The Science Of Getting Out Of Your Head | Annie Murphy Paul

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Science Of Getting Out Of Your Head

Podcast: 10% Happier with Dan Harris
Guest: Annie Murphy Paul
Release Date: October 20, 2025
Episode Theme: Exploring the science and practical strategies of “the extended mind”—thinking that goes beyond the brain, engaging the body, surroundings, and relationships to improve cognition.

---

Main Theme & Purpose

Dan Harris interviews science writer and TED speaker Annie Murphy Paul about her book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Together, they explore the transformative idea that intelligence is not confined to our brains; our best thinking draws upon our bodies, environments, and interactions with other people. The episode is a rich mix of cutting-edge cognitive science, practical tips, and tools for getting “out of your head.”

---

Detailed Breakdown

1. What Is the “Extended Mind”?

[03:47]

• Thesis: “If you want to upgrade your mind, you need to use more than just your head.” (Dan Harris)
• Origins: Annie describes being “very much in my head” as a writer, but discovering the concept of the extended mind while seeking a truly transformative idea in the science of learning.
• Key Source: The 1998 philosophy article by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” asks: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”
• Quote [07:41]:

  “The mind does not stop at the standard demarcations of skin and skull, they argued. Rather, it is more accurately viewed as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources.” – (Dan reads from Annie’s book, quoting Clark & Chalmers)

Parallel with Buddhism
[09:27]

• Dan observes the overlap with Buddhist concepts of the self as non-solid and non-separate, an idea Annie says “rhymes” with the extended mind thesis.

“It’s not just an idea about how to think better. It’s about how to live better or how to live in accord with who we really are.” – Annie Murphy Paul [09:54]

---

2. Thinking with the Body

[11:12]

• Cultural Split: Our society traditionally separates the “pure, cerebral mind” from the “animal” body.
• Interoception: The capacity to sense internal bodily states (heartbeat, tension, butterflies) carries essential information for decision-making.
• Practical Tool: Regular body scans increase interoceptive awareness, leading to sharper intuition and better choices.

“All the while, there’s this continual stream of information that’s arising inside our bodies... that flow of internal sensations carries a lot of information, a lot of wisdom that we don’t have access to when we don’t pay attention to it.” – Annie Murphy Paul [12:59]

• Intuition & Bias:

  • Gut feelings and intuition can be powerful—but both intellect and body are subject to bias.
  • Keeping an "interoceptive journal" to track bodily cues against outcomes can help calibrate your intuition.
  • Quote [16:15]:

    “Just as we shouldn’t give undue preference to our thinking mind, we should also not give undue preference and credulity to the signals our body might be sending to us. Because both...can be biased and wrong.” – Dan Harris

• Movement & Cognition:

  • Movement breaks, walking, dancing and even fidgeting improve cognitive function, creativity, and problem-solving.
  • Our ancestors evolved to think and move.
  • Language reflects this connection (“I’m stuck,” “Ideas are flowing,” etc.).
  • Quotes:
    • “The more we can make our thinking work resemble those activities that the brain really evolved for...the better we’ll be able to think.” – Annie Murphy Paul [36:21]
    • “I am very fidgety...when I’m writing...I am at a standing desk, I have a tennis ball or a stress ball on my desk...I feel in my body that I need to move in order to address these seemingly insoluble problems...” – Dan Harris [20:42]

• Fidgeting:

  • Fidgeting and “micro-movements” help regulate arousal and focus, especially valuable to adults and children with attention challenges.
  • Schools and meetings should consider “activity-permissive” environments, allowing standing desks, wiggle stools, etc.

“Fidgeting is actually a way to very finely regulate and modulate our level of arousal and alertness...” – Annie Murphy Paul [22:26]

• Gestures:
  • Gesturing aids in both personal thinking and clearer communication; audiences remember gestured points better.
  • “Gesture is our first language and it never goes away...it’s also an extension of our own thinking process.” [25:44]
  • “Let your hands share the burden.” – Dan Harris [28:21]

---

3. Thinking with Surroundings

[31:12]

• Brains are Context-Sensitive: Unlike computers, our mental functioning changes with our environment.
• Nature’s Power: Time outside calms, replenishes mental resources, and supports better thinking.
  • “One of the quickest and easiest ways of replenishing [attention] is simply to spend time outside in that diffuse attentional mode.” – Annie Murphy Paul [33:40]
• Design & Identity:
  • Surround yourself with “evocative objects” — reminders of identity and belonging — to boost focus and purpose.
• Spatializing Ideas:
  • Use whiteboards, post-its, and physical space to organize thoughts. Getting ideas “onto space” takes advantage of the strengths our brains evolved for (navigating 3D space, manipulating objects).
  • Artists and teachers “instinctively get” these strategies, using hands-on, spatial methods for creativity and learning.

---

4. Thinking with Relationships

[42:23]

“Our particular kind of human intelligence benefits by making as many loops as possible” – Annie Murphy Paul [48:26]

• Cultural Critique: Western culture’s individualism overlooks how the mind is fundamentally collaborative.
• From Novices to Experts:
  • Experts must unpack their “automatic” knowledge to help novices learn—“cognitive apprenticeship.”
• Thinking with Peers:
  • Harness debate, argument, storytelling, and teaching peers to activate social learning and cognition.

“There are times when I need to run something by somebody, and I’ve sometimes said that I don’t know what I think until I’ve talked about it with my wife.” – Dan Harris [48:10]

• Group Intelligence:
  • Group work (despite its pitfalls, e.g. “groupthink”) is essential to solving modern problems.
  • Foster “groupiness” via synchrony (walking together, shared rituals), open communication, and explicit modeling of thought processes (“leaving traces”).
  • Transactive memory systems: Know who in your group has what expertise, turning the team into a cognitive “superorganism.”

---

5. The Challenge of “Extension Inequality”

[54:45]

• Access to the resources that extend the mind—freedom to move, green spaces, mentoring, collaboration—is unequally distributed.
• “If we are going to take seriously this idea...then we need to pay more attention to the fact that not everyone has equal access to those raw materials.” – Annie Murphy Paul [54:47]
• Calls for rethinking how we measure intelligence (test scores, etc.) and better supporting equitable access to these cognitive resources.

---

6. Returning to Childlike Learning

[57:04]

• Young children naturally engage their whole bodies, environments, and relationships in learning. Adults are encouraged to reclaim this approach for richer, more effective thinking.

“We need to return to that spirit of including our whole selves in how we think and how we learn, that we think is natural for young kids, but actually would benefit all of us.” – Annie Murphy Paul [57:57]

---

Notable Quotes & Insights

• “We are creatures with bodies and relationships, and we’re embedded in physical surroundings, and yet the life that so many of us live...I’m literally like a head in a box.” – Annie Murphy Paul [09:54]
• “The best thing to do is to collect evidence and then try as best we can as biased creatures, to evaluate the evidence of what those two modes are bringing us.” – Annie Murphy Paul [17:28]
• “Fidgeting can be a way to very finely modulate not just our alertness and our arousal, but also our mental state.” – Annie Murphy Paul [22:26]
• “It actually takes a fair amount of mental bandwidth to keep ourselves from doing [micro-movements].” – Annie Murphy Paul [23:14]
• “You want to be encouraging ourselves and others to gesture as much as possible.” – Annie Murphy Paul [26:42]
• “There’s a lot of hurdles for a novice to learn from an expert...involves...making the expert’s knowledge more accessible.” – Annie Murphy Paul [43:56]

---

Key Timestamps

• [03:47] — Annie introduces the extended mind concept and origins
• [11:12] — Practical strategies for thinking with the body: interoception, intuition, and movement
• [21:52] — Fidgeting and micro-movements as cognitive aids
• [25:44] — The power of gesture in thinking and communicating
• [31:12] — How surroundings influence thinking: being outdoors, design, spatial tools
• [36:21] — Getting ideas out of your head and onto space
• [42:23] — Thinking with relationships: learning from experts, peers, and groups
• [50:29] — “Groupiness,” synchronized movement, and building group intelligence
• [54:45] — Extension inequality and unequal access to extended mind resources
• [57:04] — The value of returning to childlike, embodied, social learning

---

Takeaways & Practical Tips

• Pay attention to bodily sensations (interoception); try a body scan.
• Incorporate movement and fidgeting into work or study routines.
• Use gestures and body language—don’t suppress them, even on Zoom.
• Step outside or bring nature cues into your workspace.
• Externalize ideas with whiteboards, post-its, or physical models.
• Collaborate often: Run ideas by others, seek mentoring or teach peers.
• Foster groupiness through shared rituals, movement, and explicit sharing of mental models.
• Be mindful of access—support environments that enable bodily, spatial, and relational thinking for all.

---

Book reminder: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul
[58:10]

---

This episode is an invitation to see thinking—and intelligence itself—as a distributed, dynamic process. Annie and Dan offer a wealth of science-backed tools and real talk about getting out of our own heads and using our full human toolkit to solve problems, connect, and live more fully.

Transcript

[Dan Harris]

Foreign this is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How we doing?

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

When you think about thinking, I think most of us think of it as a supremely solo pursuit. You're in your head, concentrating and cogitating all by yourself. But the science shows that if you want to improve your thinking, you need to get out of your head. Today we're going to talk about a concept called the extended mind. Your mind is not just confined to your skull. It's in your body. It's in the people around you. It's in your surroundings. The best thinking requires that you break out of what the writer David Foster Wallace once called the skull sized kingdom. This may sound abstract or hard to grasp, but my guest today is going to make this all very practical. And I have to say I've been using many of her techniques myself. Annie Murphy Paul is a science writer and TED speaker. Her latest book is called the Extended the Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Just to say before we dive in, we originally ran this episode May of 2024 and we thought it was so good we wanted to bring it back. In this conversation we talk about why upgrading your thinking involves using more than just your head. How our bodies, our surroundings and our relationships all have the power to enhance our thinking. Practical strategies for thinking with your body, including interoception, the role of intuition, movement breaks and even fidgeting the importance of gesture and movement why sitting still can actually make thinking harder for many of us. Tips for thinking with your surroundings from stepping outside to using evocative objects and whiteboards to organize your ideas. The social side of thinking how to learn from experts how to think with peers and harness the intelligence of groups. The challenge and potential of group collaboration Avoiding the pitfalls of group think and fostering what psychologists call groupiness. The concept of extension inequality why access to the resources that enhance thinking is not distributed equally, and why that matters. And finally, why returning to the way kids learn using your hands, your body and connection might actually be good for everybody. If you want to learn more about how to upgrade your thinking, this episode comes with a custom guided meditation from our teacher of the month, Seben A. Selassie. It's called Alternatives to Overthinking. In it, SEB teaches you how to expand your definition of thinking and problem solving. This is deeply counterintuitive but instantly practical stuff. Check out that guided meditation. You can get it if you [e-mail] Paying subscribers also get access to our weekly meditation and Q and A sessions. We do These live on video every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. The next one is October 21st. It will be me solo, although sometimes our teacher of the month joins. And if you want to meditate with me in person, I am co leading a weekend retreat very soon, October 24th through 26th at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's going to be me, Sabene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and Afosu Jones Corte. It'll be super fun. We do a session Friday night, two sessions on Saturday, and then a final.

[Dan Harris]

One on Sunday morning.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

In between, lots of free time to hike, play tennis, get a massage, do yoga, whatever. The sessions mix meditation, discussion among the teachers, discussion among the audience members. The idea is really to mix serious meditation practice with socializing.

[Dan Harris]

And that's why we call it Meditation Party. I'll put a link in the show.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

Notes if you want to sign up.

[Dan Harris]

Okay.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

We'll get started with Annie Murphy Paul after a quick break.

[Dan Harris]

Annie Murphy Paul, welcome to the show.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Thanks for having me.

[Dan Harris]

As I understand it, and maybe this is just my language in my notes here, but the basic thesis of your book is that if you want to upgrade your mind, you need to use more than just your head. Is that reasonably accurate summation?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, that pretty much boils it down in a way that I found very difficult to do when I was having to give an elevator pitch for my book. But, yeah, that says it. And I. I should say that I'm someone who is very much in my head. You know, I'm a writer and a reader, and I live in my head. And so this book was actually, for me, a way to explore the fact that we have bodies that were embedded in physical surroundings, that we are related to other people in deep ways, and that all of those things can enhance our thinking, not just a lump of tissue inside our skulls.

[Dan Harris]

So this is like the science of getting out of your head by somebody who's in their own head.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, I think it was a learning process for me, and hopefully I was able to share the fruits of that with the reader.

[Dan Harris]

How did you get turned on to this idea?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

So I actually had been reporting and writing for a number of years about the science of learning. I had two little kids who had just started school at that point, and I was really interested in how they were learning, how their teachers were teaching them. And I thought I was gonna write a book about the science of learning, like, here's how we learn. But there wasn't a big idea in the science of learning, at least not one that I could Find that had that sort of transformative power, like that kind of, oh, wow. This idea makes the whole world look different. And that's always what I'm looking for as a writer and as a reader. And so I don't know if you've had this experience with writing books, Dan, but my experience is that in the middle of every book that I've written, there's a moment when I just think I'm. I can't do this. Or maybe multiple moments.

[Dan Harris]

I was just gonna say, only one. Only one. That sounds like you're doing it wrong.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

And I reached that moment with the Science of Learning book that I was just like, I don't wanna write a manual for parents and teachers and students. I want to understand in some transformative and radical kind of way what it really means to live in the world, to learn, to understand. And so what I did at that moment when I didn't think I could go forward or didn't see a way forward, is I started reading Philosop. And it was in a philosophy journal that I discovered an article written or published, rather, in 1998, called the Extended Mind by these two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. And a lot of philosophy goes right over my head. But this article grabbed me from the very start. The first line of it was, where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? And I was like, oh, that's an interesting question. I think I know the answer. I mean, the mind stops at the skull, right? I mean, like, the mind is pretty much the same as the brain, right? So that question intrigued me because I thought it had a pretty obvious, or at least conventional answer that the mind stops at the skull. That the mind and the brain are kind of the same thing. Right. Like, that would have been my answer at that point. But Clark and Chalmers were arguing that, no, actually the mind extends but beyond the skull, into the movements and sensations of our bodies, into our physical surroundings where we think and learn and work, into our relationships with other people and into our tools and devices. And that just seemed like such a deeply interesting, provocative, generative idea to me. So then I kind of dug in, and years later, my book came out.

[Dan Harris]

Just to say it can sound like an academic or abstruse, if I'm using that word correctly, idea. But you make it very practical. And we'll get to the practical aspects coming up. But back to this article. There are a few passages from your book where you, I believe, are quoting Chalmers and. What's the other guy's name?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Clark.

[Dan Harris]

Clark. The Mind does not stop at the standard demarcations of skin and skull, they argued. Rather, it is more accurately viewed as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources. Once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, they concluded, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world. It's fascinating.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, yeah. Pretty deep stuff, I'm thinking, as I hear you read that. I don't know if you have this experience when you go back and read your own book, you're like, who wrote that?

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, yeah, that guy's a genius.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Hopefully you think that. I've always been someone who lives very much in my own head. And so the idea that thinking is a process that we sort of assemble from the raw materials in our environment, that we're actually thinking with our bodies, our spaces, other people. That, to me, was a really exciting idea and something I wanted to explore.

[Dan Harris]

I mean, you said earlier you're always looking for ideas that make the whole world look different, and this seems to fit the bill.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Absolutely, yeah. So as someone who writes about academic research for a living, and I live in a college town and I live this life of the mind, this idea that actually the mind is not inside the skull, but out here in the world. That, to me, was really intriguing. I wanted to. To make it practical, as you say. Like, it seemed like too good of an idea to leave to the philosophers. Like, I wanted to operationalize it and say, okay, if we think with something more than our brains, how can we use that fact to think better? You know, how can we think better with our bodies, with our spaces, with our relationships? And I ended up writing a manual of sorts in the end, for how to think with your extended mind.

[Dan Harris]

We'll go into the various aspects of it because I found it really interesting and useful, but just on a higher level here. This idea sounds like it rhymes with Buddhism in some ways. That Buddhism talks about the fact that the self, the mind, isn't ours in a conventional sense. It doesn't have some solid core, graspable, essential nugget. And this seems to be at least parallel, if not the exact same thing in different words.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Totally, yes. And even that insisting upon a graspable, essential self is the root of suffering. Right. So if we can give up that idea and explore the alternatives, it's not just an idea about how to think better. It's about how to live better or how to live in accord with who we really are. Because we are creatures with bodies and relationships, and we're embedded in physical Surroundings, and yet the life that so many of us live. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm on zoom a lot. I'm literally like a head in a box, you know? And I've always valued my ability to read and think and write. So the idea that there's a world beyond that definitely appealed to me. And I. I am very interested in Buddhism. I didn't see at first the connection between the extended mind and Buddhism, but it became more and more clear to me as I wrote the book. And although I didn't reference Buddhism at all in the book, people have said to me after the book came out, you know, after having read it, that they felt that the book had a Buddhist flavor, which really pleased me, because Buddhism is nowhere mentioned. But I do think there's a lot of commonalities between the two thought systems.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, let's get practical now. So one of the first sections of the first section of the book, after you establish the idea, is about thinking with the body.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

What does that mean?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. So, you know, in our culture, we so often separate mind and body, and we kind of imagine that mind is up here. Those of you who are listening, I'm sort of raising my arm to suggest that the mind is elevated above the body. You know, the mind is this cerebral kind of pure sphere all the way up in the air, and then the body is this sort of grubby animal thing down here, you know, And I think that shows up in the way that we approach thinking and learning. We imagine that the body has nothing to contribute to intelligent thought. And what I learned in the course of researching this book is that that's really not the case. That, for example, we all have this faculty called interoception, which is basically our ability to tune into the flow of sensations and signals that are arising in our bodies at all times. So we are so focused in our culture, in our world, on all the stimuli that are coming at us in the outside world, and we get very caught up in that. But all the while, there's this continual stream of information that's arising inside our bodies. And again, to return to Buddhism, a lot of what meditation is about is paying attention to those quieter internal signals, learning to tune into that. And it turns out this is back to the extended mind. It turns out that flow of internal sensations carries a lot of information, a lot of wisdom that we don't have access to when we don't pay attention to it. And it turns out in the research that I report on in the book, that One of the best ways to become more interoceptively attuned, more attuned to our bodies, is through a body scan practice wherein we pay open minded, nonjudgmental, curious attention to whatever is arising in our bodies at that moment. And research has found that when we do that for at least a few weeks, we end up becoming more interoceptively attuned. We are more aware of, say, when our heart is beating, which is one common way of measuring how interoceptively attuned a person is.

[Dan Harris]

And again, the benefit is that if you have more awareness of the sensations and processes of your body, you can make better decisions. Because the body is sending you information.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Exactly. Because although we focus so much on our conscious minds, that's only a very tiny amount of what's going on in our minds at any given time. As we go through our days, we're bombarded with so much information. We couldn't possibly process all that on a conscious level, but we are taking it in on a non conscious level and storing those patterns and those experiences. And then the question is, well, how do we have access to all that experience and knowledge if it's non conscious? The answer is that the body lets us know it's interoceptive signals, whether it's, you know, we feel a little nervous or we feel a little excited. Those sort of very subtle shifts within us, that's the body sort of tapping us on the shoulder or tugging us on the sleeve to say, pay attention, there's something here that you've encountered before or that is a danger to you or an opportunity to you. And if we're not in touch with our bodies, then we don't have the same access to that depth of experience.

[Dan Harris]

One of the people I work with, she often talks about the notion of a full body. Yes. You know that expression?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

No, I don't. I like it.

[Dan Harris]

The idea is that she's able to tell whether this is something she wants to do, if it feels good holistically throughout her person.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Like her whole body is nodding and saying, yes, yes, yes, I like that. Well, and then there's the full body. No. Right. Which we should also pay attention to, of course. Yeah.

[Dan Harris]

What is the overlap between this thinking with the body and the subject of intuition?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. You know, this term interoception is a wonky kind of technical term and not one that I was familiar with before I started researching this book. But I think terms like intuition and gut feeling, those capture that same phenomenon. They have a little bit of a woo, woo. Kind of, you know, like if you hear that someone's relying on their gut intuition, you might think, you know, better, think that through instead. But what the research is showing and what I find so fascinating is that there are times, and this has been scientific, scientifically demonstrated, that our gut feelings, our interoceptive signals, are quite a bit more informed and more adaptive than our conscious thought processes.

[Dan Harris]

This strikes me as tricky because I. I believe the research here and that intuition has been kind of demonized in a. Probably a pretty sexist way. And we should think about listening to our hearts, listening to our gut feeling, something in our bones, full body. Yes. There's a reason why we have all of these idioms, because it is speaking to something fundament. And we are also biased creatures. And we have all sorts of stereotypes and mental shortcuts that we've arrived at either through our family life or through the culture or whatever. And if we are listening to that, we can make very dumb and unfair decisions. So I don't know how to walk the line there.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yes. Yeah, I share that concern of yours, Dan. And so I write in the book about the benefits of keeping what's called an interoceptive journal, which is a way of tracking those internal signals and what they're telling you and then comparing them against, you know, the outcome of the thing that you were contemplating when you were paying attention to your body. And by doing that over time, you can kind of see, yeah, my body is steering me correctly. Say, I have a feeling about this stock that I'm thinking about buying. I can note that down. And then after I've purchased that stock, I can take a look at how it did and compare the feeling that I had about that decision at the time that I made it to the outcome. And see, over time, you know, is this is my body kind of coming through for me in terms of giving me accurate knowledge. Or maybe this is a situation in which I should rely more on my conscious mind.

[Dan Harris]

I like that. Because what you're saying is, just as we shouldn't give undue preference to our thinking mind, we should also not give undue preference and credulity to the signals our body might be sending to us. Because both the thinking mind and the body can be biased and wrong.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Right, Right. And so the best thing to do is to collect evidence and then try as best we can as biased creatures, to evaluate the evidence of what those two modes are bringing us.

[Dan Harris]

Speaking of practicality, you talk about using the body to help us think more clearly. In particular, thinking with movement and there are a bunch of different flavors of this, but just give us a top line understanding of what you mean by thinking with movement.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, so when we think about when we have to do some really hard thinking, you know, some serious mental work, we assume that we have to be still, usually. Right. You know, that we've got to lock ourselves in a room and kind of keep our butts in the chair and like, until the work is done. At least that's always been my assumption. But it turns out that if we look at our evolutionary history as human beings, human beings evolved to think and move at the same time. You know, our own particular kind of human intelligence was forged in activities like foraging and hunting, which are cognitively demanding and also physically demanding. You know, this idea that we separate the two, that we work with our brains during the day and then maybe we go to the gym after work, we segregate those two things is really not so much in line with our nature as embodied creatures. So I write in the book about ways to bring movement into our thinking lives. One might be taking a movement break instead of a coffee break. I actually have taken to turning on music and dancing around in between Zoom meetings, which is actually a pretty great way to, you know, release some energy and get the body moving again. But also, you know, I think a lot of your listeners will have the experience or will identify with the experience of just not being able to solve a problem or get something done as long as they're sitting down. And yet as soon as they go for a walk or do something where they're moving their bodies, the thoughts start flowing. And why is that? It may be that just as our minds tell our bodies to do things, it works in the other direction as well. We can prime our minds to be in a certain state by moving our bodies in a similar way. So you can see this in our language, like when things aren't going well for you, you know, when you're brainstormin, for example, you might say, I'm stuck or I'm in a rut. But when things are going well and you're feeling creative, we say things like, the ideas are flowing or I'm on a roll. And it turns out that we can prime that kind of fluid dynamics mental state by getting our bodies to move in a similar way. Just walking or riding one's bike is a kind of loose metaphor for the kind of fluidity that we're looking for to institute in our mind. So I think that's, that's one reason that kind of enacting like a metaphor with our bodies, the kind of metaphor that we use to understand mental activity, can actually put us in that frame of mind. And that's why we tend to have so much more creative ideas when we're moving than when we're being still.

[Dan Harris]

So if I want ideas to flow, I should go swimming or do something with my body that's in a flowing motion.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

It's worth a try. Yeah. Yes. Actually, there's been research to suggest that people who are induced to move in more fluid ways come up with more and more creative ideas than people who are still or move in more constricted ways.

[Dan Harris]

I find this body of research to be incredibly liberating because I am very fidgety. I hate sitting still. Doing interviews actually can be very hard for me because I get fidgety. I don't want to sit still. And when I'm writing, which is most of my time, I am at a standing desk. I have a tennis ball or a stress ball on my desk. I'm playing catch. If I'm stuck on an idea, there's that word again. I will pace around, I'll go chase a cat, I'll throw the ball against the wall and drive my wife crazy. I feel in my body that I need to move in order to address these seemingly insoluble problems that I'm confronted with all day long.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yes. Yeah. Well, next time your wife gets annoyed, tell her that you're engaging in embodied self regulation, that you're actually regulating your mind through the actions of your body.

[Dan Harris]

I'm imagining the daggers that I will get in that moment. Baby, this is embodied self regulation.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

You can't have any problem with that.

[Dan Harris]

I'll have her call you. On the subject of fidgety people. You talk about engaging in micro movements, playing with fidget objects. Can you give us a sense of things that we would have permission to do if we're trying to think clearly?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned fidgeting because part of what I wanted to do with this book was push back against the sort of pro brain bias that our culture has. Andy Clark, the philosopher that we were mentioning earlier, he likes to say that we're a very brain bound culture, meaning we're really focused on the brain. We kind of fetishize the brain. And we not just push aside or dismiss or ignore the body, we actually kind of denigrate it. And I think you can see that in, for example, I don't know if you've ever been criticized or sort of harassed for the Fact that you fidget.

[Dan Harris]

But school, school is really hard.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

For me, it's right. Fidgeting is seen as at best, you know, something sort of distracting, and at worst, almost like you're shady or like you've got something to hide or, you know. But it turns out that fidgeting is actually a way to very finely regulate and modulate our level of arousal and alertness. And also the kind of micro movements you mentioned that we make when we're at a standing desk, same thing. Those small movements help keep us alert. It actually takes a fair amount of mental bandwidth to keep ourselves from doing that. You know, it uses up some of our mental resources just to stay still, which is a problem for many kids. Like kids who have an ADHD diagnosis. It actually takes a lot of mental power to keep themselves still. And research has suggested that actually for kids with adhd, the more they move, the better they're able to think. And I think that can be true for a lot of us, including adults. But back to fidgeting. Fidgeting can be a way to very finely modulate not just our alertness and our arousal, but also our mental state. So people use fidget objects of various kinds to soothe themselves because they might repetitively make the same movement, or they may take a paperclip and start bending it into different shapes and kind of be very playful and expansive. So I think we need to really broaden our sense of what's acceptable. And remember again, that we have bodies and that our bodies can really contribute to our thinking and our learning and our working. And they don't have to be something that's put aside as a kind of hindrance or inconvenience.

[Dan Harris]

It's interesting to think about what to do about this, because if you're a teacher or conducting a meeting at work, crowd control seems important. And yet there are a non trivial number of people and children and grownups like me do not fit in well in these situations. And I hate being in meetings and I have trouble paying attention in particular, hate zoom meetings because it's even harder for me to pay attention to something that's on a screen. Are there workarounds for this beyond just, you know, giving us permission to do a little bit of fidgeting because the person running the meeting, our boss, might not be giving us that permission.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yes, yes. Well, I think that's been one boon associated with remote work. You know, that people who do need to move when they think and work do that more easily. Now when they work at home, schools are a little More complicated. I have seen in a number of schools, a growing number of classrooms that adopt what is called an activity permissive environment, where students don't just have to sit, you know, in rows, in chairs, at desks. They can sit on a yoga ball, or they can stand at a standing desk, or they can sit on a wiggle stool and move as they're learning. And I think initially I've heard from teachers that they feared that this would be distracting, that this would be chaos. But it's really just a norm that we've gotten used to this idea that students should be sitting still in these rows at desk. And it turned out for most of the teachers that I've talked to that students are more controlled, more calm, more attentive, because they're able to move in ways that are comfortable for them, and it doesn't end up being so distracting to their classmates.

[Dan Harris]

One more question on this thinking with the body section here. You also talk about thinking with gesture. What's that all about?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, so I think if any of us think about gesture, and mostly we don't, we think of it as, like, this sort of clumsy add on to what's really important, which is what we're saying. Right. Our culture really elevates and celebrates verbal expression. But gesture is often a few milliseconds ahead of what we're saying with our words. Our hands actually get there first, which I think is fascinating. Linguists think that before spoken language even came along, we communicated with others with gestures. So gestures actually, in a sense, our first language. And for many babies, you know, it gets recapitulated with every infant who, you know, gestures before they have words. So gesture is really our first language, and it never goes away. We think of gesture as a way that we communicate with other people. And it is, of course, but it's also an extension of our own thinking process. And research has shown that when people are restrained from making gestures, when they have to sit on their hands or their hands are constrained from moving, their thinking is less cogent and their expression is less fluid. So we really actually want to be encouraging ourselves and others to gesture as much as possible. And maybe even in those Zoom meetings, sit a little bit farther away from the camera, ask other people to do the same so that we're not just seeing someone's head in a box, but we're seeing their gestures as well.

[Dan Harris]

You talk about rehearsing your gestures. Like, if I'm gonna say something to somebody, I might wanna think about not only the words, but what I'm going to do with my hand strings.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Exactly. Yeah. Well, I'm sure if you are giving a talk, Dan, you give some thought to what you're going to say, right?

[Dan Harris]

Yes, ideally.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Ideally. But are you thinking about what your hands are going to do in advance?

[Dan Harris]

No.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

No. Yeah. And yet research suggests that the audience is really getting as much from your body language, from the movements of your hands as they are from your words. But this is another way, I think, in which we denigrate the role of the body. We don't give much attention to that. We don't rehearse in advance what our bodies are saying along with what our mouths are saying. There are two things we might keep in mind when we're giving a talk like that. That symbolic gestures are gestures that capture some aspect of the content of what we're saying. Those can be really helpful to our listeners and our viewers in terms of understanding the import of what we're saying. And then there are beat gestures that are more about establishing a cadence and bringing people on to our own sense of excitement and engagement with the topic.

[Dan Harris]

So, like, sometimes pounding the table literally is a move.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

It's a move. It certainly expresses something much more forcefully than words.

[Dan Harris]

Could you say, let your hands share the burden?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yes. Research has found that when we're asked to explain something that we haven't quite understood yet, that we're still sort of getting our arms around, there's an embodied metaphor for you. We gesture more than when we're relaying something that we understand perfectly. And that's because coming up with ideas and thoughts on the fly is really cognitively challenging. And so we tend to offload some of that mental work onto our hands. That's why we end up gesturing more when we're improvising than when we're explaining something that we already know.

[Dan Harris]

I remember wrestling with this a little bit as an anchorman. I mean, Peter Jennings, who many young people don't remember, but was the anchor of World News Tonight on ABC News for many, many years and was a mentor of mine, he had this, like, intricate little ballet within this very confined space of the TV screen. So, I mean, as an anchor, you don't want to be stock still, but you also don't want to be gesturing wildly. And I remember feeling a little constrained and having to think about that a lot. But the whole thing of being on TV is artificial, so it may not be scalable to our normal presentation of ideas interpersonally.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Did you model your own hand movements on Peter Jennings at all?

[Dan Harris]

Yes, I modeled Everything after Peter Jennings for a long time now I'm not on the news anymore, so it doesn't really matter. I used to hold a pen in my hand, and then my wife said I was starting to seem like John McCain, who always had a pen. You know, he was injured as a pow, and so one of his compensation techniques was to hold a pen in his hand. And so I tried to, like, over time, have a limited repertoire of movements on air that I would go to. So sometimes I had a pen in my hand. Sometimes I would just gently have my hands clasped on my desk. Sometimes I would rest my head in my head like it really depended. But I remember thinking a lot about.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

This, maybe overthinking it, because as soon as you become aware of it, it's. It can become a little selfish.

[Dan Harris]

Exactly. I think your point is that we should not overthink it and just do what feels natural and not be putting ourselves in a situation where we're telling ourselves, don't gesture.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. I'm thinking of research that suggests that people who are watching someone talk, they remember and pay attention to the things that are accompanied by gesture, the comments that are accompanied by gesture more than those comments that are not. But it's not only for our listeners that we want to be gesturing. It's really for ourselves for making our own thought processes less effortful and more fluid.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

Coming up, Annie Murphy Paul talks about how to use your surroundings to think better. And my favorite of the three areas of her book, thinking with our relationships.

[Dan Harris]

We've talked about thinking with the body. Then there's a whole section around thinking with your surroundings. I suspect that might be a hard idea to grok for people.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

What does that have to do?

[Dan Harris]

I mean, I get that I think with my body, but what do you mean by thinking with your surroundings?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, when I think about thinking with spaces, I tend to think of a metaphor that we often use for the brain, which is the brain as computer. Right. Like, we think of our brains as sort of machines that we put in information. It kind of chugs around, spits out an answer that's like how the brain works. But I think that metaphor is really pretty limited, pretty flawed. And one of the big differences between our organic biological brains and a computer is that a computer works exactly the same no matter where it's located. You know, my laptop, if I use it in my home office, it's gonna operate in exactly the same way as if I took it to a park and was working outside. But the human brain isn't like that. It's exquisitely sensitive to context, to where it's doing our thinking. We have different kinds of thoughts and we think in a different way depending on where we are. So one of the clearest examples of that is the outdoors that, you know, I'm going to go back to our evolutionary history. We evolved in the outdoors. What that means for us today, where we spend, you know, most of our time inside buildings and cars, is that it's still the case that our brains process most effortlessly and easily the kind of stimuli that we encounter outside. A lot of us have had this experience when we go for a walk outside. It's very mentally calming and pleasing. Right. Like to look at the leaves of a tree or the clouds in the sky or maybe waves on an ocean beach. It doesn't take a lot of mental energy or effort. That's very different from the kind of hard edged, intense kind of concentration that we have to pay when we're at work or when we're at school. And when we're paying that kind of hard edged, intense attention to something, our mental resources get drained really, really quickly and we kind of get burned out. Whereas the kind of attention that we pay when we're outdoors, it's this diffuse, pleasantly diverting attention. And so thinking outside is a very different experience for our brains than thinking inside. And when we do find that our attentional resources are drained, one of the quickest and easiest ways of replenishing them is simply to spend time outside in that diffuse attentional mode.

[Dan Harris]

I've been experimenting with this a lot since my family moved to the suburbs during the pandemic. And I will now take breaks outside even when it's cold, really cold, and sometimes even maybe bring my work outside even when it's cold. Just bundle up and if I've got some printed sheets of paper, I'll read them outside. And I do find that has a real effect. I even heard my wife telling somebody recently that she has found my doing that has made me less annoying in various ways.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

How do you think that works for you? What does it do for you to be.

[Dan Harris]

I have no idea. Well, I know I had heard on this show that it was good to get yourself outside early in the day for your circadian rhythm and sleep. And then I had heard in some other episodes that when we're outside, the mind can function in some different and salutary ways. And my fidgetiness and not wanting to be chained to my desk and it's working for you.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

That's good, I think.

[Dan Harris]

I mean, it could be just a story I'm telling myself, but it sounds like there's data to back this up.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, yeah. And here we are sitting next to a fake green wall. There's actually research suggesting that even indoor plants and sort of greenery and bringing a bit of the outdoors inside can be helpful.

[Dan Harris]

What about other aspects of design? How important is that in terms of having our mind function at its best?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. So since we are inside most of the time, as much as we would probably all like to be outdoors more, it's worth giving some thought to what we see around us when we're in our place of work, when we want to be thinking or creating or doing our work really well. And psychologists talk about what they call evoc objects, meaning material objects that kind of evoke a certain feeling or association for us. And these fall into two main categories, cues of identity and cues of belonging. So when you're at your desk, for example, you know, you might want to think about what you see around you. Are there reminders of who you are and who you are specifically in that setting? Of course, you are many things. You're a father, you're a podcast producer, you're a. You're a citizen. But in the place where you do your work, I would imagine you want to be a creator, a thinker, you know, and are there objects, signs, symbols that remind you of that identity there, out of your many identities? And then also are there cues of belonging? Are there mementos of the fact that you belong to valued groups? Because that too can prime a kind of association for us, make us feel more powerful maybe, than we would be on our own, more secure, because it reminds us of those groups to which we belong.

[Dan Harris]

You also talk in this section of the book about thinking with surroundings, about thinking with the space of ideas. That might require a little unpacking.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, yeah. So I mentioned earlier that we live in this sort of brain bound society that really fetishizes the brain. And one of the ways we see that is that we really value doing things in our heads. You know, we admire people who can do complex math problems in their heads or sort of the chess master who can game out multiple rounds of chess in their heads. But it turns out that it's actually more efficient and more effective in most cases to get ideas and information out of our heads and onto physical space. So that could be a big whiteboard, it could be a bunch of post it notes that you can move around. It could be a multi monitor setup on your computer so that you're not just looking at one little screen and having your brain fill in for all the space that you could be spreading out your ideas on. And one way I like to think about this is that again, going back to our evolutionary history as human beings, our brains really evolved to do a certain number of limited things really well, things like navigating through physical space, moving and sensing the body, interacting with small groups of people. The brain didn't really evolve to do what we ask it to do so much these days, which is to wrestle with abstract concepts and symbols. So the more we can make our thinking work resemble those activities that the brain really evolved for, like navigating through three dimensional space or manipulating material objects, the better we'll be able to think. So rather than try to keep everything in your head, if you put that all out on a whiteboard, you can sort of move up and down the whiteboard and zoom in, zoom out. And I don't mean digitally, I mean like physically with your body, or if you are organizing a book chapter, for example, you can have an idea on a bunch of post it notes and then move them around like they are objects. That's taking advantage of these embodied resources that would be dormant and unused if we just tried to do all of that in our heads.

[Dan Harris]

One whole wall of my office is a giant whiteboard, and I would have a bigger one if I had a bigger wall. I have attention challenges and I don't like staring at a computer screen. So stepping away and like ordering ideas on a huge whiteboard and then erasing it and then moving them around, I find that incredibly satisfying. And I suspect a lot of people listening to this are thinking, oh, I'm intuitively doing a lot of the things that you're talking about systematically, yes.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

And some of the most enthusiastic readers of this book turned out to be teachers. And a lot of them said to me that your book is just telling me stuff that I already sort of figured out on the job. But thank you for giving me a framework to think about it in and providing me with some scientific citations that I can say, see, I was always right about this, you know, and the other group that got the book right away was artists, interestingly, because I think artists, you know, of all kinds have always been thinking with their bodies, thinking with spaces, thinking in collaboration with other people. It's only in these like really weird environments, like universities and certain kinds of workplaces where we think the brain alone is enough or is the highest level of achievement, don't you think?

[Dan Harris]

In part that has to do with crowd control. I mean, you can't get a million people into a classroom or a meeting and have them walking around and fidgeting and, you know, playing with objects to express their ideas.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Why not?

[Dan Harris]

I suspect the story that these, I'm presuming mostly men running these institutions told themselves was, we need to get asses into seats, not moving, so I can impart information and they can absorb it.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, well, people talk about this sort of factory model of schooling, of education. And I think that was the notion was just get students into their seats. And a lot of workplaces, of course, were and are still arranged on this kind of model. But I hope that we're at a place where we can be rethinking that model and whether that really works for people. We're rethinking so many things about how work is undertaken these days, I think, and education, I think maybe opening up the door to let in all these other outside the brain resources, this might be the time to do that.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

So if you, Andy Murphy, Paul, were.

[Dan Harris]

Running a meeting with five to 10 people in a room, not on zoom, how would you organize it based on everything you've learned in writing this book?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Well, let's see. I might suggest, if we're in the same place, I would suggest that we all have a walking meeting first.

[Dan Harris]

Kick it off with a walking meeting.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Kick it off with a walking meeting. I'd certainly want to be encouraging people to use their hands. I might say what I say to my kids. I have two teenage kids, and when I feel like they're struggling to grasp something, I'll say, try moving your hands when you say that. And I advise them to look for instructional videos also that show a teacher or an instructor who's moving their hands. I definitely want us to get outside. That's part of, I guess, with the walk, that would be sort of killing two birds with one stone. Maybe I would start off the meeting with a body scan so that we're all attuned to our bodies and feeling what's going on internally. And then, you know, this is getting onto the next part of the book. But I think I would try to create a sense of groupiness, meaning a sense that we're not just a collection of individuals, but actually an entity unto ourselves, a group. By having some synchronized movement, maybe I'd make people dance with me. I'll end with a not so wacky idea that I think it can be very powerful and meaningful for people to share a ritual together, which can be something just like sharing a meal Would.

[Dan Harris]

You give people permission to sit, stand, pace, you know, do whatever they need with their body, or would that get a little too hectic?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

You know, a spirit of experimentation I think is welcome here. So I might give it a try. Allow people to move and gesture as they want and see how that goes. And maybe after a few times of that, I'd have everybody sitting in their seats and being very still.

[Dan Harris]

Got it.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Who knows?

[Dan Harris]

All right, so let's talk about thinking with our relationships. This is perhaps my favorite of the three areas that you explore in the book. Give us the top line description of what you mean by thinking with our relationship.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, so again, this book was really meant to be kind of a critique of our culture. And we are in, of course, a very individualistic culture. One that says that, you know, if you have an idea, that's your idea. If you have an achievement, that's your achievement. Whereas certainly if we were to approach it from the spirit of Buddhism, we would see that everything is a collaborative undertaking. That there's these very rigid divides that we insist on between people are really a delusion, you might say. So what would that mean if we thought about our thinking processes, if we thought about thinking as a truly collaborative enterprise and not something that goes on, you know, sealed inside your own head, that might open up all kinds of possibilities for achieving what you might call a group mind, which I think we need more and more in our incredibly complex world, which, let's face it, is full of some really daunting problems. I don't think that an individual brain is going to solve the problem of climate change, for example, or even the problem of our politics. We actually need to come together and form that group mind in productive ways just to meet the moment that we're in.

[Dan Harris]

So let's get practical here. There are a couple of ways to think with our relationships. One is thinking with experts.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, the model we have for how novices become experts is that they learn from past masters, from experts. But there's a problem with that, which is that by the virtue of being an expert, an expert thinks differently from a novice. You probably experience this with someone who's really good at what they do. They've been doing it for a long time and their minds work differently. A lot of what is very effortful and conscious for a novice has become automatized for someone who's an expert. It's actually almost impossible for them to explain how or why they do what they do to a novice in a way that the novice can learn. You know, it's kind of like following around someone who's in the kitchen, who's a really good cook. And you say, well, how did you know to add the spices then? Or stir it then? And they just say, oh, you know, it just looked like it needed it. There's a lot of hurdles for a novice to learn from an expert. And how we might address that involves, again, getting ideas and information out of our heads where the novice can't really see it, and laying it out for them in ways that make the experts knowledge more accessible.

[Dan Harris]

Got it. So if I wanted to operationalize this in my life, what would be the practical steps?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Well, say you're mentoring somebody on your staff who's a sort of baby journalist who doesn't have your years of experience in reporting and writing the news. You would have to break it down for them. Why exactly it is that you make the choices that you do and you no longer have to think about those choices. Right. It's like second nature for you. When you're interviewing somebody or when you're researching a topic, it's all become automatic for you. You will actually have to slow down, break it down into steps and even micro steps for that novice, for that intern. You might need to exaggerate certain aspects of what you do to make the important stuff leap out. For the novice, it's again, so much second nature for you that you don't even realize it anymore. But the novice is confronted by this welter of information that all seems the same to them. They don't know that they can attend to this, that they should attend to this, but they can ignore that. You know, all of that stuff, you're gonna have to think about a lot more consciously than you have in years if you wanna effectively convey it to a beginner.

[Dan Harris]

Got it. Thinking with peers.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. So just as we. Our culture separates mind and body, like we were talking about earlier, I think we also really separate intellectual life or mental life from social life. We'll work on our own all day and then go to a happy hour at the end of the day. As if social life and interacting with other people is somehow different and separate from our work. And the same with kids that, like, we let them run around at recess and make as much noise as they want, but when they come come into the classroom, they have to sit quietly and don't talk to your neighbor and all of that. But actually, the social brain, we are such fundamentally social creatures, and we're social all the time, not just at happy hour and not just on the playground. What we want to do is to think in terms of harnessing our social natures in the service of thinking and learning. And some of the ways that we can. Can do that are things like generating a debate or an argument or telling stories to others or teaching others, teaching our peers. Because all of those activities, those really deeply social activities, they activate processes in our minds that are going to, again, lay dormant if we just do that work on our own in an unsocial way.

[Dan Harris]

Starting an argument sounds pretty antisocial.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Well, a productive debate can flesh out different positions in a way that is very hard to do when you're just thinking about that idea on your own.

[Dan Harris]

Got it, Got it.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. No physical violence here. Just hearing different perspectives and having them embodied by different people rather than having them be kind of lifeless concepts in your head.

[Dan Harris]

I find that I cannot think clearly on my own. There's a point at which I need to run something by somebody, and I've sometimes said that, like, I don't know what I think until I've talked about it with my wife. Does all this fit within this rubric for you?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah, yeah. In fact, the philosopher Andy Clark, who's. I keep referring to him, he's one of the originators of the idea of the extended mind. He likes to say that human beings are intrinsically loopy creatures, meaning that our particular kind of human intelligence benefits by making as many loops as possible. Andy Clark says that we're intrinsically loopy creatures. And I think what I hear you saying, Dan, is that you need to make a loop with whatever you're thinking about. You need to loop that through somebody else's mind, and it comes back to you enhanced or improved in a way that it wouldn't if it just stayed sort of inert in your own mind.

[Dan Harris]

Yes, yes. This is like a positive version of loopy.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Right? This is a good way to be loopy.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

Coming up, Andy talks about why groupthink is not always a bad thing and what she calls extension inequality.

[Dan Harris]

So the other aspect of thinking with relationships is thinking with groups.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

You know, we've all heard that term group think, which generally we think of as a bad thing, right? That, like, a group can head down the wrong path thinking as an. As an entity. And that can lead to some pretty bad decisions, even catastrophic decisions. It's also the case that lots of people hate working in groups. And yet, as I was saying earlier, so many of the challenges of our world require us to think in groups. So we're gonna have to learn to have a group mind. That is actually more than or better than the sum of the individual intellects in that group. And I think there are ways that we can think effectively as a group while avoiding the pitfalls of conformity and that kind of irritation or unpleasantness of working in a group that so many of us associate with group activ and group projects.

[Dan Harris]

What are the ways?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

So we were talking earlier about how I would lead a meeting. A lot of those suggestions I had were aimed at creating this feeling of groupiness, which is actually a term that psychologists use. And a lot of that is about hacking into a very old, very visceral kind of capacity that humans have for losing themselves in a group, which can be dangerous, can have negative effects, but is also responsible for some of the groups greatest achievements of humankind. So it turns out, for example, that when we move in the same way as other people at the same time in the same place, our brains kind of get the idea that maybe these people are actually extensions of us or maybe we're all one big creature. You know, I'm thinking of raves where people lose themselves in this joint activity. But that happens on a smaller scale. Even when we're taking a walk with someone. It turns out that when we walk alongside someone, we just naturally fall into a synchronized rhythm. And research has found that people who take a walk together, they find it easier to cooperate and to collaborate because they've had this experience of kind of like, oh, that person's body is moving in the same way and at the same time as mine. Maybe we're kind of mentally on the same page as well. It's kind of like that embodied metaphor that we were talking about earlier.

[Dan Harris]

Are there other practices that you recommend for this portion of thinking outside the head in the area of thinking with our relationships? Some of the things I've seen you write about are. I don't know exactly what this refers to, but leaving traces of your thinking is an idea I've heard you talk about generating a sense of shared fate.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yes. Yeah. Well, so much of our work these days happens inside the head. And that can create real problems. As I was saying earlier about in terms of novices learning how to master a skill. You know, in the old days when you had an apprenticeship, the master carpenter or shipbuilder or whatever could physically show the novice what they were doing. The novice could give it a try. The master carpenter could sort of guide him or her in what he was doing. But so much of what we do now is inside our heads. And so there's a really Neat idea coming out of psychology called a cognitive apprenticeship, which would mean modeling for someone else the way that word thinking and making that explicit in just the way that a tailor would say, this is how I cut a bolt of cloth, you know? And one way that we can think with groups, Dan, is known as a transactive memory system. And that refers to the fact that the projects that we deal with today in the modern world are so complicated that no one person can know everything required to make that project a success. And so we can actually sort of exponentially multiply our access to knowledge and to stored information. As long as we know who in our group has the information that we need, we don't hold it in our own heads, but we know who on the team is the expert on that given piece of the project. And then together in a transactive memory system, were actually operating as a kind of superorganism that has this kind of amazing access to knowledge and information far beyond what any individual could have. And research has found, for example, that teams of doctors that have a robust transactive memory system, they know who's the expert on this and who to go to if this happens, their patients actually do better and leave the hospital sooner. So I think we need to think in terms of not just improving our own memory or our own store of information as individuals, but how are those things working together in systems with other people, with other minds?

[Dan Harris]

This has all been really interesting. Just to sum it up. We've talked about three aspects of the extended mind. Thinking with your body, thinking with your surroundings, thinking with nature. One of the things you talk about at the end of the book, though, is that this kind of extended mind is not extended to all people. That there is what you call extension inequality.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yes.

[Dan Harris]

So can you talk about that before I let you go?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. Thank you for asking me about that. Because that became more and more important to me as I was working on the book that I was writing over and over again, how important it is to have the freedom to move one's body, to have access to green spaces, to have people in your life who are very knowledgeable and accomplished. And. And the fact is that there's in no sense an equality of access to those things in our country, in our world. And so if we are going to take seriously this idea that the raw materials we have access to in the world are a really key part of our thinking processes, then we need to pay more attention to the fact that not everyone has equal access to those raw materials. You know, as long as. Because intelligence is basically a lump of stuff that's sealed inside your head. We can act as if that lump of stuff can be weighed and measured with tests and it doesn't matter so much the access to outside the brain resources that people have. But if we're going to take the idea of the extended mind seriously and say no, actually our thinking processes are assembled from these raw materials that we do or don't have access to in the world, then that access really matters. And we need to take that seriously when we're evaluating people and deciding their fates, as we do when we, when we hire people or when we let people into universities.

[Dan Harris]

So when I'm looking at somebody's test score, I might think, oh well, actually there was some extension inequality here that this person didn't get. Access to experts, green space and the freedom to move. And so perhaps there's some untapped potential here that this number I'm staring at does not speak to to Exactly.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Because those methods of evaluation that we've developed over many years and that have become so dominant in our society are really very brain bound measures. And I think we could begin to think about how could we not only measure, but also encourage the development of all of our extended minds. I think we're going to need every bit of intelligence that we can muster to tackle the problems of this world. And so I think the extended mind is going to be ever more necessary.

[Dan Harris]

Before I let you go, is there something you were hoping to talk about.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

That we didn't get to yet?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

You know, you had asked early on, Dan, where my interest in this topic came from. And I said that I had these two little kids who are now strapping teenagers and much taller than me. I was interested in how they were learning. And what I noticed as they've grown up is that when kids are little, we're okay with them thinking outside the brain. We're okay with them using manipulatives, you know, using their hands, getting their hands dirty. We're okay with them moving their bodies, spending time outside, learning from their peers in play. And then we're all supposed to put that aside increasingly as our kids get older and then as we live our adult lives. And I kind of think we need to return to that spirit of including our whole selves in how we think and how we learn. That we think is natural for young kids, but actually would benefit all of us.

[Dan Harris]

I'm glad you said that. That's a nice place to end. It's rousing and I'm not being sarcastic. The real final question, though, is can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and any other things you've put out into the world, books, websites, whatever that you want to let people know about?

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Yeah. So the title of the book is the Extended Mind, the Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. That's it. I just would love to share that book with anybody who's interested.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

Awesome.

[Dan Harris]

Thank you.

[Annie Murphy Paul]

Thank you.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

Thanks again to Annie Murphy.

[Dan Harris]

Paul.

[Podcast Narrator/Host]

Don't forget, if you want a guided meditation that will help you turn down the volume on overthinking and think in a more elevated, expansive way, check out danharris.com where we've got a guided meditation for from 7A Selassie, a bespoke one customized for people who've just listened to this episode. Also, and I never tire of mentioning this, paying subscribers also get access to our weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions. The next one's coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, October 21st. And this weekend we've got the Meditation Party retreat with me and Seb and Jeff Warren and Ofasu Jones Corte. There's a link in the show notes. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

[Dan Harris]

Sam.