The Science Of Getting Out Of Your Head | Annie Murphy Paul

26:05Our hands actually get there first, which I think is fascinating. Linguists think that before spoken language even came along, we communicated with others with gestures. So gesture is actually, in a sense, our first language. And for many babies, it gets recapitulated with every infant who gestures before they have words. So gesture is really our first language and it never goes away. We think of gesture as a way that we communicate with other people and it is of course, but it's also an extension of our own thinking process. And research has shown that when people are restrained from making gestures, when they have to sit on their hands or their hands are constrained from moving, their thinking is less cogent and their expression is less fluid.

26:48So we really actually want to be encouraging ourselves and others to gesture as much as possible. And maybe even in those Zoom meetings, sit a little bit farther away from the camera, ask other people to do the same so that we're not just seeing someone's head in a box, but we're seeing their gestures as well. You talk about rehearsing your gestures. Like if I'm going to say something to somebody, I might want to think about not only the words, but what I'm going to do with my hands. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I'm sure if you are giving a talk, Dan, you give some thought to what you're going to say, right?

27:21Yes, ideally. Ideally, but are you thinking about what your hands are going to do in advance? No. No, yeah. And yet, research suggests that the audience is really getting as much from your body language, from the movements of your hands as they are from your words. This is another way, I think, in which we denigrate the role of the body. We don't give much attention to that. We don't rehearse in advance what our bodies are saying along with what our mouths are saying. There are two things we might keep in mind when we're giving a talk like that, that symbolic gestures are gestures that capture some aspect of the content of what we're saying.

27:58Those can be really helpful to our listeners and our viewers in terms of understanding the import of what we're saying. And then there are beat gestures that are more about establishing a cadence and bringing people on to our own sense of excitement and engagement with the topic. So like sometimes pounding the table literally is a move. It's a move. It certainly expresses something much more forcefully than words could. You say, let your hands share the burden. Yes. Research has found that when we're asked to explain something that we haven't quite understood yet, that we're still sort of getting our arms around, there's an embodied metaphor for you, we gesture more than when we're relaying something that we understand perfectly.

28:40And that's because coming up with ideas and thoughts on the fly is really cognitively challenging. And so we tend to offload some of that mental work onto our hands. That's why we end up gesturing more when we're improvising than when we're explaining something that we already know. I remember wrestling with this a little bit as an anchorman. I mean, Peter Jennings, who many young people don't remember, but was the anchor of World News Tonight on ABC News for many, many years and was a mentor of mine. And he had this like intricate little ballet within this very confined space of the TV screen.

29:14So, I mean, as an anchor, you don't want to be stock still, but you also don't want to be gesturing wildly. And I remember feeling a little constrained and having to think about that a lot. But the whole thing of being on TV is artificial, so it might not be scalable to our normal presentation of ideas interpersonally. Did you model your own hand movements on Peter Jennings' at all? Yes. I modeled everything after Peter Jennings for a long time. I'm not on the news anymore, so it doesn't really matter. I used to hold a pen in my hand, and then my wife said I was starting to seem like John McCain, who always had a pen.

29:48You know, he was injured as a POW, and so one of his compensation techniques was to hold a pen in his hand. And so I tried to, like, over time have a limited repertoire of movements on air that I would go to. So sometimes I had a pen in my hand. Sometimes I would just gently have my hands clasped on my desk. Sometimes I would rest my head in my head. Like it really depended. But I remember thinking a lot about that. Maybe overthinking it because as soon as you become aware of it, it can become a little self-conscious. I think your point is that we should not overthink it and just do what feels natural and not be putting ourselves in a situation where we're telling ourselves, don't gesture.

30:25Yeah, I'm thinking of research that suggests that people who are watching someone talk, they remember and pay attention to the things that are accompanied by gesture, the comments that are accompanied by gesture, more than those comments that are not. But it's not only for our listeners that we want to be gesturing. It's really for ourselves, for making our own thought processes less effortful and more fluid.

30:53coming up annie murphy paul talks about how to use your surroundings to think better and my favorite of the three areas of her book thinking with our relationships

31:12we've talked about thinking with the body then there's a whole section around thinking with your surroundings. I suspect that might be a hard idea to grok for people. What does that have to do? I mean, I get that I think with my body, but what do you mean by thinking with your surroundings? Yeah. When I think about thinking with spaces, I tend to think of a metaphor that we often use for the brain, which is the brain as computer, right? Like we think of our brains as sort of machines that we put in information, it kind of chugs around, spits out an answer. That's like how the brain works. But I think that metaphor is really pretty limited, pretty flawed.

31:46And one of the big differences between our organic biological brains and a computer is that a computer works exactly the same no matter where it's located. You know, my laptop, if I use it in my home office, it's going to operate in exactly the same way as if I took it to a park and was working outside. But the human brain isn't like that. It's exquisitely sensitive to context, to where it's doing our thinking. We have different kinds of thoughts and we think in a different way, depending on where we are. So one of the clearest examples of that is the outdoors that, you know, I'm going to go back to our evolutionary history.

32:25We evolved in the outdoors. What that means for us today, where we spend, you know, most of our time inside buildings and cars is that it's still the case that our brains process most effortlessly and easily the kind of stimuli that we encounter outside. A lot of us have had this experience when we go for a walk outside. It's very mentally calming and pleasing, right? Like to look at the leaves of a tree or the clouds in the sky, or maybe waves on an ocean beach, it doesn't take a lot of mental energy or effort. That's very different from the kind of hard-edged, intense kind of concentration that we have to pay when we're at work or when we're at school.

33:05And when we're paying that kind of hard-edged, intense attention to something, our mental resources get drained really, really quickly, and we kind of get burned out. Whereas the kind of attention that we pay when we're outdoors is this diffuse, pleasantly diverting attention. And so thinking outside is a very different experience for our brains than thinking inside. And when we do find that our attentional resources are drained, one of the quickest and easiest ways of replenishing them is simply to spend time outside in that diffuse attentional mode. I've been experimenting with this a lot since my family moved to the suburbs during the pandemic.

33:45And I will now take breaks outside, even when it's cold, really cold. And sometimes even maybe bring my work outside, even when it's cold. Just bundle up. And if I've got some printed sheets of paper, I'll read them outside. And I do find that has a real effect. I even heard my wife telling somebody recently that she has found my doing that has made me less annoying in various ways. How do you think that works for you? What does it do for you to be outside? I have no idea. Well, I know I had heard on this show that it was good to get yourself outside early in the day for your circadian rhythm and sleep.

34:17And then I had heard in some other episodes that when we're outside, the mind can function in some different and salutary ways. And my fidgetiness and not wanting to be chained to my desk. And it's working for you. That's good. I think. I mean, it could be just a story I'm telling myself, but it sounds like there's data to back this up. Yeah. Yeah. And here we are sitting next to a fake green wall. There's actually research suggesting that even indoor plants and sort of greenery and bringing a bit of the outdoors inside can be helpful. What about other aspects of design? How important is that in terms of having our mind function at its best?

34:51Yeah. So since we are inside most of the time, as much as we would probably all like to be outdoors more, it's worth giving some thought to what we see around us when we're in our place of work, when we want to be thinking or creating or doing our work really well. And psychologists talk about what they call evocative objects, meaning material objects that kind of evoke a certain feeling or association for us. And these fall into two main categories, cues of identity and cues of belonging. So when you're at your desk, for example, you might want to think about what you see around you. Are there reminders of who you are and who you are specifically in that setting?

35:35Of course, you are many things. You're a father, you're a podcast producer, you're a citizen, But in the place where you do your work, I would imagine you want to be a creator, a thinker, you know. And are there objects, signs, symbols that remind you of that identity there out of your many identities? And then also, are there cues of belonging? Are there mementos of the fact that you belong to valued groups? Because that, too, can prime a kind of association for us, make us feel more powerful maybe than we would be on our own, more secure, because it reminds us of those groups. to which we belong.

36:12You also talk in this section of the book about thinking with surroundings, about thinking with the space of ideas. That might require a little unpacking. Yeah, yeah. So I mentioned earlier that we live in this sort of brain-bound society that really fetishizes the brain. And one of the ways we see that is that we really value doing things in our heads. We admire people who can do complex math problems in their heads or sort of the chess master who can game out multiple rounds of chess in their heads. But it turns out that it's actually more efficient and more effective in most cases to get ideas and information out of our heads and onto physical space.

36:55So that could be a big whiteboard. It could be a bunch of post-it notes that you can move around. It could be a multi-monitor setup on your computer so that you're not just looking at one little screen and having your brain fill in for all the space that you could be spreading out your ideas on. And one way I like to think about this is that, again, going back to our evolutionary history as human beings, our brains really evolved to do a certain number of limited things really well. Things like navigating through physical space, moving and sensing the body, interacting with small groups of people.

37:32The brain didn't really evolve to do what we ask it to do so much these days, which is to wrestle with abstract concepts and symbols. So the more we can make our thinking work resemble those activities that the brain really evolved for, like navigating through three-dimensional space or manipulating material objects, the better we'll be able to think. So rather than try to keep everything in your head, if you put that all out on a whiteboard, you can sort of move up and down the whiteboard, zoom in, zoom out. And I don't mean digitally, I mean like physically with your body. Or if you are organizing a book chapter, for example, you can have an idea on a bunch of post-it notes and then move them around like they are objects.

38:15That's taking advantage of these embodied resources that would be dormant and unused if we just tried to do all of that in our heads. One whole wall of my office is a giant whiteboard, and I would have a bigger one if I had a bigger wall. I have attention challenges, and I don't like staring at a computer screen. So stepping away and ordering ideas on a huge whiteboard and then erasing it and then moving them around, I find that incredibly satisfying. And I suspect a lot of people listening to this are thinking, oh, I'm intuitively doing a lot of the things that you're talking about systematically.

38:47Yes. And some of the most enthusiastic readers of this book turned out to be teachers. And a lot of them said to me that your book is just telling me stuff that I already sort of figured out on the job. But thank you for giving me a framework to think about it in and providing me with some scientific citations that I can say, see, I was always right about this, you know. And the other group that got the book right away was artists, interestingly, because I think artists of all kinds have always been thinking with their bodies, thinking with spaces, thinking in collaboration with other people. It's only in these really weird environments like universities and certain kinds of workplaces where we think the brain alone is enough or is the highest level of achievement.

39:32Don't you think in part that has to do with crowd control? I mean, you can't get a million people into a classroom or a meeting and have them walking around and fidgeting and, you know, playing with objects to express their ideas. Why not? I suspect the story that these, I'm presuming mostly men, running these institutions told themselves was, we need to get asses into seats, not moving, so I can impart information and they can absorb it. Yeah. Well, people talk about this sort of factory model of schooling, of education, and I think that was the notion was just get students into their seats. And a lot of workplaces, of course, were and are still arranged on this kind of model.

40:13But I hope that we're at a place where we can be rethinking that model and whether that really works for people. We're rethinking so many things about how work is undertaken these days, I think, and education. I think maybe opening up the door to let in all these other outside-the-brain resources, this might be the time to do that. So if you, Annie Murphy-Paul, were running a meeting with five to ten people in a room, not on Zoom, how would you organize it based on everything you've learned in writing this book? Well, let's see. I might suggest if we're in the same place, I would suggest that we all have a walking meeting.

40:50First, kick it off with a walking meeting. Kick it off with a walking meeting. I'd certainly want to be encouraging people to use their hands. I might say what I say to my kids. I have two teenage kids, and when I feel like they're struggling to grasp something, I'll say, try moving your hands when you say that. And I advise them to look for instructional videos also that show a teacher or an instructor who's moving their hands. I definitely want us to get outside. guide. That's part of, I guess, with the walk, that would be sort of killing two birds with one stone. Maybe I would start off the meeting with a body scan so that we're all attuned to our bodies and feeling what's going on internally.

41:30And then, you know, this is getting on to the next part of the book, but I think I would try to create a sense of groupiness, meaning a sense that we're not just a collection of individuals, but actually an entity unto ourselves, a group, by having some synchronized movement. Maybe I'd make people dance with me. I'll end with a not so wacky idea that I think it can be very powerful and meaningful for people to share a ritual together, which can be something just like sharing a meal. Would you give people permission to sit, stand, pace, you know, do whatever they need with their body or would that get a little too hectic?

42:06You know, a spirit of experimentation, I think is welcome here. So I might give it a try, I allow people to move and gesture as they want and see how that goes. And maybe after a few times of that, I'd have everybody sitting in their seats and being very still. Got it. Who knows? All right. So let's talk about thinking with our relationships. This is perhaps my favorite of the three areas that you explore in the book. Give us the top line description of what you mean by thinking with our relationship. Yeah. So again, this book was really meant to be kind of a critique of our culture. And we are in, of course, a very individualistic culture, one that says that, you know, if you have an idea, that's your idea.

42:47If you have an achievement, that's your achievement. Whereas certainly if we were to approach it from the spirit of Buddhism, we would see that everything is a collaborative undertaking, that there's these very rigid divides that we insist on between people are really a delusion, you might say. So what would that mean if we thought about our thinking processes, if we thought about thinking as a truly collaborative enterprise and not something that goes on, you know, sealed inside your own head? That might open up all kinds of possibilities for achieving what you might call a group mind, which I think we need more and more in our incredibly complex world, which, let's face it, is full of some really daunting problems.

43:32I don't think that an individual brain is going to solve the problem of climate change, for example, or even the problem of our politics. We actually need to come together and form that group mind in productive ways just to meet the moment that we're in. So let's get practical here. There are a couple of ways to think with our relationships. One is thinking with experts. Yeah. The model we have for how novices become experts is that they learn from past masters, from experts. But there's a problem with that, which is that by the virtue of being an expert, an expert thinks differently from a novice.

44:14You probably experienced this with someone who's really good at what they do. They've been doing it for a long time. Their minds work differently. A lot of what is very effortful and conscious for a novice has become automatized for someone who's an expert. It's actually almost impossible for them to explain how or why they do what they do to a novice in a way that the novice can learn. You know, it's kind of like following around someone who's in the kitchen who's a really good cook. And you say, well, how did you know to add the spices then or stir it then? And they just say, oh, you know, it just looked like it needed it.

44:50There's a lot of hurdles for a novice to learn from an expert. And how we might address that involves, again, getting ideas and information out of our heads where the novice can't really see it and laying it out for them in ways that make the expert's knowledge more accessible. Got it. So if I wanted to operationalize this in my life, what would be the practical steps? Well, say you're mentoring somebody on your staff who's a sort of baby journalist who doesn't have your years of experience in reporting and writing the news. You would have to break it down for them why exactly it is that you make the choices that you do.

45:34And you no longer have to think about those choices, right? It's like second nature for you when you're interviewing somebody or when you're researching a topic. It's all become automatic for you. You will actually have to slow down, break it down into steps and even micro steps for that novice, for that intern. You might need to exaggerate certain aspects of what you do to make the important stuff leap out for the novice. It's, again, so much second nature for you that you don't even realize it anymore. But the novice is confronted by this welter of information that all seems the same to them.

46:06They don't know that they can attend to this, that they should attend to this, but they can ignore that. All of that stuff, you're going to have to think about a lot more consciously than you have in years if you want to effectively convey it to a beginner. Got it. Thinking with peers. Yeah, so just as our culture separates mind and body like we were talking about earlier, I think we also really separate intellectual life or mental life from social life. We'll work on our own all day and then go to a happy hour at the end of the day, as if social life and interacting with other people is somehow different and separate from our work.

46:45And this is same with kids that like we let them run around at recess and make as much noise as they want. But when they come into the classroom, they have to sit quietly and, you know, don't talk to your neighbor and all of that. But actually, the social brain, you know, we are such fundamentally social creatures and we're social all the time, not just at happy hour and not just on the playground. What we wanted to do is to think in terms of harnessing our social natures in the service of thinking and learning. And some of the ways that we can do that are things like generating a debate or an argument or telling stories to others or teaching others, teaching our peers.

47:28because all of those activities, those really deeply social activities, they activate processes in our minds that are going to, again, lay dormant if we just do that work on our own in an unsocial way. Starting an argument sounds pretty anti-social. Well, a productive debate can flesh out different positions in a way that is very hard to do when you're just thinking about that idea on your own. Got it. Yeah, no physical violence here. Just hearing different perspectives and having them embodied by different people rather than having them be kind of lifeless concepts in your head. I find that I cannot think clearly on my own.

48:14There's a point at which I need to run something by somebody. And I've sometimes said that, like, I don't know what I think until I've talked about it with my wife. Does all this fit within this rubric for you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, in fact, the philosopher Andy Clark, who I keep referring to him, he's one of the originators of the idea of the extended mind. He likes to say that human beings are intrinsically loopy creatures, meaning that our particular kind of human intelligence benefits by making as many loops as possible. Andy Clark says that we're intrinsically loopy creatures. And I think what I hear you saying, Dan, is that you need to make a loop with whatever you're thinking about.

48:54You need to loop that through somebody else's mind and it comes back to you, you know, enhanced or improved in a way that it wouldn't if it just stayed sort of inert in your own mind. Yes. Yes. This is like a positive version of loopy. Right. This is a good way to be loopy.

49:15Coming up, Annie talks about why groupthink is not always a bad thing and what she calls extension inequality.

49:31So the other aspect of thinking with relationships is thinking with groups. You know, we've all heard that term groupthink, which generally we think of as a bad thing, right? That like a group can head down the wrong path thinking as an entity, and that can lead to some pretty bad decisions, even catastrophic decisions. It's also the case that lots of people hate working in groups. And yet, as I was saying earlier, so many of the challenges of our world require us to think in groups. So we're going to have to learn to have a group mind that is actually more than or better than some of the individual intellects in that group.

50:12And I think there are ways that we can think effectively as a group while avoiding the pitfalls of conformity and that kind of irritation or unpleasantness of working in a group that so many of us associate with group activities and group projects. What are the ways? So we were talking earlier about how I would lead a meeting. A lot of those suggestions I had were aimed at creating this feeling of groupiness, which is actually a term that psychologists use. And a lot of that is about hacking into a very old, very visceral kind of capacity that humans have for losing themselves in a group, which can be dangerous, can have negative effects, but is also responsible for some of the greatest achievements of humankind.

51:01So it turns out, for example, that when we move in the same way as other people at the same time in the same place, our brains kind of get the idea that maybe these people are actually extensions of us, or maybe we're all one big creature. I'm thinking of raves where people lose themselves in this joint activity. But that happens on a smaller scale, even when we're taking a walk with someone. It turns out that when we walk alongside someone, we just naturally fall into a synchronized rhythm. And research has found that people who take a walk together, they find it easier to cooperate and to collaborate because they've had this experience of kind of like, oh, that person's body is moving in the same way and at the same time as mine.

51:47Maybe we're kind of mentally on the same page as well. It's kind of like that embodied metaphor that we were talking about earlier. Are there other practices that you recommend for this portion of thinking outside the head in the area of thinking with our relationships? Some of the things I've seen you write about are, I don't know exactly what this refers to, but leaving traces of your thinking is an idea. I've heard you talk about generating a sense of shared fate. Yes. Yeah. Well, so much of our work these days happens inside the head and that can create real problems, as I was saying earlier about in terms of novices learning how to master a skill.

52:27In the old days when you had an apprenticeship, the master carpenter or shipbuilder or whatever could physically show the novice what they were doing. The novice could give it a try. The master carpenter could sort of guide him or her in what he was doing. But so much of what we do now is inside our heads. And so there's a really neat idea coming out of psychology called a cognitive apprenticeship, which would mean modeling for someone else the way that we're thinking and making that explicit in just the way that a tailor would say, this is how I cut a bolt of cloth, you know. And one way that we can think with groups, Dan, is known as a transactive memory system.

53:11And that refers to the fact that the projects that we deal with today in the modern world are so complicated that no one person can know everything required to make that project a success. And so we can actually sort of exponentially multiply our access to knowledge and to stored information, as long as we know who in our group has the information that we need. We don't hold it in our own heads, but we know who on the team, you know, is the expert on that given piece of the project. And then together in a transactive memory system, we're actually operating as a kind of superorganism that has this kind of amazing access to knowledge and information far beyond what any individual could have.

53:57And research has found, for example, that teams of doctors that have a robust transactive memory system, they know who's the expert on this and who to go to if this happens. Their patients actually do better and leave the hospital sooner. So I think we need to think in terms of not just improving our own memory or our own store of information as individuals, but how are those things working together in systems with other people, with other minds? This has all been really interesting. Just to sum it up, we've talked about three aspects of the extended mind, thinking with your body, thinking with your surroundings, thinking with nature.

54:34One of the things you talk about at the end of the book, though, is that this kind of extended mind is not extended to all people, that there is what you call extension inequality. Yes. So can you talk about that before I let you go? Yeah, thank you for asking me about that, because that became more and more important to me as I was working on the book, that I was writing over and over again how important it is to have the freedom to move one's body, to have access to green spaces, to have people in your life who are very knowledgeable and accomplished. And the fact is that there's in no sense, you know, an equality of access to those things in our country, in our world.

55:14And so if we are going to take seriously this idea that the raw materials we have access to in the world are a really key part of our thinking processes, then we need to pay more attention to the fact that not everyone has equal access to those raw materials. As long as intelligence is basically a lump of stuff that's sealed inside your head, we can act as if that lump of stuff can be weighed and measured with tests and it doesn't matter so much the access to outside the brain resources that people have. But if we're going to take the idea of the extended mind seriously and say, no, actually, our thinking processes are assembled from these raw materials that we do or don't have access to in the world, then that access really matters.

56:00And we need to take that seriously when we're evaluating people and deciding their fates as we do when we hire people or when we let people into universities. So when I'm looking at somebody's test score, I might think, oh, well, actually, there was some extension inequality here that this person didn't get access to experts, green space, and the freedom to move. And so perhaps there is some untapped potential here that this number I'm staring at does not speak to. Exactly. Because those methods of evaluation that we've developed over many years and that have become so dominant in our society are really very brain-bound measures.

56:40And I think we could begin to think about how could we not only measure but also encourage the development of all of our extended minds. I think we're going to need every bit of intelligence that we can muster to tackle the problems of this world. And so I think the extended mind is going to be ever more necessary. Before I let you go, is there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to yet? You know, you had asked early on, Dan, where my interest in this topic came from. And I said that I had these two little kids who are now strapping teenagers and much taller than me. I was interested in how they were learning.

57:17And what I noticed as they've grown up is that when kids are little, we're okay with them thinking outside the brain. We're okay with them using manipulatives, using their hands, getting their hands dirty. We're okay with them moving their bodies, spending time outside, learning from their peers in play. And then we're all supposed to put that aside increasingly as our kids get older and then as we live our adult lives. And I kind of think we need to return to that spirit of including our whole selves in how we think and how we learn that we think is natural for young kids but actually would benefit all of us.

57:57I'm glad you said that. That's a nice place to end. It's rousing, and I'm not being sarcastic. The real final question, though, is can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and any other things you've put out into the world, books, websites, whatever, that you want to let people know about? Yeah. Yeah. So the title of the book is The Extended Mind, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. That's it. I just would love to share that book with anybody who's interested. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again to Annie Murphy-Paul. Don't forget, if you want a guided meditation that will help you turn down the volume on overthinking and think in a more elevated, expansive way, check out danharris.com where we've got a guided meditation from Seb and A.

58:38Selassie, a bespoke one, customized for people who have just listened to this episode. Also, and I never tire of mentioning this, paying subscribers also get access to our weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions. The next one's coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, October 21st. And this weekend, we've got the Meditation Party Retreat with me and Seb and Jeff Warren and Ofosu Jones-Korte. There's a link in the show notes. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

59:15Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

59:38Thank you.