Annie Murphy Paul || The Extended Mind

the Brain. Annie, thanks for coming on the Psychology Podcast again after being our very first guest ever. Thank you so much, Scott. I'm so happy to be back, you know, seven years later, seven years Wow, and look at all the people you've talked to in those seven years. It's amazing. I was gonna say, look how many books you've done since then. I have not been as prolific as you. That is sure, That is for sure. Oh come on, now, I love your work, as you know, I'm a big fan,

and this latest book is no exception. You know, in this new book you invite the reader to quote think outside the Brain. Can you can you tell our listeners a little bit what that what that means? To you to think outside the brain. Sure, yes, Well, I borrowed the idea of the extended mind from two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, and their idea, which I think I hopefully expanded upon and elaborated on, is that we don't just think with our brains. We think with the

world around us. And in my book I explore in the in sort of more minute detail what that means. We think with our bodies, you know, our bodies below the neck, so because of course the brain is part of the body, but we think with the rest of our bodies. We think with the spaces in which we learn and work, and we think with the mind of

other people. And to conceive of thinking in this way is it's a departure from how we're used to thinking about thinking, which is, you know, everything goes on inside the head. And all of our efforts that cultivating intelligence and effective thinking seemed to be directed at improving how the brain functions. And I wanted to nudge people to think about, well, what are those other resources that we pull into our thinking processes, and how can we do

that more skillfully? Yeah, you make the case that we pay too little attention to the body and discussions about intelligence. I mean just the whole language of you know, that person's brainy, right, that person I don't know, hows a smart arm. But why is that misguided? Tell us why that's misguided? You should talk about you know how it's not just the brain and right, Well, that idea that

the body has nothing to contribute to intelligence. I think that's rooted in a metaphor that really animates much of our thinking about thinking, and that is the computer. Sorry, the brain as computer metaphor. We think of the brain as being like a computer, like a processor of information, and that's actually not how human intelligence works. You know, we evolved, We evolved in a setting that made use

of our entire body all the time. Our movements, our gestures, the internal signals that rise up from within our body, all of these contribute to our thinking all the time. But again, we're used to thinking of thinking as happening only in the brain, and so we have a blind spot in a sense for all the ways that the body and its capabilities contribute to intelligent thought. Yeah, you

talk a lot in your book about introception. Very exciting feel it's tied up with this merging research on embodied cognition, which for your book for sure, Can you tell us a little about what introception is and maybe even individual

differences in that, because I'm very interested individual differences aspect. Yes. Yeah, So introception is a kind of fancy technical word for gut feelings, you know, those feelings that arise within your body that give you a sense of something, of knowing something, but the notion doesn't seem to come from your brain. It actually feels like it's coming from within your body.

And in fact, just like we have all these sensors that take in information from the world outside, we have sensors located all throughout the inside of our body that send the brain this continuous flow of information about how the body is doing, whether balance, a state of balance is being maintained, what actions need to be taken to maintain a state of balance, And in terms of individual d differences, it does seem to be the case that

people are really widely distributed across the spectrum in terms of how sensitive they are to their internal signals, how attuned they are to those signals. You know, the sort of standard test of introceptive sensitivity is the heartbeat detection test, so it's like, and how that works is that people are asked to name the moment when their heart is beating.

And what's interesting is that some people immediately take to this task and say, oh, yeah, I know when my heart is beating, and other people are like, what are you talking about, Like, I have no idea when my heart is beating. And it's the same, you know, the heartbeat detection tests. The heartbeat is a kind of proxy or stand in for the whole range of introceptive sensations that we feel, and across all those many introceptive sensations, people are different in terms of how sensitive they are

to those sensations. And it's not entirely clear why those individual differences exist. It may be partly genetic and maybe partly the kinds of messages that people got growing up from their caregivers about how legitimate it was to pay attention to those internal signals and take them seriously. You know, some people were told, you know, you're not hungry, it's not dinner time yet, or you know, or we're kind

of encouraged to put those internal signals aside. And I think more generally in our society, there's not we don't have a lot of patients for or affinity for those internal signals and really taking them seriously. So I think all of us, no matter where we stand on that spectrum of introceptive attunement, can probably benefit from from becoming more sensitive to those internal signals and cues. Yeah, is mindful meditation does that alter interceptive ability? It seems to.

It seems to have that effect. In particular, the activity that is often a part of mindfulness meditation known as the body scan, where you pay objective, non judgmental, accepting, open minded attention to whatever sensations rise up from your body, and you might even kind of go part by part, you know, like first feeling what's there to be felt in your feet and in your legs and in your hips and in your stomach, and then all the way up through the body, and just being very aware of

what those feelings are, which you know, in the hurry and bustle of every day we often don't check in with our bodies in that way, but it's a very easy way to kind of just as I say, check in with yourself and see what you are feeling on the inside. Nice. Yeah, that's also good for getting going to bed at night. I like to do a body scan helps me relax at the end of the long day.

There are profound implications in individual differences in this. You know, people a lot of mental disorders and other things like like psychopathy. Like psychopaths have an altered interception the feedback they're getting they're not in touch with and they're also it kind of limits them from being able to learn from their mistakes as a result. I had not heard that. Wow,

that's so interesting, Scott, I had. I had read about introception being implicated in faulty interception being implicated in things like eating disorders and addiction, where so met much of those so so much of those behaviors are bound up in responding to bodily cues, and if you can't feel them, or if you feel them excessively, as is the case in say, panic disorder, interception can be really the kind

of locus of some of those mental conditions. Yeah, and also there's and this is really like frontlines of science I'm about to say, but there's an emerging model of OCD as purely an alteration of introception. So kind of reconceptualizing all of O c D from that vantage point and and what that does, you know, like the OCD symptoms result kind of rethinking why exactly those symptoms are resulting and why people get so locked on certain things they're not able to get in touch with what it

actually is and why it's driving their behaviors. Yeah, so interesting. So maybe those compulsive behaviors are are a response to or a try in a way to try to address those internal events. Interesting. Interesting, So state like stay tuned for more on that. Research on that. I mean, it's you know, it's a very emerging science. You know, you the word We should talk about intelligence for a second.

How do you define intelligence? You know, because you use that word in your book and you talk about you could see how an intelligence researcher in the field of psychology might beg to differ that some of the things you're describing as intelligence as intelligence. But no one, as we both know and agree, no one has like the stake on what that word means and what counts. No research or owns the definition of it. So I'd love to ask Andy Murphy Paul's definition. I probably have a

pretty broad definition, all things considered. I would say intelligence is the ability to think effectively in the world to learn and remember, to solve problems, and to come up with new ideas, you know. So for me, it's really rooted and grounded and how effectively you can act in the world. It's less of a you know, brain and a jar kind of you know, what's your IQ, and more like what can you do with that intelligence you

have in terms of advancing your own goals? And that's you know, the cornerstone of my mentor in grad school.

Robert Sternberg's new book, which I think you wrote about in the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, the Bust and Globe, I think I think it was Yeah, Yeah, Boston wrote about that a little bit about adaptive intell So if you think about it as really adapt we can certainly bring in lots of the things we're talking about, because you make the point that the spaces around us expand our minds and can increase our expertise and knowledge

and intelligence. What are some of the environmental conditions that you've identified, Yeah, Well, one of them is spending time outdoors, which was a really interesting strand of research that at first I was a little skeptical about, to be honest, because the idea that you know, going outside makes you feel good or makes you think better seemed like sort of,

you know, tree hugging, nature loving nonsense. But the more I am dug into that research, the more I appreciated the the mechanism by which psychologists think that those effects occur, which is, you know that we evolve to process the kind of information that is present in natural settings, and we process that information, that stimuli in a really effortless way, in a way that you know, we find very pleasant, that we find very restorative in the sense that it

doesn't demand, doesn't make the demands on our cognition, it doesn't draw down our mental resources the way you know, a highly stressful urban setting, or even like focusing very intently on symbols and concepts as we do in our work and our learning. Those those things are really demanding of the brain. But being out in nature, as many of us know from personal experience, you know, it's it's restorative, it's relaxing. It engages our attention in a way that

is pleasant and diverting. But it's sort of diffuse. It's not like we have to focus really intently on anything. And so after we spent some time in nature. It's like refilling the tank, you know, of our of our attentional resources, and then we can we can go back to return to our work, our learning sort of refreshed and better able to focus. Yeah. Yeah, it's intense living in a big city, all sorts of things, you know,

like cognitively, what are what are you know? You talk about cognitive loops in West World where he goes we all have can you talk a little about sure, yeah, I'm not sure how much I can say about West World, but but in terms of cognitive loops, yeah, I again borrowed that idea from Andy Clark, the philosopher who likes to say that humans are intrinsically loopy creatures, meaning that again we're different from computers in that a computer, if

it's solving a problem or processing some information, it doesn't print out you know, the information, like mark it up with a pen, like take a couple of days and come back to it, you know, show it to some colleagues and get their comments, and then you know that all those things are creating loops where you're you're looping the information in through your own brain and then out into the world, into space, into the minds of other people,

maybe through your body, through through the movements of your body. And there's something about those creating those loops that enhances human intelligence. And that's not how computers work again, but that's how human brains appear to work. And so when we are trying to enhance our own thinking, I think it can be really helpful to think in terms of creating those productive and enriching loops, rather than keeping it all in our head where that information can't be improved

and enriched and made better by those successive loops. Cool. Yeah. In that nineteen ninety five essay by Clark and Chalmers entitled The Andish to Andy Clark and David Chalmers called The Extended Mind, they asked the question, where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin. Now, that's a very interesting philosophical question and with obviously huge psychological implications. Do you see any boundaries at all? I mean,

are there? It's it seems intuitive to me, like intuitively to me, that there are moments where my mind is just to myself. I want it to be when I'm fantasized. I don't love that out of my head. Now, you know what I'm saying so like it. There surely are moments when we're thinking and it is just contained to our body, isn't that right? Hmmm? Right? Or no? Is is the does the mind ever stop at the at the at the skull? Is that? Is that the question? Like?

Or does it always extend? It? Is there always mind? Yeah? I think I would say there always is an extended mind. I've never been asked that question, so I'm really thinking about it. But for one thing, the fact that we have language, the fact that we have structures of thought and conventions of thought, those are all relics or artifacts of our interactions with other people. Right, So in a sense, we have no thoughts without other people, without our social

experience of a lifetime. So I think from the very beginning our minds are extended. I don't know that there's any way around that, because of their influence, like the influence of the environment on the thoughts we're thinking. Yeah, And we're always doing our thinking in a particular body. We're always doing our thinking in a particular place, We're always doing it in some kind of social context, even

when we're alone. So yeah, I don't think. I don't think I thought is ever not extended, you know, As you know, I'm very interested in like genius and giftedness. Giftedness and and kids that can do amazing calculations in their head and are capable of learning far beyond their years. There's a certain certain part where they can clean the credit, you know, for their brain that their their unique brain

they have. And then there's another hand of a lot of the some of the rich resources a lot of them may have had, and and aspects that you table. So it seems like there's there's a mix, Like I don't I don't think you want to you're going in so far as to suggest that you know, there's there's no brain processes that are you know, I don't get that from you, right, Yeah, No, No, I would never want to say that that the brain is not central

to thinking. I just I'd like to think of it in terms of redefining the brain's role not as the place where it all happens, but rather a more dynamic kind of role of like I like to compare it to an orchestra conductor, like to someone to the entity that's coordinating all these resources and bringing them all together. And when we think about thinking in that way, to me, it opens up all these options because now it's not a matter of just sitting there working your brain until

the task is done. You have all these other resources to draw and you know, maybe you need to go for a walk, or maybe you need to have a conversation with a friend, or maybe you need to act out. You know what, you're the problem you're trying to solve with your body and with your gestures. So to me, it's a very optimistic vision of our potential and how we can expand our potential. Definitely optimistic, definitely and optimistic. And also, as you point out, it can give is

compassion for people in suboptimal conditions. So it's not always optimistic in the sense you know, you know, some people are in certain environments where their extended mind is is direct. As my father would say, you know, well, yeah, I mean, and that's why I think there's there is another blind spot here when we're talking about judging people on what presumably or ostensibly their brains are able to produce, and judging their their outcomes as if their brains are are

the end of the story. But because the raw materials that we have to think with are such an important aspect of our ability to think intelligently. It matters the quality of the raw materials that we have access to and whether we know how to use them skillfully. So once you bring that aspect into awareness, it seems crazy to me to to judge people on their ability to think intelligently, as if all that matters is inside their brains, and not to look at the wide angle lens of like.

But you know what, are they free to move their bodies. Are they in a place that is quiet and orderly and supportive of intelligent thinking? They do? They have a network of mentors and peers and teachers who can help them think. You know, all those things matter hugely to how intelligently we're able to think, and those things are not in any way equitably distributed. Great point, and they're also you know, just that doesn't look like what an IQ test is at all. I mean, I can know

individualistic is right, possibly right. When you're supposed to sit there without moving and you're in a strange place without any of your usual cues around, and you're not allowed to talk to your neighbor who's taking the IQ test alongside you, I mean, it's it's an incredibly brain bound, as Andy Clark would say, brain bound approach to intelligence, and it misses the to me, the vast, you know, repository of human intelligence that we draw in all the

time in ordinary real life situations. Yeah, it seems like COVID is relevant to this discussion as well, because there must have been implications of living during the pandemic for our brain, our brain bound way of thinking. We realized just how extended the mind really is during this time. Is that right? Oh? I really think so. Yes. I mean we I think during the during the period when things were really shut down, we were all kind of brains in front of screens for months at a time,

you know. And I think a couple of insights came out of that. For me. One was that, you know, if we're going to take seriously this model of grit or the growth mindset, wherein you know, the ideas if you just work your brain harder and harder, if you give it more exercise the way you know, you exercise

the muscle, it get stronger. A lot of us were working our brains a whole lot during the pandemic because we had no commute, we had no chats with coworkers, We were just you know, working, working, working, And it's not as if we many of us did not feel that our brains were at their best or were at like in fine form, you know, because there were a lot of other things that we were now being deprived of, that we were being cut off from because of the pandemic.

We may not have been moving as much. A lot of us just sort of sat in front of our computers day after day. We weren't visiting new and stimulating places,

we weren't interacting with people in person. So, you know, one professor said to me that he felt cut off from his extended mind because he wasn't allowed to go into his university office, and the way his books were arranged in the shelves around him formed a kind of external memory and an external body of knowledge that he was not cut off from because he couldn't be in his office. So I think the fact that our minds are extended became much more apparent to to many of

us during the pandemic. Yeah, I think the implications for children is striking. In fact, Angel Duckworth, who you know you were talking about grit a few seconds ago, she co authored a big study on some of the implications of children not being able to go to school and inplications for their well being, and and you know, she found there's huge implications, very very high levels of anxiety.

And I think that's just really goes to show the extent to which just learning a contextually, you know, is not not all that matters for school children having social law needs met, have their having their other basic needs and growth needs in that right. Yeah, The idea that all that matters is the transfer of information from one brain to another is such a limited and constrained idea of what learning is and how it happens, and it's it's not an accurate view at all of how that

happens for kids or for adults for that matter. Yeah, yeah, for sure, I think I want to talk about information. And we both talked her herd at the same time. Did you see that there's something there about it about the extended mind? Where we were we were so in sync that we both at the same pause did the

same hand gesture. I think so. I mean, I write in the chapter on introception about how the way we know how another person feels is that we subtly mimic their their facial expressions, their their posture, their gestures, and then we kind of read that off our own bodies and that gives us that that creates a channel for us to understand the otherwise inaccessible feelings of another person. So maybe in that moment, Scott, you and I were engaged in that kind of introceptive dance. Yeah, we're able

to illustrate that. People who watch the YouTube video you can watch that happen in real time on planned. I do want to I do want to segue into talking a little about information overload, a really important top that you talked about in your book, and I really enjoyed that discussion in your book and the extent to which you know, we have this bombardment of information coming us way too much for a conscious mind to rest, and we are very not We're not that too privy to

the extent to which our unconscious minds are. It's influencing our unconscious right and and all sorts of So I'm just wondering if you could talk a little about perhaps how people who design social media platforms or other sort of news outlets, et cetera, might take an account some of the principles you're talking about in your book. Oh, so interesting in terms of information overload. I was thinking about that. Yeah, yeah, interesting, Okay, I have I have

two thoughts there. One is that I make the argument in the book that are the biological brain is kind of operating at peak capacity at this point, and there's so much information coming at us. Our expertise is so specialize. Our problems, as you've made reference to a couple of times, are so daunting that the biological brain on its own

is not really up to the task. That we really have to acquire what I call a second education and in thinking outside the brain, at skillfully using these external resources in order to meet the moment really of you know, what our world demands of us. And then the other thought I had, you know, I talk about non conscious information acquisition in the chapter on introception, because that was the explanation, you know, just like the nature loving stuff.

I initially approach the idea of intuition that's informed by introception with a little bit of skepticism, like, you know, gut feelings, like how often, like how would that work? Like that sounds a little mystical, But the idea or the research, what the research suggests is that you know, as you were saying, there's so much information coming at us all the time, just in daily life that our

conscious minds can't absorb at all. But we can store and register and store a lot of that in our in a non conscious way in terms of noting patterns and regularities. And but these these patterns are too complex for our conscious minds to really to for us to be able to articulate in a conscious way. So the way we have access to those those helpful patterns and

signals is through the those introceptive cues. You know. That's what a uh uh, you know, a sudden sort of tightening in your stomach or a sudden elevation in your heart rate, that's what that's your body telling you. You know, this is pay attention. This is something you've encountered before. You've you've you've maybe had a similar experience before, and this is how you acted, you know. So we get access to all that non non consciously stored information through

the body. And that's why it's so important to be attuned to what the body is telling you. Otherwise you're kind of missing out on all that the richness of that information that you actually do possess. Yeah, I think it's a really good point. But when you're talking about how's it different from intuition? How how you know rationality decision making researchers refer to as intuition, Is it similar?

Is it? Is it different? You know, because a lot of them argue that, Yeah, it always strikes me how much. How you know, it's such a strong current in our culture to want to see ourselves as perfectly rational as as computing machines, and I just I really take a different view that, you know, we have this incredibly rich source of wisdom and knowledge and information that's that's there with us all the time in our bodies, and why

wouldn't we take advantage of that? Not not that we shouldn't be that we should act on it uncritically, And in fact I describe and exercise in the book called keeping an Introceptive Journal, which means sort of tracking, which involves tracking your introceptive sensations and what they're telling you and then if you act on them. How that decision turned out? Just looking at introception and our bodily signals as another source of information that can possibly be very informative.

Not that we should base everything on that. But I don't think it's smart to base everything on pure rationality either. Yeah, so it sounds like, you know, this is not well you're arguing, is not at all incompatible with a mindful

way of life. You know, you can use that, you can be aware of the information coming from your body, and you can also be mindful of whether or not you want to apply it right right, And just to you know, you mentioned expertise there a moment ago, and I do think that the extended mind has implications for how we think about expertise, because I think our brain bound notion of expertise is that the expert does it

all in his head. You know that that he's the chess grandmaster who never has to has to, you know, do anything except sit there and cogitate, you know. And I think if you look at how experts actually operate in the in the real world, these are people who know how to use their bodies, who know how to pay attention in a skillful way to their internal signals, who know how to use space, who know how to

use relationships. That's, in a way, the essence or the core of their expertise and their skill is that they do use their extended mind in an incredibly skillful and effective way, and that's something novices actually could emulate. Rather than thinking that as you become more expert, you become more brain bound. I think it's just the opposite. Yeah, And you extend it to culturally and socially. You say we're better together. I mean those are you? Those are

your word Scott, but but but very characteristic. I think think of you. Oh cool, Well, you do argue that engaging in synchronious activity maybe those are your words, synchronious activity with others is can be very beneficial. And I thought, I thought this was kind of cute. The effect of eating togethers of families heightened if food is served family style and it's very spicy. Yeah, not even just as a family, but as a group, like a team or

a class of people. Yeah, because the way we get on the same page, you know, intellectually or mentally with people. We can do that by sort of hacking our bodily systems, which which respond to synchronous movement, as you're saying, like when we when we're moving together, when you're our move or when your head moves at the same time my head moves. It it's it sort of flips a switch what Jonathan hate Height calls the hive switch. You know, this like, which is his metaphor for like switching from

an eye orientation to a we orientation. When we're moving together, it feels kind of like we're one being, you know. And then when we not only move together as one, but also have intense feelings or experiences, whether those are physiological experiences or emotional experiences, when we feel together, we also feel like we're we can get on the same page mentally in a more effective way. So the idea behind eating together is like you're actually there's something about

eating together that's meaningful. Of course, you're sharing resources, you're sharing food, but you're also, in an informal way sort of synchronizing your movements. Everyone's sort of lifting their fork to their mouths and chewing, and you know, and then also when you eat something spicy, you're all experiencing together this physiological arousal. So there's a kind of glue that binds a group together when they've had all these shared experiences,

for sure. And a related concept in the cognitive science literature is socially distributed cognition. Very mouthful but yeah, better together, it's much much more recognition. Did you I mean the years you took writing this book, did you delight in nerding out over the scientific papers? I mean, I can just imagine I like spending days of where you weren't necessarily writing, but you were going on Google scholar and looking,

you know, looking at all the latest kind of stuff. Scott, you know me, well, I think I imagine you have done the same thing too. I have a sneaking feeling. Yeah, I totally geek out about the journals. And that's why this book took me so many years, because it does cover a lot of different disciplines, a lot of different strands of research, and yeah, I totally geek out about

the research. And what's exciting is that there's more of this research coming out every day, you know, an embodied cognition, on situated cognition, on socially distributed cognition. I really feel like we're maybe at the at a turning point where you know, the I think the the old brain bound conception of thinking is just not adequate anymore, and we're realizing that there's so there's so much more to what goes on when we when we think, and so to me,

the research is pointing in really exciting new directions. Yeah, yeah, really exciting. So well, along those lines, is there was what do you what's some recent stuff that you're most what's your most excited about? What are you most excited about? To choose? Oh gosh, well, we haven't really talked so

much about gesture. I find gesture really fascinating because I tend to be someone who talks with her hands a lot, and I love the idea, for example, that often our most advanced or most cutting edge, or our newest ideas that we can't quite put words to yet show up

in our hands. First. You know, there's in some movement of our hands we manage to capture some element of what we're trying to express verbally, and then we can read off that self generated information, you know, we can read off our own hands that can inform our sort of emerging verbal explanation for of what we're what we're

trying to get at. And so I love the idea of not only encouraging students and others to move their hands, but also creating occasions where gestures are more likely to happen, like people are more likely to gesture when they're asked to give an impromptu explanation for something in front of an audience, because to speak in an impromptu way like that is really cognitively taxing, so we tend to offload

some of that burden onto our hands. We also gesture more when there's something to gesture at, you know, some kind of artifact or model or map or diagram and so and you know, the research suggests that the more we gesture as we're trying to work something out in our heads, the the greater our understanding, the more accurate our memory. So we actually want to be getting people to gesture as much as possible. I find that really fascinating.

It is fascinating. It's also can be used as a manipulation to the tool for marketers who don't really want you to pay that much attention to the words they're saying and want of distract you with their hand motions.

I found that just because like I, I grew up like with an auditory disability, so I became hyper hyper tuned to nonverbal communication and those bs and and I actually cringe when I watch some of these people, you know, like like motivational gurus and people you know, like some of some of them on YouTube or whatever be like the five things that will help you bring, you know, and and they're like the overdue with the hand motions. But like I actually listen to the words they're saying,

I'm like, I don't know about that. So interesting, Scott, I you know I do. I write in the book about how entrepreneurs who are making a pitch for their their proposed venture, when they employ the skilled use of gesture, they they attract more funding. Now they maybe they're they that goes for the charlatans as well as the earnest,

well meaning entrepreneurs. But you know, I tend to think of gesture as another channel of communication, and so that channel could be used, could be used for good or ill I suppose absolutely, I mean it can be used Like when I said be used to manipulate. I mean that can be good. You know, you know I want or you want to want to convince certain foods or she you know, maybe is better worth to manipulate. But oh boy, what what other topic? What if I'm missed?

What have I missed? I feel like we covered we covered a lot thinking with our bodies, with our surrounds, now, well, here's something I think is super cool about your book. The way that we can over the way we can

unload our ideas into like notebooks and other things. I've long argued in the field of intelligence that we focus too much on working memory capacity is the core aspect of human intelligence, and that you can get a lot more intelligence out of people, especially neurodiverse people who working memory issues, by allowing them to take these a Q tests or things by unloading it from their minds. So

I've made that argument. I think it's just tells nicely with it was a lot of the things that is interesting, Scott. I mean, I've been arguing since the book came out. I've made the point on a bunch of podcasts that people who who learn differently or think differently are often kind of leading the way in terms of extending the mind because because their brains don't work the same as as other people, because they're neuro a neuroatypical is that

how you say it, And they they neurodiversient. Yeah, they have had to develop ways of thinking outside the brain and using skillfully using resources you know, and not and not thinking in the conventional way. But but developing often

very ingenious solutions that involve thinking outside the brain. So and that there's a lot we have to learn from people who who've encountered challenges in conventional classrooms and workplaces, you know, because they've been forced by necessity to come up with really ingenious ways of thinking outside the brain, and cognitive offloading, as you mentioned, is one of those ways just getting I think all of us can benefit from getting that stuff out of our head onto physical

space where we can manipulate ideas as if they were objects, you know, or navigate through them as if they were a physical three dimensional landscape, because those are the things we evolve to do when we do so effortlessly and easily, and to keep it all in our heads again, doesn't do justice, doesn't draw on all the capabilities and resources that we have as human beings. Yeah, what's the benefit

of like copying experts? Hmmm? Yeah, Well, in that chapter on experts, I talk about and I know you know this research about how by virtue of being experts, you know, experts find it very difficult to articulate for a novice exactly how they do what they do because it's become automatized for them, it's become second nature in a way that they're not even that's not even accessible to them anymore. And yet our systems of education are systems of workplace training.

They rely on experts teaching novices. So we really need to think harder. I think about how experts can become more legible examples for novices so that they can become more easily copied, because you know, that's another bias in our culture that I'd like to push back against, this idea that innovation and originality is always better than emulation and imitation, because you know, imitation used to be at

the core of education for centuries. That was, it was understood that to master a body of knowledge or a particular skill, you emulated the people, the masters, the people who did it the best, and you learn how to do it sort of from the inside that way, and

only then could you add your own twist. You know, there was a famous professor of composition and rhetoric who like to say imitate that you may be different, you know, like you, but you first have to master the fundamentals, and imitation can be the most efficient and effective way of doing that. So I'd love to see the stigma that attaches to imitation currently in our society to I'd love for that to fade away. Yeah, I love that and U but not in like a John Alaire sort

of way. We don't no, no, no, yeah, there's no limits, no, no plagiarism, yeah, no, more like an apprenticeship. Apprenticeship, apprenticeship, right and sharing expertise, uh, so important for a lot of scientific discoveries. But I've always been fascinated this idea of multiples, you know, ideas, great ideas that seemed to just be in the air. You know, if you have a certain level expertise, and obviously that that expertise is

not a vacuum. Is not a vacuum, right in some cases it is, though there was there's this guy I think he independently discovered and came up with calculus with literally no knowledge of this the other information that had been going on. It's amazing, isn't it. Do you have a theory about that, about why that happens? It seems like so there's two separate phenomenas, so the multiples, well, and I do think it's it's related to what you're

talking about. I do think that when there's a certain certain amount of shared expertise in the air, and people there is like something that's ripe if you have that expertise and the intelligence, the talent, the background, the resources, all these perfect There are multiple people with perfect storms that have the perfect storms that they can independently come

up with it. But I don't have a good suggest there's another different phenomena because I was just thinking, like, are there instances where a great discovery happened and there really wasn't great shared expertise? And there are a few instances throughout human history where that is the case. And now I'm not going to get all ancient Aliens on you. I don't think it's like, you know, they were tapping into the acrom record or whatever it's called Ansian aliens.

Actually I was in an episode of Ancient Aliens on Genius. So that's why I joke about this, because I was actually the expert in that episode and I they did what I said in a way that I was trying to be very scientific about it. And then like this guy was like, well, could it be that they were tapping into the aliens? But I didn't say that, but but but but there there's got to be an explanation for it. And you know, at the end of the day, I think that maybe you know, there there there there

is something to be said for talent. There is something to be said for uh, you know for some of these prodigies. These child prodigies have a certain genetics that that they can be traced to their ancestors who had certain expertise. So I'm not actually rolling out the idea of epigenetic transmission, you know, and that's that's going to be shared expertise throughout the ages in inter generationally. So that's another region that is that is let's talk about

talk about cutting edge. I know, I know it really is, Scott, it really is. What did we talk about in that first uh that first one that I seven years ago that I recorded more about the science of learning, the science of learning? Yeah, yeah, but I want to listen to it again after this. Yeah I will too. Yeah, that would be really fun. We know so much more now, we're so much now. There are a lot of things

I wish I didn't know. I know that was more naive then, right the line from a Bob Seeger song, wish I didn't know now what I what I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then, Yes, exactly, but there's something that I certainly a happy about. I would I'd like to leave today's episode with a quote that I saw you you write in an interview, you had your someone conduct on you. You You said, acknowledging the reality of the extended mind might well lead us to

embrace the extended heart. We didn't bring up the heart today at all, the hearts, but I thought we could end on this note just because there's so many people hurting right now. There's some people so yeah, I can't. I just can't not think about it, you know what I mean, Like I do these interviews, but like my brain just keeps thinking how how blessed we are in a lot of ways. You know, I know, I know

you've able to have the freedom of having this conversation. Yeah, yeah, can you talk a little bit about how, you know, just like ending that note, you know, how they extended mind can help us mm hmm. Yeah. I think it's so important to see people in their full humanity, and their full humanity means their bodies. You know that we're in we're in these fragile animal kind of bodies, you know, and we are embedded in a place, and the place we are affects us so deeply, and we're connected to

each other. We're not individual atoms just sort of floating around, you know, We're really embedded in a network of of other people, and we have to take care of each other,

you know. I mean to me, that's what I was trying to say with the idea of the extended heart, that maybe if we see each other for the in the in the round, you know, in in full, that maybe we can have some more compassion for each other and extend our heart feeling to them and not see them just as you know, lumps of intelligence of larger or smaller size, you know, reducing people to how well they're able to take a test. You know that I find that offensive, and I'd love to encourage people to

see each other as full human beings. Thank you, Annie, You always bring so much knowledge to the table. I feel like you every new book you do, does it feel like you've earned a new PhD? And at the top it feels like that to me too. God, maybe I'll just like write like a rip off of this book a few more times so I can like get my get my money's worth out of it. But I'll probably write another PhD with the next book. I'll probably get another PhD with the next book, too. Wonderful and wonderful.

Thanks thanks so much for being on the Psycholic Podcast. Thank you Scott. This has been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.