Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson

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When the cup was full of iced coffee, they rated people as cooler and less welcoming.12

      The clothes you wear can make a difference, too. In one experiment, people who wore lab coats paid more attention to their work and made about half as many mistakes when compared with people who wore their own clothes.13 Lab coats are worn by scientists, doctors, and lab technicians—people who cannot afford to be sloppy or lazy in the work. Just wearing a lab coat was enough to make people more attentive. We often wear clothing for the effect it will have on others. Consider how the uniforms of police, judges, and priests serve as useful cues on how to behave. We wear uniforms because they have an outward effect, one directed at the people around us. Yet here we have studies showing that clothes, balance boards, and steaming cups of coffee have inward-facing consequences, too, not only for how we feel, but also for how we think.

      Or step away from the lab and reflect on situations from everyday life. Why, for example, do we pick up and rotate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, testing them in various holes? If perception is merely input, and the brain is so impressive, why don’t we just look at the pieces, rotate them in our brain, and then plop them into place? When making pancake batter, why do we mutter aloud while counting out the four cups of flour? Why do we often use paper and pencil, or a calculator, even for modest math problems? Or what about this one: Why do we talk with our hands even when we’re on the phone and nobody is there to see our hands waving about? Again and again, close examination of everyday behavior reveals that we consistently interact with the world in seemingly superfluous ways. Why not just pause, perceive, ponder, and then act? We are not—as a brain-centric model would suggest—“thinking, then doing.” Rather, we are “thinking through doing.”

      The assumptions of behaviorism meant that, eventually, it was forced to give way to the computational theory of mind. Now the assumptions of the computational theory are, in turn, leading to a new way of understanding how the mind works.

      The Embodied Mind

      Taken together, the studies just mentioned, and thousands more, are the basis for a new view of the mind called embodied cognition. Evidence for this view, which is commonly referred to as just embodiment, has been building for decades and is considered “the most exciting idea in cognitive science right now.”14

      Embodiment proposes a theory of mind that, at its most broad and blunt, says simply this: Descartes was wrong. René Descartes, you may recall, was a 17th century French philosopher who introduced the idea of mind-body dualism, distilled most famously in his dictum, Ego cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Everything in the world was made of physical matter, Descartes observed, but the mind was different. You can’t ever point to something and say “that is a mind.” As a result, Descartes reasoned, the body was made of flesh and blood and was part of the world, but the mind was not.15 With this proposition, Descartes changed the course of Western philosophical and scientific thought.

      Embodiment is a counterargument to four centuries of mind-body dualism. It contends that we cannot explain the human experience if we have cleaved mind from body, perception from cognition, and action from understanding. We must stitch together what Descartes pulled apart. The psychologist Arthur Glenberg summarizes the embodiment perspective this way: “All approaches to embodiment agree that behavior is produced by more than a disembodied Cartesian mind manipulating symbols according to rules. In other words, embodiment is in strong contrast to cognitive psychology as developed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.”16 The computational theory of mind has produced decades of solid science. The embodied theory of mind says, hold on, that isn’t the whole story.

      From Brainbound Minds to Extended Minds

      To reconcile these two views, let’s turn to the cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, who has proposed two opposing models of human thought.17 One model, based on the computational theory, equates the mind with the brain and puts cognition—every last bit of it—in the head. Clark calls this the brain-bound model. If this model is correct, it means that the body exists exclusively for sensory perception (i.e., information inputs), with motor movements (i.e., action outputs) playing no role in cognition itself. It also means that cognition depends entirely on neural activity. If that’s the case, we should, in theory, be able to pop the top off a human skull, scoop out the brain, dump it into a cognition tank hooked up to ocular and auditory processors and say, “Voila, there it is, a thinking, intelligent, conscious being.”18

      When you read an article about the mind that features an image of the brain, you’re probably dealing with the brainbound model. It is the culturally dominant conception of the mind, one exemplified by the computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil envisioned a day when our brains could be uploaded to the cloud, and we would exist as conscious creatures made of pure information.19 While this view has many proponents, it’s worth noting that even neuroscience has been coming around to the idea that what the brain does is intimately connected to the messy reality of our biology. The neuroscientist Alan Jasanoff summed up the “fundamental lesson of neuroscience” this way: “The brain cannot be all there is.”20 The more science learns, the more questions arise about the brainbound model.

      Because of this, Clark proposed an alternative model called the extended mind.21 In this model, neural processes don’t handle each and every cognitive task. Some will happen in the head, while others might happen in the world. The basis for this idea is that we evolved in a physical world, which also means we evolved cognitive tooling that relies on our brains and our bodies and anything in the world. Sometimes that means thinking happens entirely in the head with mental representations. Other times it means the cognitive act depends on information outside the head—external representations—and interactions with other worldly resources. When the mind is extended, to use Clark’s vivid wordage, “Cognition leaks out into the world.”22

      We can draw a line between these two models (see Figure 2.3). On one side is brainbound, with mind and brain co-located in the skull and the body serving only as input and output. On the other side is extended, with cognition spread across brain, body, and anything in the world: whiteboards, smartphones, sticky notes, maps, notebooks, and even other people. The extended model doesn’t dismiss what the brain does. But neither is it biased toward electrical signals whizzing through squishy gray tissue.

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      A key difference between these two models is how much they depend on neurons. Brainbound assumes neuronal hegemony: thinking is restricted to what neurons do. Extended argues for neural frugality: thinking can happen with neurons, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes our thinking happens outside the head because it can be faster, or easier, or just plain better to do the work out there.23 This isn’t the brain being lazy. Instead, it’s more like the busy executive who effectively delegates certain tasks to the people around her rather than doing all the work herself.

      Mental Representations and the Big Divide

      The question before us then is twofold. First, how does this most exciting idea change our view of how the mind works? And second, what does it mean for how we create understanding from information?

      We’ve long understood that Starbucks and Calvin Klein use marketing to influence what we think. But it is surprising, and intriguing when science finds that a cappuccino or a lab coat can influence how we think. The temperature of our morning coffee can make the grumpy bus driver seem friendlier? Wearing a long white jacket can help us focus on a task? It sounds a bit crazy.24 In one sense, it’s not that controversial: of course, the outside world influences what happens in our head. Imagine taking a calculus test,

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