Annie Murphy Paul

anniemurphypaul.com · American English

The Extended Mind The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain A bold new book reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains-in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships Order Now Learn More About The Extended Mind “Use your head.” That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or […]

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The conversations we’re not having
Mar 24, 2021 · original
Working remotely has become the new normal for many of us—so much so that we may not quite realize what we’re missing. Ben Waber of the workplace analytics firm Humanyze has now quantified one COVID-era casualty: the number of informal conversations we have with coworkers. During the pandemic, Waber found, the average number of co-workers that employees talk to for 15 minutes or less a week plummeted from nearly 38 to fewer than 22, even as the small number of people they talked to more than an hour a week increased. Journalist Katie Johnston reported on Waber’s findings in a recent article in the Boston Globe . The drop-off in casual workplace conversations is a problem, Waber told Johnston, because these small interactions are “how you get new ideas and learn from co-workers.” In another recent article, appearing in MIT Sloan Review , Waber discusses how this deficit might be addressed
Learning how to use our extended minds
Mar 24, 2021 · original
“Prospective memory”—the ability to remember to act on our intentions—declines with age. But older people can perform on a par with younger ones when they use their extended minds: that is, when they rely on the external environment to provide cues and reminders. This process is known as “cognitive offloading.” It involves moving the intentions we form out of our forgetful minds and onto the more stable and reliable stuff of the world. Researchers Sam Gilbert and Chiara Scarampi are interested in the use of such external-memory strategies across the lifespan. Offloading may be “particularly beneficial for older adults,” they note, “to compensate for age-related declines in cognitive abilities.” In a new study, Gilbert and Scarampi found poorer prospective-memory performance among older adults, as expected. But—in a result that surprised Gilbert—the older adults didn’t always compensate f
The importance of knowing what your teammates know
Mar 24, 2021 · original
In today’s information-saturated workplace, there’s too much knowledge for any one person to keep tabs on. Yet all relevant knowledge must somehow be marshaled and applied in order to accomplish a complex task. The solution to this dilemma lies in creating what psychologists call a “transactive memory system,” in which each person on a team is responsible for knowing and remembering one segment of the larger body of information drawn upon by the group. In order to reap the benefits of a transactive memory system, each member of the team has to be aware of their teammates’ areas of expertise. But how to establish and update this awareness? Researchers from Maastricht University in the Netherlands have a suggestion: create a concept map. Concept maps originated in education as a way of organizing and representing information. They “externalize” what people know, taking it out of their head
How exercise helps us regulate our emotions
Mar 24, 2021 · original
Many of us have no doubt noticed that if we’re feeling stressed or upset about something, we feel better about it after we exercise. But why would this be? A new study suggests an intriguing answer. Researchers from Beijing Normal University in China tested the theory that engaging in vigorous physical activity improves our capacity to engage in “implicit cognitive reappraisal”—that is, the largely unconscious processing of a distressing situation such that we come to feel that it’s “not so bad.” In their study, published in Behavioural Brain Research , they found that participants who engaged in exercise reported fewer unpleasant feelings than a control group who did not exercise; the results, the researchers write, “may point to acute exercise as a promoter of implicit cognitive reappraisal.” Other research cited in this article has found that exercise can even offer a protective effec
There’s not one single way of being smart
Mar 24, 2021 · original
In my work I try to challenge conventional notions of what intelligence is—not a lump of stuff inside one’s skull, but rather an ongoing process of assembling resources located inside and outside the head. I welcome other challenges to our narrow ideas about intelligence. Some of the most interesting come from the study of animal cognition. In a recent article in the Journal of Intelligence , researchers note that many animal species—like chimpanzees, dogs, and crows—have cognitive abilities that far surpass humans’. A press release accompanying the study notes that “various species demonstrate better-than-human abilities in delayed gratification, navigation, communication, pattern recognition and statistical reasoning.” What’s more, intelligence researchers have traditionally looked at animal cognition through a highly anthropocentric lens; they “tend to overrate cognitive skills that a
Do you have a theory of your own mind?
Mar 24, 2021 · original
If you like to read about psychology, you may have encountered the term “theory of mind,” which refers to our ability to think about the mental states of others: their thoughts, feelings, and intentions. But what about having a theory of our own mind? How well do we understand what’s going on in our own heads? This question may be especially salient for people who are “neurodivergent”—whose minds operate in a different way. Peter Vermeulen, an autism expert, has written an interesting blog post on the subject of what he calls Theory of Own Mind. “Very frequently, effort is focused on teaching autistic and other neurodivergent people to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling,” he writes. “For instance, we show them pictures of faces and ask them to identify how someone feels.” “Training their Theory of Mind may have a certain benefit, but shouldn’t we rather start helping t
The joy of letting go of our individuality
Mar 24, 2021 · original
During this pandemic year, we’ve been living as individuals—isolated individuals, practicing personal responsibility, wearing our own masks, washing our own hands. We’ve done this for the good of the collective as well as to preserve our own health—but the “collective” has existed mostly as an abstract idea. What we haven’t experienced in a while is the joy of losing our individual selves in a group. I thought wistfully of that joy while reading a recent article by Will Coldwell in The Financial Times. The article is about . . . dancing. “Dance provides us with a universal language—one deeper and more emotional than words — that helps us to bond with other, often unfamiliar, people,” Coldwell writes. “Anthropologists suggest that danced rituals create a magic that language alone cannot muster.” “In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy , Barbara Ehrenreich says dancing, ‘pa
John le Carré didn’t write alone
Mar 17, 2021 · original
Most all of us are familiar with the novelist John le Carré. How many of us have heard of his wife, Jane Cornwell? Yet Jane was a “crucial, covert collaborator” in the creation of le Carré’s books, writes the couple’s son, Nick, in an essay in the Guardian . Nick’s article is a beautiful portrait of the extended mind at work—of the way thinking doesn’t only happen within a single skull, but in the space between two minds that know each other very, very well. “By and large, only they knew what passed between them and how much she reframed, adjusted, trained the novels as they grew,” Nick writes of his parents’ working relationship (both Jane and David Cornwell—le Carré’s real name—died in the past year). But there were clues. Reviewing le Carré’s papers, literature scholar Richard Ovenden saw evidence of a “deep process of collaboration,” “a rhythm of working together that was incredibly
Politics plays out in the body
Mar 17, 2021 · original
Political observers spend a lot of time contemplating how voters think : what they believe, how they can be persuaded. But how about what voters feel —literally, the physical sensations in their bodies? Manos Tsakiris urges us to consider what he calls “visceral politics.” Tsakiris, a psychologist at the University of London, writes in a fascinating new paper that “visceral states have come to the forefront of politics.” Uncomfortable internal feelings are interpreted as fear or anger, motivating political decisions accordingly. “In a social world of increased existential uncertainty,” accompanied by “increased informational uncertainty,” he writes, influence accrues to politicians who are able to give a name to what people are feeling in their bodies. This is something Donald Trump was good at. Tsakiris cites this example: “Trump said in a political rally that ‘the Democrats’ shameful c
The new appeal of “touchless” games
Mar 17, 2021 · original
In so many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a disaster for education. But there some ways in which the disruption it has induced has made room for new approaches—within educational systems that are resistant to change in normal times. One of these approaches is bringing bodily movements into the learning process. Javeria Salman has a great piece in The Hechinger Report about the use of the Kinems platform by teachers and students in the Greenburgh Central School District, outside New York City. Kinems is one of a new generation of “motion-based touchless games,” in which motion-based sensors allow players to control an avatar on the screen by moving their bodies. “Touchless,” of course, has a whole new appeal in the COVID era. Although Kinems was available to Greenburgh teachers before now, many of them did not take advantage of it. “Sometimes it can be a sentiment of, ‘Oh not one mo

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