> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions brainbound thinking neurocentric bias - eg "use your head" extra-neural inputs - inputs from outside the brain ## Chapter Summaries ### Introduction > It’s true that we’re more accustomed to thinking about our bodies, our spaces, and our relationships. But we can also think with and through them—by using the movements of our hands to understand and express abstract concepts, for example, or by arranging our workspace in ways that promote idea generation, or by engaging in social practices like teaching and storytelling that lead to deeper understanding and more accurate memory. Rather than exhorting ourselves and others to use our heads, we should be applying extra-neural resources to the project of thinking outside the skull’s narrow circumference. > Here we arrive at a dilemma—one that we all share: The modern world is extraordinarily complex, bursting with information, built around non-intuitive ideas, centered on concepts and symbols. Succeeding in this world requires focused attention, prodigious memory, capacious bandwidth, sustained motivation, logical rigor, and proficiency with abstractions. The gap between what our biological brains are capable of, and what modern life demands, is large and getting larger each day. With every experimental discovery, the divide between the scientific account of the world and our intuitive “folk” understanding grows more pronounced. With every terabyte of data swelling humanity’s store of knowledge, our native faculties are further outstripped. With every twist of complexity added to the world’s problems, the naked brain becomes more unequal to the task of solving them. > > Our response to the cognitive challenges posed by contemporary life has been to double down on what the philosopher Andy Clark calls “brainbound” thinking—those very capacities that are, on their own, so woefully inadequate. We urge ourselves and others to grit it out, bear down, “just do it”—to think harder. But, as we often find to our frustration, the brain is made of stubborn and unyielding stuff, its vaunted plasticity notwithstanding. Confronted by its limits, we may conclude that we ourselves (or our children or our students or our employees) are simply not smart enough, or not “gritty” enough. In fact, it’s the way we handle our mental shortcomings—which are, remember, endemic to our species, that is the problem. Our approach constitutes an instance of (as the poet William Butler Yeats put it in another context) “the will trying to do the work of the imagination.” The smart move is not to lean ever harder on the brain but to learn to reach beyond it. ### Chapter 8 - Thinking with Peers **social encoding advantage** > the brain stores social information differently than it stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinct region of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information more accurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encoding advantage.” **shared attention as a form of tagging** > the phenomenon that psychologists call “shared attention” occurs when we focus on the same objects or information at the same time as others. The awareness that we are focusing on a particular stimulus along with other people leads our brains to endow that stimulus with special significance, tagging it as especially important. **four steps to induce groupiness** people who need to think together should: - learn together - train together - feel together - engage in rituals together where "together" means being in the same place at the same time **transactional memory** “Nobody remembers everything. Instead, each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally—and then can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t. In this way, we become part of a transactive memory system.” – Daniel Wegner > All of us maintain a set of mental markers that help us locate information we don’t currently possess; we may not recall every detail contained in a report, but we know the folder (physical or digital) where the report can be found. Such markers also point us toward the people who possess information we do not; the aim in building a robust transactive memory system is to make these pointers as explicit and as accurate as possible. The process of setting out these markers should begin early in a team’s work together. <span style="color:#64ccf2">It’s important to establish from the outset not only who’s responsible for doing what but also who’s responsible for knowing what</span>. **meta-knowledge champion** > Research shows that groups perform best when each member is clearly in charge of maintaining a particular body of expertise, when each topic has its designated “knowledge champion,” as it were. Studies further suggest that it can be useful to appoint a meta-knowledge champion: an individual who is responsible for keeping track of what others in the group know and making sure that group members’ mental “directory” of who knows what stays up to date. ### Conclusion A curriculum of the extended mind. A series of nested principles. 1. We should offload and externalise our knowledge as much as possible. 2. We should try to transform information into an artifact. 3. Alter our mental state to one that is appropriate for the task. 4. Take measures to re-embody the information we think about. 5. Re-spatialise the information we think about. 6. Re-socialize the information we think about. 7. Manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops – passing our thinking through physical, spatial and social loops. 8. Create cognitively congenial situations. 9. Embed extensions into our everyday lives. # Quotes