Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson

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day, at the beach. Who wouldn’t find it hard to concentrate when you could be lounging or surfing or reading a great book. But embodiment is making a much deeper claim: our ability to think depends on the world outside our head. We can never fully escape how the way we interact with our environment shapes our cognitive powers.

      Embodiment is far from settled science. Just how far to take this idea is a matter of much debate and even more research. It is helpful to think of embodiment, not as a singular theory, but as an umbrella term that includes many different challenges to the computational theory of mind. You will find Clark’s extended mind under this umbrella, along with ecological psychology, distributed cognition, enactivism, activity theory, and something called radical embodied cognition, to name just a few. Although they each have various intellectual roots, and the distinctions between them are often fuzzy, they all share a belief that no robust theory of mind can come from studying neurons alone.

      There is one topic, however, where there is a notable disagreement. Do mental representations exist or not? This is the big dividing line. Some groups under the embodiment umbrella, most notably radical embodied cognition, posit that we don’t need mental representations. To those who stand under this part of the embodiment umbrella, symbols in the brain are as mythical as unicorns. Since even the most advanced brain scanning technology has failed to observe even a single mental representation, this idea has an obvious allure. Experiments with creatures ranging from robots and crickets to children and baseball players have provided intriguing evidence for this position.25 Even so, explaining the mind without mental representations is so difficult that Anthony Chemero opened his book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science with the following qualifier: “One of the things I try to make clear is that it is actually very difficult to reject internal representations, and that radical embodied cognitive science must be more radical than most of its proponents realize.”26

      The debate over mental representations means we can, and should, expand our brainbound vs. extended framework. Our revised diagram, shown in Figure 2.4, puts brainbound at one end of a spectrum (cognition is all about symbols in the head), radical at the other (cognition involves no mental representations whatsoever), and extended somewhere in the middle. Exactly where in the middle is not easy to say. It depends on where one stands under the embodiment umbrella. That middle area covers a lot of different ideas. The later chapters in this book, for example, often draw from distributed cognition, but for our purposes, it’s sufficient to overlook these differences since this is the region that accepts mental representations as part of an embodied view of the mind.

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      What Is the Truth About Embodiment?

      What is the truth about embodiment? Don’t ask the scientists because nobody knows. Not really. This is how science works. Hypotheses are put forth, experiments are designed, evidence is collected, debates rage, and scientific knowledge slowly moves forward. For decades, the evidence has been building in favor of an embodied view of mind. But here’s the thing: the rock-bottom truth doesn’t matter. Not for our purposes, at least.

      The embodiment debate stems from a simple yet eternal question: How does the mind really work? Yet where scientists are looking for truth, the rest of us seek something else. All we require is a perspective on cognition that allows us to make substantial headway on a wide range of messy, complex, real-world problems of understanding. We need better ways to recognize how people solve problems, create meaning, and make decisions. That is precisely the focus of subsequent chapters in this book. Debating the existence of mental representations is part of building theories, but largely irrelevant for creating more understandable information. Where scholars want scientific truth, we need analytic utility: a way to examine problems of understanding so that we can create better ways of thinking. In short, we’re more interested in utility than in truth.

      Taking embodiment seriously means there is much to be gained by shifting our position away from the brainbound view and toward the radical one. That means recognizing that our default view is the brainbound model and the limitations it imposes. But it doesn’t mean we have to also become radicalized. Representations and how we transform them, whether in our head or in the world, are a useful way of looking at problems of understanding. In fact, much of this book is about how we can create understanding by moving representations out of the head, putting them into the world, and using technologies to manipulate them. As authors, we like the way Andy Clark puts it: Some problems seem to be “representation hungry.”27

      Seeing the World Through a New Lens

      How does this extended view of cognition help us see the world and the way people make sense of information, in a new way? What does it provide over the standard brainbound model? For now, let’s consider a single, illustrative example. Imagine you’re in a kickoff meeting for a new project. First, let’s consider the usual way these meetings proceed ...

      The Brainbound View

      More than likely, one person is leading the meeting. This person has prepared a PowerPoint deck chock-full of information. Attendees are expected to listen and then ask questions. Some take notes on their laptops, or maybe on paper. Everyone expects a copy of the presentation to review later, which excuses (although no one would admit this) the partial attention given to the presenter. And, as you’d expect, half of these people will spend much of the meeting discretely dealing with emails or otherwise being distracted.

      The entire meeting is structured around an information transmission model: I have information. You should pay attention and file this away. Understanding depends on how well information is communicated and how carefully people pay attention. We might easily imagine some future technology, let’s call it PowerPoint Plus, where you could attach a cable from your laptop to your brain and download the slides directly. Given how these meetings work, this sounds appealing: skip the boring stuff and download the information straight into your brain. The brainbound model says this is at least a theory.

      The Extended View

      Here’s an alternative way that we might design this meeting through our lens of understanding.

      People are themselves viewed as part of a distributed system of cognitive resources—we believe each person in attendance brings with them a set of experiences and perspectives that are probably vital to the meeting topic. In addition to the people in attendance, the whiteboard, the markers, the sticky notes—even the height of the table—are all viewed as potential resources to be designed. The leader views their role as more of a facilitator than speaker, more as a cognitive enabler than an information transmitter. This means that attention is managed through active learning and sharing. Care is taken to create a psychologically safe environment. Rather than marching people through a bullet-laden deck, a single problem statement is handed to all, with an opening challenge to explore options and share ideas. If there was background knowledge, it was distributed ahead of time for folks to read. Knowledge is curated rather than transmitted. Ideas are drawn together, on the board, with markers or sticky notes handed to people to make their ideas visible, or to show how their idea fits into or contradicts what someone else has rendered. The meeting moves fluidly between moments of standing and sitting, depending upon the activity, as the facilitator knows there’s a correlation between the body and thinking. The facilitator is also careful to frame and reframe the problem in many different ways (and encourages others to do the same), challenging how this problem is viewed. In short, people are actively working and learning together, to make sense of the project ahead (see Figure 2.5).

      There’s a lot to unpack in this second scenario. It illustrates many of the principles that run throughout our work, principles

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