Book Review-The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul

I started reading The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul as a part of my own effort to learn about the  cognition and neurosciences.  I am a neophyte in this area, and I became curious about the general area after I read Physical Intelligence by Scott Grafton (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/08/book-review-physical-intelligence-by.html), as it dealt with connection between our minds, nervous system, and our bodies. It was after reading that book that I decided to work on learning more about the general area of mind-body connections, the how and the why. I create an autodidact’s  course into how we think and trying to understand and  learning about learning.

As a part of this effort, I picked three books to focus on as a starter set of readings. This is one of the three books. The other two were Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky and Brainscapes (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/03/book-review-brainscapes-by-rebecca.html) by Rebecca Schwarzlose. I read the three together, more or less in parallel. This was the first one that I finished. Mind In Motion was a little bit more challenging for me to understand, and I started reading Brainscape much after I started the other two. I knew it was challenging to read all three books together, but I liked challenges. I tried very hard to keep the contents separate from each other in my head while still trying to integrate and coalesce the concepts from each book.

The Extended Mind explores the different ways of extending our minds that are external to our minds, i.e., how to use the environment around us to ease our internal cognitive loading, a mind-blowing idea. The author simplified some very obscure and amorphous concepts to clarify our understanding. She cited  numerous research literature in her explanations as examples of the concepts, as with all good nonfiction books seeking to explain complex material.

The book is split into three parts: Part I is thinking with our bodies,  Part II is thinking with our surrounding spaces,  and Part III is thinking with our relationships. Each part is further  split into three separate chapters, in addition to a conclusion,  so there are ten chapters in all.  

Chapters 1 and 2: Thinking with Sensations and Thinking with Movements did not draw me initially as I was reading articles in the same general area, so the topics seemed familiar.  The chapter that captured my attention was Chapter 3: Thinking with Gestures. The topic coincided with my own use of gestures when I lecture on video. I had tried to limit my own gesturing, fearing that the students would find it distracting. It was after reading this chapter that I felt liberated  to gesture freely, as well as consciously making my gestures meaningful.  I don't know how successful I was, but it made me think in terms of how extending my lectures to my gestures would serve to help my students understand my lectures.

The next two parts were much easier reading for me because I became more open to the ideas presented in the book. I was delighted with Part II: Thinking with Our Surroundings.  I've thought about using natural spaces before reading the book,  but I've never made that connection. Thinking with built spaces hit close to me because I have worked in industry for many years and I have always wondered about our office space and how ill-conceived most of them are, how ill design they are, and how unproductive the spaces made me. I was thinking about the open plan offices that became de rigueur.

Thinking with a Space of Ideas that was watershed chapter. It opened up the possibility of using different spaces to enhance my creative process, which made me quite excited as I took off tangentially into exploring how I can do this extension in my life.

Finally, thinking with our relationships with others hit another sweet spot, as we are bound to our fellow humans with regard to our cognition, whether we liked it or not, so we need to make that process simpler and more conducive to thinking creatively.

The chapter on thinking with experts reminded me of the times during my gradual school research days and how I felt dealing with experts; whether I was presenting a paper or what I was interacting with my gradual school advisor. The chapter made me re-evaluate those experiences  and allowed me to reexamine my history for the first time. The memories of the difficult times  during my student days and I wondered whether I could have done better if I knew this information then.

Thinking with peers and thinking with the group gave me motivation for  my teaching because I have liked having the students do group work,  but I have always dealt with student groups that were unbalanced, where one person  did all the work while the rest just coasted. I was determined to avoid that scenario. The chapters on peers and groups help shed light on some of the dynamics that I had observed but not really understood. I incorporated some of what I had learned from this book into my instructions to my students this semester. We shall see how this works.

I recommend this book. Although I don't know if people are going to fully incorporate all of this into their lives as I am hoping that I'm doing, it helped me to understand the part of cognition; The Extended Mind explained the connections for me between how our minds incorporate concepts outside of our mind and extend our cognitive process, it gave me a better understanding of the cognitive sciences and helped make connections to other material. If you are interested in how the mind works and how one can make our minds be better at what it does as it extends it with other tools, this is a good start. It is not a how-to book however, which I appreciate.  It made me learn and consider the various other tools and it made me create a paradigm that I feel I need to make my unique circumstances work for me.