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.

Book Review-Make it Stick

Make It Stick-The Science of Successful Learning

By Peter C. Brown. Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel

A friend recommended that I dive into this book since I was hoping to learn about the latest theories on learning and cognition; one reason for my search is to be a better coach with volleyball athletes, but as it turns out, this book is helping me become a better college professor.

The authors devoted the opening chapter to the myths and sacred cows that we carry in our minds about how we learn and how to best create an environment that is suited for teaching.  They recount the large number of beliefs that many hold dear as the absolutely truth and then give evidence which debunks them one by one.

The central tenet for the book is stated clearly very early in the first chapter:  learning needs memory and the ability to recall from the memory; people will need to continue to learn and remember throughout our lives in order to function; and finally learning is an acquired skill, not a natural skill, one that need to be practiced.

Very early on in this book, the authors laid out their own beliefs. The first is that learning needs to be effortful in order to be effective, that is, we learn better when learning is difficult. They also believe that people tend to be poor judges when it comes to determining how well we learn a subject; we often overestimate our learning prowess. One of their biggest pet myths is that rereading and massed practices - the perennially preferred studying practice of most people - is the worst and least effective practice habit.

What do they believe in? They believe that learning comes from our ability to retrieve knowledge from our memory, and that we need to exercise that memory retrieval constantly in order to makes sure that it is always there for our recall. They believe that the exercise of retrieval and recall needs to be done with built in gaps in timing, i.e. they need to be spaced; they believe in making the repetitions be unpredictable and irregularly spaced in time, i.e. interleaved.  They believe that before being shown how to resolve a problem, the learner needs to wade into the problem without any clue as to how to solve the problem. They believe that searching for and discovering the underlying reasons for a piece of knowledge is much more important that just being able to perform a skill repetitively, although they do acknowledge the importance of being able to repeat a task procedurally.

Although the ideas and methods that is covered in this book is not all completely new to me, the presentation and organization is quite interesting. They can cite a great number of studies in the scientific literature that effectively and sufficiently support their arguments against the stated myths while citing enough studies which also amply support their arguments. The most interesting part of the book came to me after I had read it from cover to cover and was sitting down to review what I had learned. What the authors cleverly did is to use the very desired practices that they are espousing in structuring the book. They spaced the same descriptions of the desired practice repeatedly through the text, they interleaved certain arguments in all the chapters, they gave the reader time and room to discern the underlying principles, and they motivated the reader to elaborate on what they had learned to themselves, at least I did.

I am relatively certain that this was deliberate.  Indeed, I followed the rut that they had called out in their recitation of bad learning habits and strategies as I was reading, rereading, and taking massive amounts of notes in order forcefully lever the ideas into my head. Little did I know that the authors had, by the nature of how the book is structured, created an opportunity for the reader to practice what they had preached.

As I stepped through my memories of the time that I was reading this book, along with a couple of other books on how to best learn, I unintentionally spaced and interleaved my learning from this book because I was switching between books, a practice that I had picked up as a matter of habit as my learning habit throughout my life. The real question is then whether this tactic was successful: did it accomplish the goals in the way that the authors had intended? I can’t speak for the longevity memory retention of the lesson from the book, but I can say that I did spend a lot of time thinking and understanding the underlying principles. I will be able to speak to the longevity of my learning with their preferred methods when someone asks me about the book in a few years, but as of now, I had worked long and hard on learning from this book.