 New America would like to welcome you to our virtual event. The program will begin momentarily. While we are waiting, I want to review a few housekeeping notes. This event is being recorded and a recording will be posted to the New America events page within 48 hours after the event. Attendees will be in listen only mode and you will not be able to be seen by your fellow attendees or panelists. Therefore, we invite you to submit questions via Slido, which is located to the right of your screen. If you encounter any issues, please contact events at newamerica.org. If you are interested in buying the extended mind, you can do so via the button at the bottom of your screen that says purchase the book. Thank you for joining us. Lisa, over to you. Great. Thank you so much, Angela. And welcome everybody. I'm really glad you all can be with us here today. I'm Lisa Guernsey. I'm a senior fellow and strategic advisor for the education policy program at New America. And one of the co-founders of the learning sciences exchange, which you'll hear about more in a minute, but we're a relatively new fellowship program at New America in partnership with child development experts Kathy Hirsch-Cassick and Roberta Gollenkopf and the Jacobs Foundation. So we are really happy to be able to bring you this book talk today. This is being held and hosted in partnership between the learning sciences exchange as well as the national fellows program and future tents, which is a partnership of Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. And our honored guest today, Annie Murphy-Paul, is currently a fellow for our learning sciences exchange. And several years back, she was also a national fellow and a future tense fellow. So we are feeling fortunate three times over today to be able to get to know Annie throughout these years and to be able to help spotlight her new book today and have this really fascinating conversation with her. The Extended Mind, Annie's book comes at the perfect time as our pandemic produced habits have led many of us. I know that this is happening for me to be just kind of sitting on our laptops for hours typing or zooming away. And it turns out that's probably not so good for helping us become better thinkers. So Annie's book uses findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology to help show us a different way. And then, you'll be, I'm learning a ton myself. I'm so excited to hear more from Annie today. So our talk as well features Nick Thompson, who is the CEO of The Atlantic. He will interview Annie about what she's learned and why it matters. And we'll probably chat for about 35 to 40 minutes or so and then perhaps turn to audience questions. But we encourage you to put questions in whenever they come to you. And Nick will be taking those questions and emitting them into the conversation. We'll also be keeping the conversation going online via Twitter at hashtag extended mind. So now let me just go ahead and introduce you to Annie and to Nicholas Thompson. As I mentioned before, Annie is currently an LSX fellow in her 2022 cohort. And she was a 2014 National Fellow and Future Tense Fellow at New America. She's an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time Magazine, and many other publications. And in addition to her newest book that we'll be talking about today, she's also the author of Origins, How the Nine Months Before Birth Shapes the Rest of Our Lives, and the Cult of Personality, how personality tests are leading us to miseducate our children, mismanage our companies, and misunderstand ourselves. Annie has spoken to audiences around the world about learning and cognition. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 2.6 million people. She's a graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and serves as a lecturer at Yale University and a senior advisor at the Yale University Purview Center for Teaching and Learning. And also I feel very honored to consider Annie a great friend and mentor to me as well. So I'm just so thrilled, Annie, that you can be here with us today. Oh, thanks, Lisa. Thank you. Yeah, no, it's just fantastic. So I'll introduce Nick and then I'll let the two of you take this away. Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic and a former editor-in-chief of Wired. He is a former contributor for CBS News and co-founder of The Atavist, a National Magazine Award-winning publication and multimedia content management system that was sold to WordPress in 2018. He was also a national fellow at New America and is also served as editor of NewYorker.com and a senior editor at Wired. And I just found this out today. Nick is also a competitive runner and in 2019 he was ranked as one of the top 20 master's marathoners in the world and holds the national master's record for the 50k. I think I got that right, Nick. I know you guys might talk a little bit about the moment. So I'm just really thrilled to have you with us. And I'm going to turn it over to you now to take it from here. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lisa. And I just want to start by saying that this book is great. I enjoyed every bit of it. It's fascinating. It's interesting. It's fun to read. I learned a lot from it. I figured out new ways to talk to my kids. And it also is very useful because I gesticulate wildly and have my entire life. And this is the first time there's been a real scientific justification for the crazy stuff I do with my hands which normally drives people crazy. So thank you, Annie, for all of that. You're so welcome, Nick. I'm so glad the book could do that for you. You're quite kind. Let's begin just by explaining the inspiration for the book and the general argument. Let's let everybody have the basic framework for why you wrote this fabulous book and the brief version of what it says. Yeah. So I have been writing about learning and cognition, covering research on learning and cognition for about 10 or 15 years now. And as one does when you're immersed in research, you keep finding interesting threads, collecting them for rainy day. And I was doing this and feeling that there were a bunch of interesting research areas that were connected. But I couldn't quite see how they connected. I'm talking about bodies of research like in body cognition, the idea that we think with our bodies, situated cognition, the idea that where we are affects how we think, and socially distributed cognition, the idea that we don't just think with our own individual minds, we think with the minds of other people. And it wasn't until I read an article written by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, that was published in 1998 called The Extended Mind, that all these pieces came together for me. And I was arrested by the very first line of that article, which said, where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? And that would seem to have an obvious answer that the mind stops at the skull. It's contiguous with the brain, but Clark and Chalmers were saying, no, that's not the case. Thinking is spread across the body, across our surroundings, across the minds of other people, our relationships with other people. And we need to radically expand and change our notion of where thinking happens, how thinking happens. And this to me was the big idea that brought all these pieces together for me in a way that I knew that that was the book that I wanted to write. Okay, wonderful, very concise and clear. Let's go to the next obvious question, which is thinking extends beyond, explain how thinking extends to the bookshelf behind you, maybe the vase behind you, and also to your hands. Yes. Well, starting with the bookshelf, you know, a professor that I was communicating with on Twitter told me, and this relates to what Lisa was saying about how, in a sense, the pandemic was like this vast natural experiment where we all became, as philosophers like to say, brains in vats, you know, we were cut off from a lot of the mental extensions that usually aid our thinking. And so this professor was saying to me that he was not able to go into his office because of COVID. And he realized that his books that surround him in his office, and the way that they're arranged, constitute an extension of his mind. And without his books there, you know, arranged in a certain pattern that he was able to access while sitting there, he couldn't think as well. So that to me was a beautiful example of how we use space as a mental extension. And then to talk to address your point, Nick, about gestures, and I gesture a lot too. So I too was very happy to read this line of research about how, you know, we have constructed a very brain bound society in the sense that we do believe and act as if all thinking happens up here in our heads, but and, you know, congruent with that brain bound approach, we treat hand gestures as kind of a clumsy accompaniment to our thinking in our speech. But in fact, our gestures are part of the thinking process. They're an integral part of the thinking process. And our gestures are actually often one or two steps ahead of where we are in terms of formulating a thought in our heads and having the words to put to that thought so that it's often the case that our most advanced, our newest, our sharpest kind of ideas about an idea or an explanation show up first in our hands. And then we can kind of read off that self created information to inform our emerging verbal explanation of what we're trying to say. So we really want to be gesturing and encouraging our kids to gesture as much as possible. I'm sorry if this next question sounds like I'm like stoned in a dorm room. But if the idea is that sometimes our thoughts begin with our gestures and then go to our brain, what causes the gesture if not the brain? Well, yeah, I want to be clear that I'm not saying that the brain is not involved or that the brain is not central to thinking. It's, it's, you know, to me, it's, it's a question of the role that we imagine the brain playing and central to our imaginings are the metaphors that we use to describe how the brain works. And the conventional metaphors that we so often use to describe the brain and thinking are things like the brain is a computer, the brain is a muscle. And both of those very common metaphors locate thinking in the brain. And as if it all happens here first, and then messages are sent outward from the brain. And that's how thinking happens. I like to propose a different kind of metaphor. I have a couple of metaphors because I think they are so important. One would be the brain as orchestra conductor. It's like the central actor, but it's not doing it all itself. The brain is bringing in external resources to, to support and augment its own abilities. Or the metaphor that I developed in the book is of a magpie, which is a bird that sort of famously plucks bits and pieces from its environment and weaves that we use those pieces into its nest. And I see that as a fruitful metaphor for the brain and thinking in that what's available around us outside the brain are that's really the raw materials of thinking. And so the quality of those materials and our access to those materials turns out to be really important to how well we can think, which is, is a whole realm that we don't contemplate at all when we think that the brain is, is where it all happens and that intelligence is a kind of lump of stuff that's located up here rather than a dynamic process of assembly that's happening all the time in real time. I, I was very pleased from that book to have the image that my brain is a magpie picking up trash on the street and making something beautiful out of it. So one of the things that must be very interesting about writing a book about how we think and how we learn and how we organize our thoughts is that you then are taking what you're learning and put it into the process of writing the book. You have a wonderful section in the book on Robert Carroll and the way he uses spatial memory to help organize his thoughts, his plot lines, explain how you took what you were learning as you wrote the book to actually organize the extended mind. Yes, yes. Well, I say in the book, I write in the book that I don't think I could have written this book without applying the lessons that I learned from the research that I gathered for this book because it is, it's a cross-disciplinary book. It draws on a whole lot of research, many, many, many studies. And I don't think I would have been able to pull that all together in a coherent way if I hadn't used my own extended mind. And so in every chapter, you know, and there are three sections to the book, thinking with the body, thinking with spaces, thinking with relationships, every one of those resources became important to me as I was writing the book. I mean, I'll just give you a couple of examples. One is that I started to add some physical movement and activity to, to every day, which, you know, it's very easy to, to leave out if you feel like you need to get work done. But what I came to understand was that my work, my thinking would actually be enhanced and I would actually make more progress if I stopped and took some time to, in my case, take a bike ride. I really love biking. And, you know, Steve Jobs, the Apple founder said that a computer is a bicycle for the mind, meaning a computer is a machine that makes the mind go faster. And I always like to say that a bicycle is a good bicycle for, for the mind because it was always when I got on my bike after a day of being immersed in these studies and thinking about them and analyzing them, that it would all kind of come together and then the only problem was remembering, remembering my insights, you know, until I could get back to the computer. But then that second section about thinking with spaces, I did reorganize my home office to, in reflection, to reflect some of the research that I had gathered and write about in the book. In particular, the stuff about filling the space where you work and where you learn with cues of identity and cues of belonging that reminds you who you are in that space, what you're doing there. I put up some clips of my previous work. I have my LSX Learning Sciences Exchange mug, you know, that's one of my cues of identity. And I also made a lot of use of something I write about in the book in a chapter called Thinking with the Space of Ideas, a technique called cognitive offloading, which just means that it's really helpful to get all that stuff in your head out onto physical space, whether that is a multi monitor computer setup or a whiteboard or my own favorite tool, which is a bunch of post-it notes. Because, you know, the brain evolved not to sort of sit still and think about abstract ideas, but to do things like manipulate physical objects and navigate through three-dimensional landscapes. So when we can turn ideas and information into something more like objects or something more like a landscape, then we can use all of those embodied resources. You know, you mentioned Robert Caro and I write about how he has this gigantic corkboard on which he lays out his very, you know, intricately plated books from beginning to end. And it's so big that he can actually sort of walk along it. He can lean in and lean out. And when he does that, when any of us do that, we're using our embodied resources that are remain dormant when we're just sitting there, sitting still and keeping all that information inside our heads. So, and then finally, you know, I did, I did, I tend to be a solitary person when I'm working, you know, I'm a freelance writer and have been for many years, but the work that I did, the research that I did on socially distributed cognition convinced me that sort of running one's ideas through the minds of other people, creating these cognitive loops where you're passing information through the body, through physical space, through the minds of other people. That's how that's how ideas get improved and get elaborated and enriched, elaborated upon and enriched. So, largely with the help of my fellowships at New America, actually, that's been a really fantastic source of mentors and peers that I've collaborated with over the years now. But how is that different? I mean, I don't think anybody would argue that if you have a good idea, you should discuss it with friends and pressure test it and see if they can improve it. How is what you're saying about how ideas spread different from the conventional idea that it's good to talk to people about your hypotheses and test them? Yeah, well, I would, I would bring up how we conventionally arrange education in our country. You know, we, with, with kids, with elementary school students, high school students, we tend to think of social life and intellectual life or academic life as separate and actually as, as kind of opposed. So when our kids go to school, it's often the case that they're expected to set their social brains, their social beings aside and focus on the work, you know? And then, you know, maybe at lunch or maybe at recess, kids can indulge that social piece of themselves. But the fact is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, we're social all the time, you know, not just, not just around the lunch table. And teenagers in particular are exquisitely as attuned to the social world and that's what their brains are sort of wired to be thinking about. So I think, you know, it's, it's actually, it is a quite unconventional idea to propose that we should really be not excluding social life from the classroom but bringing it in through social activities like storytelling and arguing and debate and teaching other people and not to say, not at all to say that teachers aren't already doing this. But we do have this assumption that social life is something sort of frivolous and anti-intellectual and, you know, academic life and intellectual life is over here. And what I'm proposing based on the research is that we should be leveraging kids' social natures, students and workers' social natures in the service of learning and working and thinking rather than treating them as if they're separate domains. Makes sense. When my 11-year-old came back from his first day at school last week, I asked him what his favorite thing he did and he said, recess and I kind of rolled my eyes. But actually, clearly I should have been supporting him. Let me ask you a little bit about running because it's something that I think about a lot and care about a lot. And I ran a race yesterday and there were two parts of your book that I thought connected to it in interesting ways. So first the race begins and I go out in a pack of 10 people and we're kind of bunched together. You're very much in stride that the people next to each other because you don't want to step on their feet or clip them. You're running exactly the same pace. And I'd always learned that the reason you do that is for wind resistance, right? Both stopping the wind in front of you and if there are people behind you pushing wind into your back. And then secondly, because if you know that the group is running the right pace, you don't have to stress, right? So it gives you one last thing to think about. But you argue in the book that there's a third reason to do that, which is that when humans synchronize their activities, they're actually more efficient. Is that a proper way to read it? You know, I had never thought about synchronous movement as applied to a running race because in that case, you guys are competitors, right? You're not seeking necessarily to think together. But when I so when I write about synchronous movement in the book in a chapter called Thinking with Groups, the idea there is to look at how synchronous movement has been used by institutions like the military and like churches and all kinds of human groups that have figured out a way essentially to hack our natural instinct for moving together and thereby sort of extending our own identity to include the group so that when we move together in the same way at the same time, it's a trigger for us to think that we are in some way like the people that we're with. We tend to feel more positively about them. We cooperate with them more. We're more generous and pro-social with people that we've with people that we've moved in synchrony with. So I wonder about, you know, competitors in that situation. Do you all do you all feel as if you're part of a collective effort, even though you are trying to be first, I assume, but among people who are not competing but who need to work together, beginning a session by in some way moving in synchrony and that could be even taking a walk together because people tend to fall into synchronous movement when they walk together or even something like sharing a meal because there's a kind of informal synchrony that happens when people are engaging and in eating together. But I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, Nick, if you if your feelings about your your fellow runners, if they feel affected by that early stage where you're all running together. I think they do. I mean, because every race you run, there's both an element where you're competing against them, but there's also an element where you're competing against yourself, right? You're interested in your time. And then secondly, to a certain degree, each group is competing against each group, right? So I was out in a pack and then there's a pack behind us and it's in the interest of everybody in that front pack of 10 to be 10 seconds ahead of the second pack or 12 seconds or 14 seconds. So there is an aligned interest, even though at the end when the race spreads out, you're very much competing directly against each other. So you switch from cooperative to competitive, I think, during the race. But one more running question. Okay, so here's the other thing that I was super interested in, which is so when you're running, the relationship between the body and the brain is very interesting. When you're running at a slow pace, as you point out in the book and as Daniel Kahneman has written about or when you're walking, when you're in a relaxed pace, you could be more creative, right? It reads up mental resources. But there's a certain pace where you sort of lose the ability to be creative, right? And so you begin to focus more inwards. And for me, sometimes I start to focus on, like in a race, not just a dog, but like, where is the pain coming from? Is it coming from my knee? Is it my stomach, right? And trying to, at a certain point, you, the only thing you can think about is what hurts and where it hurts, right? And I'm not clear there what is the brain and what is the body, right? Is it the body's heading to signal to the brain? The line gets really close. And then at the very end, you know, the last mile or two, when you're going all out and you're sprinting fully, your mind just, you know, collapses. You write of it in some ways as like a void. And there is nothing happening in your mind. Really, you're just kind of trying to propel yourself forward. What exactly is the relationship between the body and the brain at that point in a race when you're at total exhaustion? Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting to hear you describe it as a real runner. I mean, that phenomenon that you're describing, scientists call that transient hypofrontality. And that, that's a reference to the fact that hypo means low or diminished and frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that, you know, controls things like making judgments, making analyses, kind of setting limits. And so when you're exerting your body to such a degree that the brain can't really do anything except manage the effort of the physical activity that you're undertaking, that dials down the activity of the prefrontal cortex. And that can produce a state that scientists liken to dreaming or like a drug trip where that, you know, the usually ever present kind of monitor, hall monitor, who's like kind of keeping everything in its place is absent temporarily or dialed down. And so those ideas and thoughts can sort of mingle together in new ways. And so some, some runners have reported, and it's been shown in laboratory experiments that people tend to have more create creative and unusual ideas and associations when they're exerting themselves to a really great degree like that, which is not is actually the opposite of the effect that is seen when people are engaging in moderate exercise, which tends to improve executive functioning. This is why teachers know that students after they've gone to recess and they've had, they've kind of gotten all their energy out, they come back to class better able to focus. So it's kind of these two poles and physical activity of different kinds produces different kinds of mental state. So what should one be getting out of extreme physical exertion? Like what does, what do you expect will happen to someone's mind after about of 30 minutes of pushing oneself to the limit or, you know, if you're, I don't know, hiking Everest multiple days? Well, it's interesting you mentioned multiple days because there's a, there's a slightly different strand of research that shows that three days spent engaged in physical exertion, especially in the outdoors tends to promote greater creativity. And part of that is just being away from our devices, you know, which tend to channel our thoughts and distract us in ways that are not good for creativity. But, you know, the idea is that when you're engaged in that kind of really extreme physical exertion that you will come up with ideas and associations that would not be available to your to your mind as it as it would be operating while sitting at your desk. I mean, have you ever, I'm curious, Nick, whether you've ever experienced having some kind of insight or creative breakthrough when you're when you're running? Does that happen? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, the most I, I don't know. I wrote my wedding speech while running. I've, you know, the the best essay I've ever written the core idea came while I was running. So absolutely. Yeah. But not when I'm running hard, when I'm running when I'm running hard, I have the amount of useful thoughts is zero. But well, you know, the cognitive scientists see on see on Bilak has suggested that and this is, you know, this is her speculation, but that the reason why professional athletes when they're interviewed right when they come off the field often, you know, don't sound as or as articulate or as thoughtful as they might at another moment is because their, their cognitive resources have been completely absorbed in this incredibly demanding effort of marshaling all their, all their resources to manage their physical activity. I will go rewatch the famous Kevin Garnett 2007 NBA finals interview, which is one of the greatest interviews I've ever seen with that in mind. Let me ask you about devices. So you have this wonderful part in your book where we all know devices distract, but you write about how part of the problem might be that they're like, they're sleek, right? And they're, yeah. And I was wondering, you know, and they don't, they don't resemble the sticks that we play with or the things that can normally trigger creativity. If you were to design a phone, right? If, you know, Tim Cook were to call you up and say, you know, any, I want you to make 14. What would you do about revenue? You just have to worry about creative. You're going to make a creativity phone. Oh, wow. Well, I have a couple of thoughts on that because, you know, the, the, the part of the book that you were originally referring to there was the part about the value of fidgeting and these kinds of, you know, we've been talking about physical movement and how it affects our thinking, but there's also an interesting strand of research about how kind of micro movements of fidgeting actually can enhance our thinking as well, because they're a very fine grained way of modulating our arousal up or down or changing our physical state. It's a kind of play, you know, can create a state of mind that's more expansive, more open to new ideas, which again, you know, is, is fidgeting is often something that's looked at, looked down upon or disparaged in our society. And I think it's something that we should be promoting and encouraging. But there's a wonderful researcher named Catherine Isbister at the University of Santa Cruz who actually studies fidgeting and in particular fidget objects. And she's put out a call for people who fidget to send her photographs of of their favorite fidget objects. And she has a Tumblr account with just pictures of people's favorite fidget objects. And what really struck her about people's favorite fidget objects was that they were sort of the opposite of these sleek, you know, metal and glass and plastic devices that we spend all our time working on. They often had a lot of texture. They were often things drawn from nature stones or small sticks, as you were saying, and they often made sounds or they had particular, you know, tactile qualities. And Catherine was speculating that these, these, she calls fidgeting embodied self-regulation. So in other words, we're regulating our mind and its operation through the activity of our, of our bodies and that she, she thought that people reach for fidget objects because they, they're reminding themselves that they're more than just a brain, that they have a body, that they have a whole range of senses that don't get engaged by our, our machines. And so she's working on developing a whole range of fidget objects that could stimulate different kinds of mental states. So that would be one thing I might suggest to Tim Cook would be, you know, is there some way that the, the iPhone could, could produce not this same state of always just gluing yourself to Twitter or whatever or your email or whatever's on your phone, but, but, you know, bring in the whole body, the whole self. I can't quite imagine what that would look like, but I'm sure the geniuses at Apple could probably figure it out. Well, yeah. Keep going. Keep going. The other, the other piece I was thinking about, I, I actually originally thought you were going towards this idea that I proposed in the book called extended technology, like we extend our minds. Our technology could be extended too. Our, our technology is kind of designed around, around the same model that we apply to our brains. This very brain bound model that, you know, we're supposed to use our technology by sitting still, not interacting with other people, you know, not moving our bodies, not be even being aware of having a body or the sensations that were, that are arising in our bodies all the time. But our technology doesn't have to be that way. We could extend our technology. We could bring the movement sensations, sensations of the body into the use of technology. We could bring our physical surroundings into our use of technology, and we could bring in person interactions with other people into our use of technology. And those would all be ways that I think we could really enrich our use of technology and not restrict it to this very brain bound kind of model. Well, in fact, you, one of the questions I had a number of times are reading your book is what are the consequences of designing artificial intelligence the way we do, right? So artificial intelligence in many ways is based on neural networks. Let's try to understand how the brain works, right? Let's try to understand the different way that neural levels work inside the brain. And let's build our computers that do that, or let's build software inside the computers that does that. What does it mean that AI is being built that way and not based on what you would consider a more accurate model of how the brain works? Yes, such an interesting question. And this has been something I've been thinking a lot about. There's this incredibly interesting work by Antonio Demasio, the neuroscientist and a colleague, Kingston Mann, that's proposes that AI researchers in developing artificial intelligence, this is me and not them, I think that they were partially motivated by this brain bound mode and created artificial intelligence as a kind of idealized human intelligence with all our messy parts engineered out, all the parts that were sort of ashamed or embarrassed about like our feelings, our bodies, our vulnerability. But it turns out, and this is Antonio Demasio and Kingston Mann's work, that's the wellspring of a lot of our intelligence. And so when we engineer that out of artificial intelligence, we end up with a kind of intelligence that is very brittle, it's not transferrable to new situations, it doesn't know how to handle unexpected situations. We have computers that are really good at playing chess, but that are really terrible at interacting with other people or making their way through a three dimensional landscape, you know, all these things that toddlers can do so brilliantly, our robots can't yet do. And that's because we left out a big part of who we are, which is the fact that we are embodied creatures embedded in physical surroundings who are also embedded in the social network of other human beings. And so Demasio and Mann are saying, if we want to develop truly intelligent robots, truly intelligent AI, we need to engineer back in all these human qualities, including vulnerability, and maybe even including the ability to feel pain, which I think is so fascinating and so really touching in a way, and tells us something about ourselves as well as AI and robotics. So maybe we're listening to you there, maybe one consequence is actually, as we think about how the world will work, it will be much longer until computers can do some of the tasks that we humans do because their intelligence in many ways will outstretch us, but in many ways it won't map as well onto ours. Right, I think it's possible that AI will develop a different kind of intelligence and the one that we humans can only marvel at, I mean they can process so many pieces of information at such high speed, they can remember, they have memory that far surpasses ours, but for a lot of the things that we want robots to do ultimately like interact with us and help us, they need to in some ways probably be more like us and that means being vulnerable, feeling pain, feeling having an internally regulated system that means that robots care whether they're hurt or whether they're in some sense feeling pain or pleasure, these are the motivations that that prompt us to make intelligent choices and without that robots are kind of they're kind of dumb, you know, so I think that that's such an amazing insight into where human intelligence really comes from. That makes a lot of sense, I'm glad though that robots can't feel pain because as we talk, I think my Roomba is like clanging around the kitchen and the poor thing was like hurt every time it banged into the dish. I actually have to leave this interview and go home right now and turn off the Roomba. Let's move to audience questions because there's a ton of them and they're wonderful, so here's one from Anonymous. What does your research show about best enhancing the extended mind for babies and older people? Can you suggest an exercise or activity for these two groups? I don't know whether a baby or an old person wrote that but what would you suggest that they do? So interesting, well you know in some ways we're doing a lot of the right things already with babies in the sense that we understand that they learn through touching, through moving, through interacting with other people, through making their way often clumsily through a physical environment. It's that we try to take all those things away progressively as people get older. It seems okay to us that kindergarteners use manipulatives to learn math for example but the idea is that as you get older and more mature you put those things away and you start to do things more and more in your head and I think that's a misconception. It's a misconception about what expertise is and what experts do because it turns out that real experts are those who know how to use their bodies, use faith, use the minds of other people. That's the cornerstone of their expertise and so it's a misconception we have about expertise that they do it all in their heads. So as for older people that's a super interesting question. I'm not sure that you know what's coming to mind is for me and this is in terms of older people who suffer from memory problems and dementia. Daniel Dennett has written about, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has written about how people's, older people's physical setting acts as their extended mind. They know where things are, their physical surrounding structure, their thinking in a way that allows them to sort of over achieve. It allows them to do more than the state of their brains would normally allow and that's why when older people are moved into a new setting and new surrounding they often show really rapid cognitive decline. Nothing has happened to their brains. It's that their mental extension of where they live and how they've arranged their space has been taken away. So I think when we think about mental extension in that way it brings up some ethical issues actually too. Like is moving an older person who is able to think with his or her surroundings is moving that person akin to inflicting a kind of injury on them. But I think that that's just one example of how incorporating the theory of the extended mind into the way we think about thinking can really change our perspective. Makes a lot of sense. Okay let me ask a question that's kind of a combination of two questions. One from Wayne Boatwright and one from another person which is Wayne Wright's as a clubhouse addict. I wonder if that platform is a form of emergent sense-making. Do you consider the digital realm as aiding or interfering with our mind? And there's sort of a follow-up question that's related to that which is you talked about the platforms as distracting us right as pulling us away right when we're thinking we go into Facebook or Twitter and we're not really letting our mind expand. We're not going outside. But on the other hand we're communicating with a ton of people which is true. How do you think about these platforms whether it's clubhouse or twitter? Yes yes I mean I um I have a very strong bias based on what I've read in the research towards in-person interaction um and that's because there is such a richness of cues of signals of um just simply the presence of another person changes the way our own um our own minds and bodies work. And so of course we're all using these platforms like the one we're on right now and email and Twitter um to communicate with with many more people than we could in an ordinary um a day you know in a day without without access to those tools. But um there there is we do pay a price in terms of a diminished kind of quality of interaction. I just read a study the other day that suggested that found that we attribute less mind to images of people as opposed to people that we see in the flesh. We don't see them as quite as as full human beings and so as hard as the pandemic has made it to be in person with people and as as easy as it is to communicate with people on these platforms online I think we have to keep in mind always the price we're paying in terms of the richness of our interactions when we don't see people in the flesh. Alright so then I need some advice right so I'm here I'm at the Atlantic's offices and if you look out to the side you can see nothing well desks right yes so I've got like five people here and I've got like 60 desks outside my office how should I be running this joint at this moment of the Delta virus? Well Nick I know that you were telling me before this started that you guys are building some new offices and I wonder if you have fewer people coming in and that seems that seems like it will be the case for many organizations going forward could you take some of that space and build some enclosed offices and not have it all open plan as that office that you just showed us seemed to be well after reading your book I definitely don't want open offices my god open offices are the Satan in this book if I read it correctly they are they are yes I write in the book about how open offices are really antithetical to getting serious complex cognitive work done because human beings are wired to be distracted by novelty by sudden movement by especially by social interactions all the things that go on in an open office and we we can this is an example of the biological brain's limitations we can't prevent ourselves from being distracted in that way and so we need to offload the job of protecting our attention and our focus to walls you know to enclosed offices or at least have those available for when people need to be doing that kind of work because you know I write in the book about this very interesting idea of intermittent collaboration that it's not great to be on your own all the time it's also not great to be into interacting with with other people all the time what we need is a kind of oscillation between those two states and so I think the challenge for us is we sort of reinvent the workplace going as we return post pandemic might be to create spaces in which intermittent collaboration is supported you got you can lead the way at the Atlantic neck we are going to well when we move into our new offices we will we will have exactly that all right I'm going to combine three questions into one because they're all good so our psychedelics influential our drugs in general beneficial cannabis etc and did you look at anything related to cosmic consciousness the field of oneness that those who meditate are trying to achieve it is interesting that that this topic or this book draws those kinds of questions because I certainly don't address any of that maybe it's that kind of psychedelic cover that is that is inviting those questions I honestly you know I think there's an interesting argument to be made for psychedelic drugs as a mental extension as as in a way it's it's a combination of you know something you do to your body and then sort of in a way some a different way that you look at at space and maybe other people I don't know I like the idea of drugs as a mental extension certainly something that allows your brain to operate in a different way from how it does normally but that I think I'll stop there because I have not done any research on this in particular okay well here's a here's a good one that I'm super interested in this is from Michael if the goal is to maximize think right think is it better to do one a day run or is it better to do multiple short runs like should you run five miles in the morning or five times should you run one mile love that question and assuming you're working at home so you don't need to shower five times because they are right I find useful the framework that I sent that I set out in the book which it which is low intensity movement you know working at a standing desk or a treadmill desk or allowing yourself to fidget and that that and doing that kind of those kinds of micro movements of what as a way of keeping yourself alert and engaged and then the moderate kind of moderate intensity physical activity that allows us to to sharpen our faculties and improve our executive functioning which might be a brisk walk around the block you know when you're taking a break from your work and then finally that third category that you and I were talking about Nick where you exercise so vigorously that the prefrontal cortex kind of goes offline a little bit and you get that the benefit of that creative associative thinking which might mean the more intensive run in the afternoon if you can work physical activity into all the um all you know as much as possible into all the spaces of your days I think that that that research suggested that will improve cognition in different ways that makes a lot of sense okay let's go to a question from Jane L. Pollan who's asking what are the implications for learning in and through the arts so we've talked a lot about learning different kinds of things but what if I'm trying to become a great painter maybe talk a little bit about your Jackson Pollock story yes yeah good idea so um one of the most gratifying things about writing a book is that you don't know until it goes out until it's out in the world who will respond to it and one thing I found is that artists um people who are in the arts have responded very positively to this book I think because artists have always used all these outside the brain resources they've always thought with their bodies with spaces in conjunction with other people and so you know lots of artists have said to me you're just giving me the research to support what I already believe and what I already do so I think there is a very a tight connection there between the extended mind and the arts the Jackson Pollock story that Nick was referring to is um it's it um tells the story of how he was at a low point uh in his personal and professional life he was living in in downtown uh New York City and uh happened to visit some friends out on Long Island the South Fork of Long Island and um really was was um stunned and and surprised by how it how it influenced his state of mind and within a week or two he and Lee Krasner had made arrangements to move out there and um when he what when Jackson Pollock was in New York City he was right he was working at an easel on these very intricately patterned kind of designs it was when he went out to Springs Long Island and was working in this converted barn that was full of light and views of the surrounding area which was very you know undeveloped and and lots of natural beauty um that's when he began um his famous his series of famous drip paintings which um you know it's a little too complicated to get into here but it turns out that those patterns that he made um with the with the drip painting um have a equality a complexity that is very similar to the kind of patterns that are found in nature he was almost um he seemed to have been almost absorbing the kind the path the way information is patterned in nature and transcribing that onto the canvas which I just think is so incredible that he became almost this conduit or this channel for for nature and the way it affects us and he captured that um in an abstract form on on in his paintings wonderful I should also add that the most creative person I know really well guy was my best friend some childhood wonderful free jazz musician is an obsessive fidgeter whole life interesting interesting I have good a question from Lisa actually the metaphor of the brain as a muscle has been used in education as a way to help students see that if they work their brains then they can become better thinkers that it's not whether you are just born smart but you can become smart or smarter but you said that's not so helpful as a metaphor right could there be a place still for the muscle metaphor or is it better to go with the magpie I love this question because Lisa has I think she and I have debated this before maybe on Twitter um I know that the muscle metaphor is really meaningful to a lot of people and has really um given a lot of teachers and a lot of students hope that um you know it really effectively does challenge the dogma that intelligence is fixed and what you've got is what you've got and that's it um the problem that I have with the with the brain as muscle metaphor is that it is very brain bound it suggests that um you know everything that matters happens up here and it suggests that um your best tack for getting smarter is to just keep working that your brain like it's a muscle until it gets stronger and um I think that that again there's some positive upsides to that message it also can leave students with a kind of paucity of choices if they're they're working their brain and it's it's not working that can if they're not succeeding at their at their at the task in front of them um the all that the all that the growth mindset has to give is to say well keep trying keep working harder whereas in my view the extended mind really opens it up and offers students and anyone struggling with an intellectual or um cognitive problem all these options um you know to bring in movement of the body to bring to take a break and go outside and have that change your mental state to um engage in a social activity that will extend your thinking so you know I'm into and I'm an admirer of carol dweck I'm an admirer of her work on the growth mindset but I think to me the extended mind um offers students and others a whole bunch of new options and choices and that's really what I appreciate about it all right well you guys can go back to arguing about it on twitter basically complete and you can go for a walk outside and not respond um all right question from the education policy team what are the implications of this approach for equity for ensuring that kids who have the least get more and better educational opportunities that's an interesting part of the book and I'd love to hear your answer yes I'm so glad that that question has come up because it's a very important uh part of the story to me and one that I kind of really only got to touch on in the book I talk about something I call extension inequality and that's meant to refer to the idea that you know once we break out of this idea that everything that makes us intelligent is up here and actually you know the raw materials for intelligent thinking are out here are largely out here in the sense of the freedom to move one's body access to green spaces access to well designed well maintained school facilities um access to mentors and peers who can really um you know extend our thinking then we have to confront the fact that those um outside the brain resources are in no way equity equitably distributed in our society and yet we keep assessing and evaluating and um distributing rewards based on the idea that all that matters is up here and so the implications for equity for me uh to me would mean taking a look at the the um inequitable distribution of mental extensions and addressing that and including that in the way that we evaluate how well people are able to think and not assuming that it's all internal and innate that's a that's an excellent answer okay a few more questions we have about five minutes remaining a question from those of us with children at home is there any good news in this book about the kind of thinking patterns or creativity that come from having kids around meaning is it good if you're utterly sleep deprived or zoom bomb you in penguin costumes I see I thought the question was going to be about you know what uh how can children benefit from being at home and being remotely schooled but the question is is there any up is there any good news for us adults who have our kids running around as we're trying to work oh man I say this as a mom who is really happy that her kids are back in school every day um you know I do I of course I write in the book about the value of of interaction um with other people but uh hey that's the tough one because I also write about how important it is to have that quiet and protected time to do our thinking and that's what it's so hard to come by when there are when there are children around I'm not really sure how to how to answer that one except to say that I hope every kid who wants to be and needs to be back in school can can do that soon well that leads to this question here from rb what do you think the impact of many of us being physically separated from our workspaces and colleagues are so long will be how long will it take to recover that's interesting you know I I tend to think that what we need to do now is not recover in the sense of um going back to the way it was but take this disruption this enormous disruption in our work lives as an opportunity to rethink how we arrange our workspaces you know I think for example that the kind of hybrid arrangement that is emerging where people work several days at home and several days in the office that could really be a a good way to support this intermittent collaboration that I'm talking about where you have time at home alone if your kids are in school um to be thinking on your own and then you go in and use the the very consciously and intentionally use the workplace as as um the space where you interact and have those those conversations that lead to new ideas and where you have um the in-person gatherings where you can generate this sense of the group mind this is another thing that I write about in the book is um you know scientists um research a property they call entitivity which means like how much does a group think of itself as an entity but I prefer another word that they sometimes use called groupiness like how do you create and facilitate a sense of groupiness among uh uh members of a team and that's very hard to do digitally I think that that you know workplaces need to become the place where groupiness happen happens and then perhaps home could be the place where we do our intense um more isolated kinds of thinking and that's groupiness with a why not an IE which is a very unfortunate workplace that I try yeah that's another book all right one minute left um question from Anonymous which scientists inspire you oh so interesting well I'll mention a scientist that I write about in the book which is um Carl Weeman he's a physicist who has won the Nobel Prize and he's also a professor of education at Stanford and he has devoted um these last years of his career the most recent years of his career and some of his Nobel Prize money um to to um improving physics education and a key part of how he's doing that is bringing in social interaction because he realized that when his graduate students came to his lab they were like just slightly improved versions of undergraduates but within a year or two they were like full-fledged physicists like his colleagues his p almost like his peers and the reason was not their academic work the reason that the the the way that that happened was their social interaction with each other and so he's trying to bring that social interaction into teaching students how to think like scientists so I admire him for that that is a great wonderful answer well thank you Annie thank you new america everybody who asked all of your great questions everybody please go read this book talk to other people about it and just articulate wildly while you do so thank you for the wonderful conversation