk about the importance of expertise and social groups –that so much of our thinking, again, doesn’t appear just in our own brain. What are some of the ways in which we can be relying or turning to experts where it’s appropriate [and] social groups where it’s appropriate? How do we make sure that we’re not falling into groupthink in this kind of way? What’s the role of the social network and the sociality in terms of our thinking and learning?

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. Well, one of my favorite examples of “thinking together” – like, that is what’s called transactive memory, which refers to the fact that no one can know everything, but people can have their areas of expertise and their areas of really specialized knowledge. And when people within a group have an updated and accurate idea of what everyone else in the group knows, then they effectively multiply their access to all these bodies of information, which could not be held in one person’s head.

And there’s really interesting research that suggests that teams that have a strong transactive memory system perform better than teams that don’t. And even this is a study I just saw the other day. Teams of doctors who have a strong transactive memory system, such that they all know what the other ones know – their patients get better faster. So, there’s a real consequence, there’s real impact, from having that kind of very smoothly functioning group thinking happening at the team level.

 Geoff Mitelman: Well, and I remember learning somewhere – I don’t know if it’s still accurate, but I do remember learning that one of the reasons that death and divorce are so devastating for people is that it’s not just that they’re losing their partner, it’s that they’re losing, actually, some of themselves. They’ve lost all the transactive memory – the memories that they’ve shared. They can’t be reliving some of these different pieces, even if it’s as simple as, “This person did the dishes, and this person did the laundry,” and the person who did the laundry died – “Well, now I’ve lost that ability because for 30 years that person did the laundry in this way.” And so, we actually store a lot of our memories in the brains of other people because we can’t know everything.

Annie Murphy Paul: Exactly, yes. And transactive memory exists in couples and families, as well as in workplaces. And you know, there’s related research that I find very interesting, which is that when couples who have been married for a long time – you know, obviously it’s almost universally true that older people score less well on tests of memory than younger people. But when an older couple who have known each other a really long time reminisce together and recall together, they actually can reach, like, young people’s levels of memory, because they’re drawing on each other’s memory stores and reinforcing each other’s memory abilities – which I think is kind of beautiful.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And it’s almost re-living, right? Like that memory is also something that’s bringing – a line that I love is that “Memory is breathing a little life back into someone or something.” So, when we lose that, we lose that breath – but being able to recall with someone and remember with someone, it’s reinvigorating.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yes. And again, there’s no reason that remembering or recalling should be a solitary exercise, or that it should be an exercise that we undertake when we’re still. And again, like kind of, you know –I have two sons who are studying for their final exams, and the impulse is to sit and memorize. And so, I’ve been encouraging them to get up and move and to gesture and to even act out what they’re studying, because bringing the body into the act of remembering can really strengthen our memory. And if you think about it, we remember things that we’ve done much better than just things that we’ve heard or things that we’ve read.

And so, when we bring the body into the equation, and bring that spatial and expressive action of our bodies into the active remembering, we’re setting more hooks. You can think of it as a fisherman. You set just one hook, and that’s your auditory memory or your visual memory. But if you can set both, and then maybe a memory cue that’s related to what’s known as proprioception, which is, you know, your sense of how your body is moving through space – the more of those hooks you can set into the material, the better you’ll be able to reel that in later when you need it – like during the exam.

 Geoff Mitelman: Well, and the role of physicality in the body is so critical that that’s something that we’ve forgotten from our evolutionary history. We used to have to walk all around, be able to pay attention to what were the different happenings in the flora and in the fauna – and knowing what and where is appropriate to be going somewhere, and what’s going to be dangerous, and what’s going to be helpful – that being able to go out and just go for a walk is an incredibly powerful tool.

Annie Murphy Paul: Right. Yeah. There are so many ways that physical movement can help our thinking. One is that just the physical activity of getting your heart rate elevated and getting your arms and legs moving – that actually sharpens our mental faculties. And interestingly, the effect of medium-intensity exercise can last for up to two hours after you’ve finished exercising. So, if you can make some time in the middle of your day not to have another cup of coffee, but to actually take a walk and get yourself moving, you’ll actually return to your desk sharper and more focused than when you left. When you departed for your break, which doesn’t always happen when you spend your break scrolling through Twitter or Facebook, which happens to drain those same cognitive resources that you use to do your work. So, you actually return to work kind of more frazzled and more spent than you were before.

And I think there are a lot of ways in which we don’t always know what’s best for us – I mean, we get into habits that don’t really serve us. And so, if we can take a step back and think about “What is really going to enhance my performance and my effectiveness right now?”, I think that’s what I’m hoping to offer with the book.

Geoff Mitelman: And the importance of breaks and rest. I mean, that’s something that’s so critical. That’s something we’ve actually talked about on the show a few times, about the role of Shabbat and being able to rest. And Shabbat, that it’s a command – that six days a week, you’re supposed to do your work, but on the seventh day, they’re at least traditionally screens off. Often you go to services, and there’s singing and there’s a lot of physicality. But also, Shabbat afternoon, you go for a nice walk and you take some time to actually shut down, both to be able to recharge and go back to work the next day that you’re at work, but also that there’s value added to your life of just being able to find that your work is not everything in life. And how do we have better relationships and just more flourishing and joy in our life?

 Annie Murphy Paul: Right, right. And it’s interesting that so often, when we’re given an opportunity to spend some unstructured time like that, we’re drawn to the outdoors, and we want to be outside. And that’s another thing that this research has really led me to think about, is that we spend so much time thinking about how we spend our attention, how we direct our attention and manage it and control it, but we don’t think very much about how we refill that tank – about replenishing it. And the best way to replenish our attention, it turns out, is to spend time in nature, where the quality of the sensory information that we’re taking in is so different from the kind of sensory information that we take in in an interior space, a built space, or in a city – you know, an urban kind of setting.

And, you know, psychologists talk about – I love this phrase – they talk about “soft fascination,” which I think will resonate with anyone who’s sort of lost themselves watching the waves on the ocean, or watching the wind rustle the leaves of the trees. There’s a kind of relaxed attentional stance that we just automatically adopt when we’re in nature that allows our attentional capacities to regenerate. And then we can come back to our desks and feel more focused, because we’ve replenished those limited stores again.

The brain is limited. As you were saying, it’s a biological organ. It’s an evolved organ. It’s not some kind of superhuman kind of resource. It needs to be tended to in these ways. And getting outside is – I think people even have that sense, and it’s why we’re so drawn to nature.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, you also talk in your book, in a few different chapters, about the role of built spaces and natural spaces, and how that impacts the way we think. And as you’re talking, I’m realizing that there’s a commandment in Judaism that any synagogue has to be able to have windows to the outside. So even if you’re in a built space, you need to be able to at least see natural phenomena outside while you’re praying. So that, if there is an element of soft fascination – I love that phrase, of a “soft fascination,” that if your mind is wandering, that it’s actually hopefully going towards the trees or the birds or whatever that happens to be outside. What’s the connection and the relationship between the built spaces and the natural spaces for our way of thinking?

Annie Murphy Paul: Well, there’s a lot of research on the benefits of having your desk near a window, which would really seem to support what you’re saying about that commandment of synagogues. But, you know, that’s another way in which the computer metaphor for the brain is so flawed. Because this laptop that I’m using right now – it operates exactly the same way whether it’s open here on my desk, or if I were to take it to the park and use while sitting on a park bench. So that’s how computers are.

But that’s not at all how the human brain operates. The brain is really exquisitely sensitive to context, to setting, to place. And so, one way of influencing how the brain works – we’re so, (again, this is the sort of grit and muscle metaphor), we think everything has to be mustered from within, but it’s actually much more effective and efficient to change the setting and the context in which the brain operates. And one way to do that is spend time outside, as we’re saying. But then also, you know, I write in the book about ways to arrange and structure your interior in ways that extend the mind.

And I’m sure that this is present in abundance in synagogues and other houses of worship – that it’s very important that, visible to you when you’re learning and working, that there are cues of identity – who you are and what you’re doing in that space, and also cues of belonging – you know, membership in a group that’s meaningful to you.

And what we need those cues, we need those symbols, to remind us of who we are and what we’re doing there, and that they kind of prime our thinking for the type of learning or work that we’re doing in that space.

Geoff Mitelman: And the sort of cookie-cutter apartments that are getting built –  if you go to a synagogue that was built in the 50s or 60s or 70s, they’re all kind of the same there. But now there’s a recognition that it needs to reflect: “What are the values that are there? What are we ultimately trying to do? What’s the space trying to get us to be able to feel and do, and not just think, but to actually have levels of emotion and influence us, even if they’re not necessarily conscious ways of influencing us?”

Annie Murphy Paul: Exactly, exactly. And to expect us to function in these settings where there’s nothing for our minds and our hearts to grab onto – you know, you mentioned these sort of generic buildings. I think of the rows and rows of sort of beige cubicles that fill so many offices, or this new-ish trend of workplaces where people don’t have a designated space at all, where it’s just sort of, “Grab a desk wherever you can and whenever you can.” There’s nothing there for a person, for whom this desk will, you know, not even be theirs by the end of the day. There’s nothing to remind them of who they are, and what their purpose is, and what they’re doing in that space.

And I think the pandemic has given us an opportunity to rethink how we use space, and I hope that we use it intelligently, because this disruption has really opened up new possibilities for how we use space in productive and constructive ways.

Geoff Mitelman: And what’s been gained and what’s been lost, and the ways in which we need to think in different ways. And this may have totally upended the way that we think about teams and relationships and networks, and connections here. I think that’s something that we need to be able to – I don’t know if we’re going to rebuild from the ground up, but being able to say, “Hold on a second, we can take a pause button on all of these different things that we’ve just fallen into as habits,” to be able to try to be a little bit more conscious, and a little bit more slowly thinking of, “What are we trying to accomplish here, and why?”

Annie Murphy Paul: Right, right. I do hope, too, that we may take some things less for granted – for example, the power of being in the presence of other people. You know now, being fully vaccinated, I’m just now sort of venturing back out and seeing people beyond my little pod for the first time. And it’s almost ecstatic. Honestly, it’s so wonderful to be physically with people again. And, you know, I write in the book about the importance – when you have a group or a team or any kind of collective – how important it is to do things together at the same time in person. And how things like synchronous movement – which of course is a key part of a lot of religious rituals and other kinds of rituals as well – but also having emotional experiences together, so that you feel like you’re all having the same kind of emotional response at once. And even things like sharing meals together – it’s a really powerful experience that really draws people together. And after a year of not having very much of that, I hope that we’ll never again sort of take that for granted, or lose sight of how incredibly powerful that is.

Geoff Mitelman: You mentioned – you led to something that I was going to ask now, which is the role of movement, and synchronous movement. That’s totally what ritual is designed to be able to do. Everyone singing together – that was one thing that I think a lot of houses of worship really lost and missed tremendously, was bringing people together to sing or to dance or to have movement in the same direction, to be able to have the same sort of emotion there. How does that impact the way in which we think? How does that extend our mind?

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, it’s really incredible. I mean, we’d like to think of ourselves as modern, civilized people, but really, we are biological creatures. We’re animals, really, you know, and we have these very visceral ways of connecting with each other. And one of those is synchronous movement. It’s almost like a hack that kind of, like tricks our brain into thinking that, “Oh, if I’m moving at the same time as this other person, in a way, we’re kind of moving as one.” The boundary between us tends to blur when we engage in synchronous movement like that. And, you know, not just religions, but also militaries, for example, have always taken it, with their sort of coordinated marching and all that. They’ve used this hack to bring people together and give them a sense of shared identity and common fate. And that’s an example of the kind of thing that you just can’t do on your own. You can’t achieve that sense of blending with another person, unless you’re really physically present with them.

 Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And the level of you mentioned before, of the role of belonging and identity – you know, if we were to be plopped on a desert island with just ourselves and our own wits, we would not last very long. But being able to say, “This is part of my tribe, this is part of my community,” however I define what my tribe is, that reinforces what we’re able to do, makes us feel psychologically safe, and then being able to take risks and be able to try new ideas.

Annie Murphy Paul: Exactly, yeah. One of the interesting strands of research that I pursued in this book was this idea of this concept called that psychologists call “ambient belonging,” which is, again, the cues of belonging that are present in our physical spaces. And I was talking about it in terms of our individual workspaces. But there are also those cues and symbols that are present throughout an institution. And unfortunately, a lot of times those symbols and cues that are visible to those who enter don’t communicate belonging. You know, it might be a row of sort of elders of the institution or past presidents or whatever, who are all white men, you know, and there’s no representation of the full diversity of an organization on the walls.

And this is the original study that gave rise to the idea of ambient belonging. A computer science classroom that embodies a lot of the stereotypes about who studies computer science – like, lots of empty soda cans and Star Trek posters and things like that. The studies showed that female undergraduates who went into a setting like that drew conclusions about computer science and about whether they didn’t feel that they belonged there. They didn’t feel that computer science was something that they could do, that was for them, that they would do well in. But when they were brought into another room, another computer science classroom that was much more sort of gender-neutral, that had nature posters on the wall and bottles of water and a novel strewn here or there, they felt much more comfortable there. They felt like, “This could be me, this could be something I do.”

And interestingly, for the male students, it didn’t seem to make a difference. They felt equally confident in either setting of their ability to take on computer science. But I think we need to be very sensitive to the kinds of cues that our physical spaces are giving off, and make sure that they are inclusive and they are making people feel that ambient belonging.

Geoff Mitelman: And this is one thing that we were taught in rabbinical school, which is that there’s the message and the meta-message of the message that every, every synagogue, every church, every house of worship, every institution, is “Come. We’re a warm, welcoming community. We want you to be part of this.” But the meta message is, “Is there representation?” You know, what kinds of people are actually showing up? And what is the music like? Can you sing along? Can you not sing along? Whatever those meta-messages are that we don’t often think about because they’re just part of what the institution has done – that will always trump what the message is. And for the institutions to say what are, “What are the built spaces? What are the messages that are built spaces? What is the music that we’re saying? What is that social group that we’re communicating here?”

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, yeah. And there’s interesting research to suggest that people who are members of traditionally disadvantaged groups are especially almost hyper-vigilant, like really, really sensitive to those cues of belonging and whether they’re present or not. And you know, another interesting way to think about this is online spaces, because, you know, when we go to a website, we’re also seeing cues, whether it’s a photograph of who’s in this academic department – or the language that’s used, whether it’s exclusionary or inviting people to feel that they could be a part of whatever it is that’s being advertised on the website. If it’s a sign-up or a sign-up page for a course, for example, there’s evidence that when you include pictures of a diverse group of people and you include a message that says, “this subject” – again, the study I’m thinking of related to computer science – “Computer science is for everyone. People from all walks of life have made contributions to this discipline, and you are welcome here, and you can thrive here.” That really makes a difference. And so, I don’t think that we’ve always thought about our online spaces in that way, as also offering a whole bunch of cues to people that can be really significant in the choices and decisions they make.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, as you talked about disadvantaged communities and how aware they are if they’re not represented in different spaces, you also talk about extension inequality, in terms of being able to have access and being able to think in different kinds of ways, whether that’s financial, whether that’s technological. What is extension inequality? And why is that something that we need to be so aware of?

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, this is something that emerged for me over the course of researching and writing this book. I didn’t start out with the idea that – I didn’t start out thinking about the political and social implications of this so much, but they became increasingly clear to me as I was writing the book. And what I mean by extension inequality is that we have this notion as a culture that intelligence and the ability to think well is this internal, individual, inherent ability. And that’s how we treat it. That’s how we test for it. That’s how we incorporate it into admissions procedures and all the rest. But there’s a problem if actually, the ability to think intelligently is highly dependent on those raw materials that we were talking about – in terms of access to green spaces, and freedom to move your body, and spaces that are quiet, over which you have a feeling of ownership and control – which is another important thing about interior space. And a space that is yours and that you can have, and where you have those cues of identity and belonging.

And again, the social relationships – people don’t have anything like equitable access to mentors or, you know, really knowledgeable teachers or even peers. That is not by any means equitably distributed. So, when we have a blind spot for all the ways in which these outside the brain resources affect the way we think, then we’re not really seeing clearly the ways in which those outside-the-brain resources are affecting how well people are able to perform in their everyday lives. And so, I think extension inequality – you could compare it to something like the wealth gap, or the achievement gap. It’s a gap in what people have available to them in terms of the thinking that they need to do and that they want to do. And it’s something that I hope will pay increasing attention to.

Geoff Mitelman: And it’s not just the nature – when people talk about nature versus nurture – that it’s both, right? You need both. What do you have as the raw materials to be able to build? And there may be some people who are absolutely brilliant, and not have the access to be able to have the resources they need, and so are not thriving at the level that somebody else could, right? And being able to have that challenge there.

Annie Murphy Paul: Exactly. And I think when we use the term “nurture,” we often think, “Well, yes, it’s true. People have different kind of childhood experiences that have lasting effects into adulthood.” And what I’m saying is a little different, which is actually, it’s what you have available to you right now in terms of raw materials with which to construct your thinking that makes a really big difference in terms of how well you’re able to think. So it’s not just, you know, a long-ago kind of – “Oh, yes, that person had a disadvantaged childhood.” It’s really what you have available to you right now in terms of outside-the-brain resources.

Geoff Mitelman: I want to shift and ask another question that we talked about a little bit before we went on air, which is the responsibility of a science communicator, because I’m not a PhD – I can’t read PhD level studies in almost anything. And probably, by the way, most PhDs can’t read PhDs in other fields also. They’ve got the psychology, but they are not going to be able to read paleoanthropology, or astrophysics, or whatever scientific study that they’re looking at. So, for those of us who consume our scientific knowledge predominantly through places like Scientific American, New York Times, or public and popular books about science, how do you translate some of the academic PhD work into ways in which the lay people can understand? Because you’re threading a tough needle there.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yes, yes. And with this project, particularly so, because it ranged across so many disciplines. You know, I was drawing on studies from neuroscience and psychology, and cognitive science and physiology, and then also ranging into philosophy – because philosophy is where the theory of the extended mind first originated.

And I think what it comes down to – and I really am sympathetic to a public that is not going to have time to sit down and read these journal articles, and does rely on these popularizers to make sense of things – I think it comes down to being educated about the way science works. And you could see this in this past year with the pandemic – that people were often confused and upset that it seemed like the advice about masks was always changing, or whether we should wipe down our groceries and our mail and stuff like that. You know, I think the more that the public is able to understand the way science functions, that science is a self-correcting – ideally a self-correcting – enterprise. And we’re always revising our knowledge, updating our knowledge, adding to our knowledge. And that can be messy, and it’s a human enterprise, so it’s by no means perfect – but it’s really the best tool we have for understanding ourselves and the world.

Geoff Mitelman: And we’ve talked about this, actually, on the show a few times, which is trying to be able to distinguish what is accurate information; what’s information that was accurate three years ago (but now the new data has shown that that’s not accurate anymore); [and] something that is well meaning but inaccurate, versus something that’s willful deception. And that’s hard for a layperson to be able to know, when you read, “Oh, this is an interesting piece. I want to click on this Twitter link or this Facebook link here, and to know what am I actually looking at,” being curious about these kinds of questions. That’s a hard thing for a layperson to be able to do.

Annie Murphy Paul: It is – it really is. And all the more so because so much trust has broken down in our society, and the people that we maybe once trusted to give us information, and to really trust their authority and their credibility – for many people, that’s eroded. I mean, Geoff, you and I were talking about how it’s easy to get attached to a study that is particularly interesting or thought-provoking, or maybe confirms what we always thought, and I’m as liable to that as anyone. I try to keep in mind what – there’s a cognitive science scientist and education researcher at the University of Virginia named Daniel Willingham who does wonderful work on the science of learning. And have you…

Geoff Mitelman: I’ve read his book, Why Don’t Children Like School? Yep. I follow him on Twitter also.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, he’s fantastic. And I think on his Twitter bio, he has, he has the phrase, “One study is just one study, folks.” In other words, “don’t get too attached to one finding.” And I tried very much to follow that motto in my own reporting for this book, that really what you’re looking for is an accumulation of findings that are all sort of pointing in the same direction, and ideally findings that were arrived at in different ways with different methodologies.

Again, this is pretty deep in the weeds for someone who’s just trying to do their job and raise their kids and get dinner on the table. But I do think that’s the responsibility of people like me, who play that translator role between the researchers and the public.

Geoff Mitelman: And to be able to have some takeaways. “Here are some ways in which we could potentially change the way we do education, change the way we do religion, change the way we interact in society.” That there are pieces, that there are the PhDs and then there’s you as the communicator, then that gets read by the board of whatever institution it is and making recommendations here. And so, it’s an important step, but to be able to recognize each step has its own responsibility and to be able to take each piece on its own merits.

Annie Murphy Paul: Again, it’s got to be a collective enterprise. And this is our human future, is having to work together. There’s no alternative. Just because knowledge is so complex and so specialized and so theoretical and abstract, we really need all the help we can get to make sense of our worlds and to navigate it effectively. And to rely on the brain alone is really no longer a sustainable strategy.

Geoff Mitelman: So, what were some of the things that surprised you the most as you were doing research and writing this book?

Annie Murphy Paul: So many things. I mean, one of my favorite chapters is the chapter on gesture, because gesture is something we do all the time and we don’t think about it – and if we do, we probably think that it’s just a kind of extraneous movement. But in fact, gesture – it’s a really good example of an outside-the-brain resource that is really part of the loop that forms our thinking process.

One of my favorite findings in the gesture literature is that many of our most advanced, most cutting-edge ideas – the ones that we can’t yet put into words – they show up first in our hand gestures. When we express those ideas spatially through our gestures, that in turn can inform the verbal account that we’re constructing of what our thoughts are. And so if you want to help, say, your child or a student understand something more deeply something that they’re struggling to grasp, one really good way to do that is to induce them to gesture. And you can do that – you know, I do this with my own kids. I say, “Can you move your hands when you tell me about that?” You know, just giving them the kind of signal that gesturing is a good idea, and is okay. But you can also ask a student to explain something in front of a group, and improvising in that way is really cognitively taxing. So, we tend to offload a lot of that labor onto our hands, and we gesture more. And the more we gesture, the more deeply we come to understand what we’re talking about.

And one more sort of tip in that vein is that we tend to gesture more when there’s something to gesture at. So, when there’s an artifact or a model, or – science teachers kind of know, this when they fill their classrooms with a human skeleton or a model of an atom or whatever. When people, when students don’t yet have the technical vocabulary to really talk in a sophisticated, mature way about a particular subject, they can point and they can use their hands to suggest motion in ways that allow them to almost vault themselves into a higher level of thinking, as long as they’re using gesture to kind of bootstrap themselves there.

Geoff Mitelman: And I’m obviously thinking about synagogue life – that in a synagogue, there’s the ark. That’s where you focus. And I obviously use my hands a lot when I’m talking here, as well. But being able to orient, you’re always facing east. And churches, too – there’s a focus of whatever iconography there is. And that’s very interesting, to be able to talk about orienting yourself towards something. And probably there’s an element of the belonging also, of every – the energy is directed towards one central place, one central location.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yes. Another thing I write about in the book is the importance of shared attention – that when we are aware that other people are paying attention to the same thing as we are at the same time, the salience and the meaning of that object or that piece of information is heightened.

And it makes sense. I mean, we need to stay on the same page as other people. And so, even very young babies, within a few months of being born, they will start following the gaze of the adults in their lives – their caregivers. And this is a very subtle and, I think very beautiful way that adults are informing their children of “This is what is important to pay attention to. That thing can be ignored.”

But that kind of shared attention – which, again, is really cultivated by ritual, when you have everyone looking or attending to the same thing at the same time – that kind of shared attention is important throughout our lives, and is really important in terms of bringing a group together to participate in a kind of shared reality.

Geoff Mitelman: And what it almost sounds like – and correct me if I’m wrong on this – but one of the things that we think about as our brains as so important and so crucial and so cognitively taxing – and I think particularly in American society, there’s a belief that you’ve got to work hard, and if you’re not working hard, you’re not doing it right. And so if you’re offloading something cognitively, you’re being lazy and you’re doing it wrong, when in fact we need to offload as much as we can. And if we can offload some of the stuff that we don’t need to think that hard about, we can be using that time to think more deeply, more richly, create more connections – that there’s actually a tremendous amount of value in offloading a lot of the cognitive work that we need to do on a day to day basis.

Annie Murphy Paul: That’s exactly right. I mean, we try to do way too much in our heads. And unfortunately, as a culture, we validate that, doing things in our heads, you know, geniuses do it in their heads, chess grandmasters – they do everything, you know, up here. And you’re right, actually offloading our mental contents, getting them onto a piece of paper or a whiteboard or a bunch of Post-It notes – that allows us to interact with our ideas as if they’re physical objects. And we’ve been talking about how important material objects are to the way that the brain operates, and when we can turn ideas into objects and actually navigate, we can use our navigational skills, our spatial skills. These are all resources and capacities we have, but they’re dormant when we’re just sitting still and we keep everything up here.

So, you’re right, offloading is – I often think about how we do allow very young children, like kindergarteners, to use manipulatives. And we understand that that helps them learn, say, how to add and subtract. But then we have this idea that like, “Oh, that’s just kid stuff,” that, you know, as you get older, as you say, that’s being lazy, or it’s being sort of uncouth in some way to have to use these external props. But actually, that is the route to more effective thinking, if we can kind of get past our own biases about it.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, I think that’s a real challenge to be able to overcome that. So, there was a question that did come up about the quick response – cognitive access in the moment to stored knowledge that things that we – and if I’m understanding this – that there’s stuff that we know that we don’t even know that we know. So how do we reflect on that? How do we access the stuff that, “Oh, I wasn’t even aware that I knew this this kind of stuff”?

Annie Murphy Paul: Yes. Well, I write about that at length in the chapter about interoception, which is a fancy word that basically just means “gut feelings” – you know, a sense that we’ve all have experienced where you have a sense of something, but it doesn’t seem to come from your brain, from your cognition. And scientists have been elaborating on and exploring what that is. And it turns out that as we go through our daily lives, we’re making note of patterns and regularities in our experience, so that when we encounter them again, it’s like, “Oh wait, I’ve been here before, I know what this is, I know how to react.”

But those patterns are actually so complex, so voluminous, that we can’t keep them in our conscious minds. It would just overtax our bandwidth. And so, they’re retained in our non-consciousness – in our non-conscious minds. And then you may say, “Well, how, if they’re non-conscious, how do we have access to them?” It’s our body that tells us, it’s our body that gives us kind of a little, you know, tug on the sleeve. And that’s what a gut feeling is, that you have this sense, like, “Oh, I’ve been here before, I know how to respond to this situation.”

And unfortunately, again, our culture being so focused on the brain doesn’t really encourage us to tune into those internal signals. And we think of it maybe as kind of New Agey – or again, we might think that the way to do really serious thinking and hard thinking work is to push the body’s signals aside, and to power through and ignore what the body is telling you, when actually the more you’re able to tune into those interoceptive cues, the more you can use them to inform form your decisions and your choices and your thinking.

So, that’s another way in which I think we all need almost a second education in thinking – not just thinking with the brain, but thinking outside the brain. And I would love to see kids being taught that their body actually has something to tell them.

Geoff Mitelman: I have two young kids, and the importance of being able to have wiggle breaks, and being able to not sit in one place for [a long time] – and I think we’re going to look back on this last year of the pandemic as very challenging, because kids not being able to see all of somebody’s face and needing to stay in one place. I think we’re going to find that that’s actually going to have at least a mildly, if not moderately significant, effect on what kids are able to learn over the next couple of years.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, this has been a really challenging year. I think if there’s any positive that comes out of it, one thing might be that we’ve all been brains in front of screens for a year, and we’ve seen how limiting that is. I think people are maybe ready to pay more attention to the role of the body and physical spaces, which we can now get out into and explore, and these in-person interactions that we’ve been starved for are possible again. And I think this has been a nationwide experiment in just being brains in vats – you know, as the term from philosophy goes. It’s been like a thought experiment come to life. And I think we’ve seen exactly what the drawbacks of being a brain in a vat really are.

Geoff Mitelman: Which means that people should buy your book now, which is coming out next week, to be able to read that as we reenter into this wonderful summer. So, Annie, thank you so much for talking with us here this afternoon.

Annie Murphy Paul: This has been so much fun. Geoff, thank you so much.

Geoff Mitelman: So people can find you on your website at anniemurphypaul.com, and they can follow you on Twitter, I believe, at the same Twitter handle. Correct?

Annie Murphy Paul: That’s right. That’s correct.

Geoff Mitelman: And you can buy her book, The Extended Mind, coming out next week, June 8^th, wherever books are sold. You can find us – we are on social media at @SinaiSynapses at Twitter, also on Facebook, you can find me at @RabbiMitelman. And thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Annie.

Next week we’ll be talking with Professor Julien Musolino, who talks about the role of the soul and how can we understand “What does the soul mean from a scientific perspective?” His thesis is that it is not anything that we can talk about scientifically. So, we’re going to have a very interesting discussion here next week. I hope you’ll join us next Tuesday at 2:00pm. Thank you all. Hope everyone has a wonderful afternoon.