The Extended Mind

Highlighted Quotes

• Page 40: We bring other people’s feelings onboard, and the body is the bridge.
• Page 40: we are sampling their emotions.
• Page 47: we believe there’s something virtuous about controlling the impulse to move.
• Page 67: the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
• Page 80: moving our hands advances our understanding of abstract or complex concepts, reduces our cognitive load, and improves our memory.
• Page 80: “Hand gestures appear to alert the auditory cortex that meaningful communication is occurring,”
• Page 83: “It is from the attempt of expressing themselves that understanding evolves, rather than the other way around,”
• Page 92: the brain is deeply affected by the setting in which it operates.
• Page 118: “The wall was designed to protect us from the cognitive load of having to keep track of the activities of strangers,”
• Page 121: Online communication, it seems, is no substitute for the offhand conversation, the casual exchange carried out in person.
• Page 124: good walls make good collaborators.
• Page 124: “a high mental load consistently diminished the originality and creativity”
• Page 125: Privacy supports creativity
• Page 125: the freedom to experiment unobserved.
• Page 125: as workspaces become more open, trust and cooperativeness among co-workers declines.
• Page 127: three people working in empowered offices accomplished almost as much as four people in lean offices.
• Page 127: “intermittent collaboration.”
• Page 132: people are less productive in a lean, featureless office.
• Page 133: “prejudiced places,”
• Page 134: The key, she says, is not to eliminate stereotypes but to diversify them—to convey the message that people from many different backgrounds can thrive in a given setting.
• Page 138: “there’s something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man.”
• Page 145: concept mapping. A concept map is a visual representation of facts and ideas, and of the relationships among them.
• Page 149: the use of a compact display actively drains our mental capacity.
• Page 150: The key, he says, is to turn away from choosing technology that is itself ever faster and more powerful, toward tools that make better use of our own human capacities—capacities that conventional technology often fails to leverage.
• Page 155: vagueness and ambiguity are more generative than explicitness or definition.
• Page 157: our assumption that the brain operates like a computer has led us to believe that we need only input the necessary information in order to generate the correct solution. But human minds don’t work that way,
• Page 157: The computer analogy “implies that simulating a situation in your head while you think is equivalent to living through that situation while you think,”
• Page 158: They are less likely to engage in “symbol pushing,” or moving numbers and words around in the absence of understanding.
• Page 164: cognitive apprenticeship,
• Page 167: The conventional approach to cognition has persuaded us that the only route to more intelligent thinking lies in cultivating our own brain.
• Page 172: a “fast second”: an agile imitator. Companies that capitalize on others’ innovations have “a minimal failure rate” and “an average market share almost three times that of market pioneers,”
• Page 173: Engaging in effective imitation is like being able to think with other people’s brains—like
• Page 175: He imagines companies opening “imitation departments,” devoted to identifying promising opportunities for copying.
• Page 177: skilled imitation, and not just brilliant innovation, is behind many of the successes we celebrate.
• Page 186: In an age of knowledge work, the “mystery” of expertise is even more enshrouded, hidden by the scrim of automatization.
• Page 188: their experience of intense social engagement around a body of knowledge—the hours they spent advising, debating with, and recounting anecdotes to one another.
• Page 189: the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process.
• Page 189: when we think socially, we think differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.
• Page 192: we think best when we think socially.
• Page 192: our society remains mired in a brainbound approach to cognition; our activities at school and at work still treat thinking as the manipulation of abstract symbols inside individual heads.
• Page 192: We are, that is, continually expected to think about abstract symbols for the benefit of an abstract audience,
• Page 196: Humans learn best from other (live) humans.
• Page 198: Valued Youth does just the opposite: it deliberately recruits struggling students and assigns them to teach younger kids.
• Page 202: arguing together, with the aim of arriving jointly at something close to the truth.
• Page 202: The two are “famous for fighting openly,” Bird has acknowledged, “because he’s got to get it done and I’ve got to make it as good as it can be before it gets done.”
• Page 202: Personal Note: Ben Yoskivitz and i at hlb
• Page 202: when people fight over ideas, and do so with mutual respect, they are more productive and creative.”
• Page 203: almost every topic can be cast in terms that highlight opposing perspectives—and should be,
• Page 204: “People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.”
• Page 207: we understand stories by running a simulation of them in our minds.
• Page 208: the role for leaders and managers lies in offering supports for, and removing barriers to, the storytelling in which their people would naturally engage.
• Page 215: a single mind laboring on its own is at a distinct disadvantage in solving problems or generating new ideas. Something beyond solo thinking is required—the generation of a state that is entirely natural to us as a species, and yet one that has come to seem quite strange and exotic: the group mind.
• Page 220: shared arousal
• Page 220: Personal Note: Forks as shared arousal?
• Page 220: when participants had synchronized with one another, and when they had experienced arousal together, they then behaved in a distinctive way—forming more inclusive groups, standing closer to one another, and working together more efficiently
• Page 220: “behavioral synchrony and shared physiological arousal in small groups independently increase social cohesion and cooperation,”
• Page 221: Though we may imagine ourselves as separate beings, our minds and bodies have many ways of bridging the gaps.
• Page 221: The key lies in creating a certain kind of group experience: real-time encounters in which people act and feel together in close physical proximity. Yet our schools and companies are increasingly doing just the opposite.
• Page 221: It assumes that information is information, however it is encountered; that tasks are tasks, no matter how we take them on.
• Page 222: we learn things better when we attend to them with other people. We remember things better when we attend to them with other people. And we’re more likely to act upon information that has been attended to along with other people.
• Page 222: “Our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen,”
• Page 222: We feel compelled to continuously monitor what our peers are paying attention to, and to direct our own attention to those same objects. (When the face of everyone on the street is turned skyward, we look up too.) In this way, our mental models of the world remain in sync with those of the people around us.
• Page 223: More of these “moments of joint attention” are associated with more successful outcomes.
• Page 223: our willingness to persevere can be enhanced when our efforts are made on behalf of a group we care about.
• Page 223: group membership acts as a form of intrinsic motivation:
• Page 223: the satisfaction we get from contributing to a collective effort, rather than by external rewards such as money or public recognition.
• Page 223: Experiencing ourselves as part of a collective “we,” rather than as a singular “I,” changes the way we direct our focus and the way we allocate our energies—often
• Page 224: people who need to think together should learn together—in person, at the same time.
• Page 227: our focus on individual achievement—and individual rewards—leads us to overlook the performance-enhancing effects of group rituals.
• Page 229: The research literature has even given this phenomenon a name: “grouphate,” defined as “a feeling of dread that arises when facing the possibility of having to work in a group.”
• Page 230: in order to carry out the intensely complex work demanded by the modern world, people must think together in groups.
• Page 231: What has not changed is our model of how intelligent thinking happens.
• Page 232: Asking attendees to write out their contributions instead of speaking them, he says, “can be a solution to this problem, allowing space for unique knowledge and novel ideas to emerge.”
• Page 232: many who work for him will choose to engage in “self-silencing”
• Page 232: Personal Note: Groupthink negative of the well crafted agenda, well run meeting
• Page 232: the manager or administrator who adopts an “inquisitive and self-silencing” stance,
• Page 232: Personal Note: Only matters IF that leader even cares to hear different views...rather than breadcrumbing their already selected idea
• Page 233: “the mind is just less and less in the head” these days. More than that, the mind must be less and less in the head, and more and more emblazoned on the world, if we are to extend our minds with the minds of others.
• Page 235: “transactive memory.”
• Page 236: the value of a transactive memory system lies in its members thinking different thoughts while also remaining aware of the contents of their fellow members’ minds.
• Page 242: Intelligence is not “a fixed lump of something that’s in our heads,” he explains. Rather, “it’s a transaction”: a fluid interaction among our brains, our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships.
• Page 243: whenever possible, we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world.
• Page 244: whenever possible, we should endeavor to transform information into an artifact, to make data into something real
• Page 244: Humans evolved to handle the concrete, not to contemplate the abstract.
• Page 252: IQ tests have so often been misused—employed to rank, divide, and exclude people instead of helping them to develop.