143: The Extended Mind with Annie Murphy Paul

We don’t just think with our brains.   What?!   How can that possibly be true?   I struggled to understand it if myself for quite a while, until I read the fabulous English philosopher Andy Clark’s description of what happens when someone writes, which essentially involves ideas flowing down the arm and hand, through the pen and ink, across the paper, up to your eyes, and back to your brain.   The ideas don’t literally flow, of course, but the process of writing alters the process of thinking - which is why research has shown that processing traumatic memories through journaling about them is more useful just thinking about them - the act of writing about them changes our interpretation of them in a way that just thinking about them doesn’t.   The challenge with school-based learning, of course, is that it’s primarily concerned with the brain.  Our task is to remember facts and ideas so we can recount them when asked about them at a later time.  Children who fidget are told to sit still, when the research that Annie Murphy Paul cites in her new book The Extended Mind indicates that this instruction is entirely misplaced - fidgeting can be a way of managing excess energy, and movement can actually help us to remember things more effectively than we otherwise would.   In this episode we learn many of the different ways that we our brains interact with the outside world to learn in ways that we might never have considered up to now.   I think of this kind of learning as Full-Bodied Learning, and long before I’d read Annie’s book I had actually developed an entire module of content for the Learning Membership on exactly this topic.  In the module we extend the ideas in today’s episode to support our children in using their full bodies to learn both in school and outside of school as well. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!     Annie Murphy Paul's Book: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (Affiliate link).   Jump to highlights 01:00 Looking at the idea that our mind isn't actually only located inside of our brains 01:46 An open invitation to join the free You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher Workshop 05:30 Learning does not just happen within the brain, but with things and people that are outside of it 06:44 The metaphor of how our brains are like magpies nest: we draw raw material available to us as resources for our thinking process just like how magpies incorporate materials available in their environment when building their nests 09:22 The movements and gestures of our bodies, the internal sensations of our bodies are part of the thinking process 10:34 Interoceptive sensitivity 13:07 The gut feeling is your body tugging at your sleeve saying that you’ve encountered this situation before and this is how you should respond 14:53 Moving the body is a way to stimulate mental processes in specific ways and you can use different kinds of movements to produce different kinds of thoughts 16:53 Recess -  the great invention that allows students to move and break the monotony of sitting down all day in school 17:49 Fidgeting is  a very subtle way to calibrate our arousal level so that we're in this optimal state of...