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.
