Focused - 146: The Extended Mind, with Annie Murphy Paul

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Author Annie Murphy Paul joins us to talk about playing with ideas, working in groups, and other ways to extend the mind.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? I am doing excellent, and I am so excited to have our guest here today. Welcome to the show, Annie Murphy-Paul. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. I told you before, Annie, the book you wrote last year called The Extended Mind, I felt like was one of the best books I read in 2021. I just feel like it just really resonated with me. And I was so happy when you agreed to come on the show today.

I'm so glad. I'm so glad it spoke to you. Yeah. So we've talked about it on the show a few times over the last year, gang, as I got into it. But Annie wrote this excellent book called The Extended Mind. And I guess, why don't you just kind of give us a little summary of what the book's about? And we can kind of start from there. Sure.

So I'm a science writer, and I mostly write about psychology and cognitive science. But I do read pretty widely in search of, you know, good ideas, big ideas. And I found this one, The Extended Mind, in a philosophy journal. There's an article published in 1998 by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers that was titled The Extended Mind. That was their first introduction of the idea. And, you know, I really, the idea grabbed me from the very first sentence of that article, which said,

where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? So that question, I found very provocative in part because, you know, you'd think it would have a kind of obvious answer that the mind, well, the mind stops at the skull. The mind is the brain, right? I mean, that's kind of the conventional understanding or the way of thinking about it. But Clark and Chalmers argued that no, actually the mind extends beyond the head and into the rest of the body, into our physical surroundings, into our relationships with other people, and into our devices and tools and technologies that we use. And this to me was such an interesting challenge to our very individualistic society, our individualistic society or individualistic culture to our culture's conventional kind of separation of mind and body to the idea that the brain is a computer that can kind of work anywhere

at any time. This was looking at the human brain and the human mind in a new way, and that was really exciting to me. Yeah. I mean, something that really stood out for me in the book was kind of the dichotomy of this, because at a certain level, the book is saying, well, hey, you know, the mind isn't just the space between your ears. It's the database on your computer or, you know, it goes beyond. Right. But at the same time, you're also saying the brain isn't everything, you know, like the argument that, you know, the brain is not a computer. I remember when I was young reading an Alan Watts lecture where he talked about the brain being the rebellious organ. And I've mentioned that on the show before because that really stuck with me. And I realized that a lot of times I get hung up on what my brain is thinking, and I don't think about what

my body is feeling. And I think this is something you covered in the book. And I feel like at one level, you're making the argument that the brain extends, but also that the brain isn't the whole game either. And that's the reason I like the book. I felt like it really kind of straddled that line. Am I on left field? No, no, I'm really interested in what you said about Alan Watson, the rebellious brain. I have read some of him because I'm very interested in Buddhist thinking. And I see a lot of parallels between Buddhist thinking and the extended mind. And I'm not sure what he meant by the rebellious brain. Maybe you can fill me in. But what it makes me think of is the fact that we do imagine the brain as this kind of all-purpose, all-powerful thinking machine.

And then we're constantly disappointed with it or we feel that it lets us down when really, you know, if we had a more realistic idea of the brain, that might not be the case. If we saw the brain as this limited, quirky, idiosyncratic, biological organ that evolved to do a bunch of things that are different from what we ask of it these days in our modern world, I think we would, first of all, understand why the brain so often lets us down. And maybe that's kind of what Alan Watts meant by it rebelling. But we would also understand that we need to augment and extend the brain's biological capacities with these outside the brain resources.

Yeah. And I think you could argue he was making both arguments. I mean, I think the fact is that it lies to us often, and we give it a lot more power than it should have you know i mean you covered this in the book about you know there's a and just we're not going to go over the whole book outline here i just everybody listen just go get it's a great book and i as i told you past read but annie breaks it down and and you know thinking with your body thinking with your in thinking with your body, thinking with your surroundings, thinking with your relationships. But one of it is thinking with your body and the interplay between your organs and your brain. I mean, if you've got a pain in your body, does the pain start in your brain or does it start in your body?

And have you actually thought about that before? that before. Yeah. And I mean, it's amazing to think about just how deep this cultural division goes, whereby we imagine the brain or the mind and the body to be separate and maybe even opposed, you know, like the mind is over here and the body's over here when really the two are so intricately intertwined. And I think the research is showing sort of the fallacy of separating mind and body. And that is a piece of wisdom that other traditions have known for a long time, but we're kind of discovering. Many of us in the West are discovering for the first time. Yeah, I've got had a significant meditation training and so much of it is just about not turning off the brain or, or,

or putting it in its place, I guess I would say, but then learning to pay attention to your body. But I don't know. I just really felt like this book did a good job. And it's accessible to anybody. I mean, I had my wife read it right after I finished it, because I feel like you're addressing something that I think a lot of people have been ignoring. Yeah, and I think that's especially true when it comes to doing mental work, intellectual work. We think that to do serious, real thinking, what that

requires is to sit still and to work your brain until the task is done, you know, keep your butt in the chair, you know. And that is just cutting ourselves off from this wellspring of human intelligence, which is our body. So I see that that kind of dichotomy showing up, especially in the way we think about doing intellectual work. We think that we have to sort of power through, get it done, and actually quash or suppress the signals and the cues of the body, and also restrict the body from moving when both of those things are really misguided. Yeah. And you talk about that kind of at length in your book, kind of explain how we got in the spot where everybody thinks we all have to sit at a desk for eight hours a day to do our best work. Yeah, you know, I think one place to look for why it is

that we've developed these ideas is in the metaphors that we use to think about the brain. And one of the most common is the brain as computer, which is a metaphor that took root in the middle of the last century during the cognitive revolution. And this idea that the brain is like a computer has led to a very fruitful research program and a lot of interesting theories. But in terms of how we think about the brain day to day, it's really unhelpful. It's really problematic because, as I say, many of the brains, the wellsprings of human intelligence are actually things that computers have no access to. I mean, the human body, the fact that we are so sensitive to context, to the setting in which we're doing

our thinking, to the richness of our social relationships, these are really where human intelligence springs from. And so if we're thinking of ourselves, our brains as computers, then we're going to find that our brains operate like second-rate computers, like defective computers. But that's because we're overlooking the real source of human intelligence instead of trying to cultivate and nourish that. Yeah, I think it's kind of interesting to me because, you know, when they first started developing computers, they wanted it to think like a human, you know, if you go back to like the World War II code breakers. But at some point, we turned it on its head, and now we're trying to model our brains after computers. I mean, how did that happen?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the mind is a hard thing to conceptualize, you know, and that's actually one of the characteristics of the human brain is that in order to understand something abstract, like the mind, we look for concrete analogs, you know, that we can really grasp, you know, you even hear me in my language using all these words that actually represent bodily motions. But another metaphor that we often gravitate towards when we want to understand the brain is that the brain is like a muscle, which can be, again, can be a helpful kind of way of thinking about the brain. It's hopeful, it's optimistic. Many of your listeners may be familiar with the growth mindset, which is a notion introduced by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, this idea that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with exercise and with practice. The problem with that metaphor, as I understand it, is that it's still very brain-centric, neuro-centric. It's still saying the brain can do it all. And sometimes just working the brain

more and more to the point of exhaustion is not productive and can be very frustrating. And what I love about the theory of the extended mind is that it opens up literally the whole world to be brought into the thinking process and to help the thinking process along. I love that the extended mind perspective that you just described as it differs from the growth mindset perspective that Carol Dweck talks about is kind of the fact that you don't have everything that you need in order to think about things the right way. One of the big aha moments for me going through this book was this cognitive repraisal idea that you introduced in chapter one. And I thought this was brilliant because I've studied emotional intelligence, always been fascinated with that topic and emotional hijacking by the amygdala. And you talk about how actions are the traditional thinking anyways, is that actions are interpreted by the brain and then the brain chooses the appropriate emotion and directs the body to act accordingly. But the reality is that something happens, we act,

and then the brain puts the pieces together. So we can actually give new meanings to actions like excitement instead of nervousness. And I was wondering if you wouldn't mind unpacking that a little bit, maybe sharing some examples for people. Sure. Yeah. I find this fascinating too. I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, we do tend to think from our neurocentric, brain-centric perspective that as you say, something happens, the brain decides what's going on, and then tells the body what to do. You know, you see a bear in the woods, and you feel fear, and the brain identifies it as fear, and the brain tells the body to start running.

When really, the direction of the causal arrow is kind of reversed in the sense that of the causal arrow is kind of reversed in the sense that our really visceral emotions and feelings like fear travel on pathways that are much faster than conscious thought. And I don't want to suggest that the brain isn't involved here. It is. But the fact is that we start running and our hearts start beating faster and our palms start sweating in a dangerous situation like that first. And then the brain, which when you think about it, is locked inside this dark room of the skull. It's making sense. It's piecing together what's going on in the outside world just from the inputs from the body. So the body is responding. It's running, the heart is beating, the palms are sweaty, and the brain puts those basic bodily reactions together and says, okay, I'm feeling fear. But that's a process of construction.

You know, we're constructing that emotion rather than, you know, feeling it instantly and whole from the beginning. you know, feeling it instantly and whole from the beginning. So what cognitive reappraisal does is say that, well, since the brain is constructing an emotion from these base, the sort of basic building blocks of bodily reactions, we can we can participate in the construction of the emotion, we can take those bodily reactions, say that it's not so much seeing a bear in the woods, but you're about to give a speech and you're feeling those same symptoms, the butterflies in the stomach, the beating heart, the sweaty palms. Well, those bodily reactions could be built or constructed into an emotion called fear, but they also are the very same bodily reactions that you'd have if you were really excited, if you were waiting in line to get on a really exciting looking

roller coaster. So once you know that emotions are constructed out of the basic units of bodily responses, then you can tell yourself, and I know this sounds a little bit silly, but I've done this and it works. You can tell yourself in advance of that speech, not I'm so nervous, I'm so nervous, but I'm excited. I'm really excited. I'm really psyched. These feelings I'm having are my body preparing myself for this exciting challenge, you know, and that really can turn things around in terms of how it feels to you. The one thing you don't want to do is tell yourself, calm down, calm down, you know, which a lot of us do, because that's not congruent with those bodily reactions that are already underway. And your

body knows better, you know, than to take that kind of advice from on high from the brain, better to work with the body's actual reactions, but construe them in a different way, in a more positive and constructive way. And the subtle note of all this is the brain isn't driving the sweaty palms and the elevated heart rate. It's interpreting them. So when you sell yourself to calm down, it's like you can't, the brain isn't going to control that. It's getting the input no matter what, you know? Yeah. And that's, again, like you were saying, David, it's like giving input no matter what you know yeah and that's again like you were saying david it's like giving the brain to we give the brain or we imagine that the brain has more power than it does you know it's it's much better to uh acknowledge that the brain has limited power

and then figure out ways to kind of work with that and it's interesting because mindfulness training is all about finding space between action and reaction, which is exactly kind of what you're describing. Yes. And as I say, I found a lot of parallels or connections between Buddhist thought, mindfulness practices, and the extended mind. In fact, I talk explicitly in the book about a particular kind of mindfulness practice known as the body scan, which is, you know, just the simple act of bringing open-minded, nonjudgmental, curious attention to whatever is arising in the body. And when you do that, you realize there's always this constant

flow of internal signals and cues and feelings. It's there all the time, but we're so attuned to all the busy stimuli coming at us from the outside that it's very easy to lose touch with that inner world. And so engaging in the body scan, even in an informal way, just kind of checking in with what's happening inside your body on a regular basis can be a good way to get back in touch with that. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focus to get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post. If you're ready to take your business to the next level, you'll need the right team to make it happen. Indeed makes it easy to hire and build a team with the right skills to make those thoughts you've had about growing your business a reality.

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Go to Indeed.com slash focus to claim your $75 credit before March 31st. Indeed.com slash focus is that link one last time. Turns and conditions apply. You need to hire. You need Indeed. And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Another big theme that came out of the book is just this idea that, you know, our bodies and brains function differently in

different environments. And that is something I've kind of always known instinctively that I like. You really banged me over the head with it in the book. And that's kind of what I need. You know, I was looking through my highlights and so much of it. One of my favorites is all of us think differently depending on where we are. And it's so obvious. And this is where the human brain is computer thing breaks down. I've talked about it on this show. If you put me in the middle of the Mojave Desert or you put me in a nice air-conditioned room, my brain is not going to function the same in two different places. Right, right.

different places. And talk a little bit about how you kind of came to that, you know, and the effects you've seen with the research. Yes. Well, as you say, you know, one of the big, big differences between the human brain and a computer is that a computer is going to operate the same no matter where it is, while the human brain is just exquisitely context sensitive. And, you know, just to mention one of these kinds of contexts, types of contexts, you know, one of the most fruitful contexts for thinking is the outdoors, is nature, maybe not the Mojave Desert, but somewhere a little more temperate that is outside. And to me, the research behind this was especially interesting because on one level, it seems obvious that it's good to get outside. It's good for human beings to be in nature. We all know that we feel good when we're outside enjoying the outdoors. But the reason why that's the case was something

of a surprise to me that, you know, human beings evolved in the outdoors. This life we live now where we're inside almost all the time, especially during the pandemic, is really a quite recent development, evolutionarily speaking. And because we evolved in the outdoors, the kind of stimuli, the kind of information that we encounter in the outdoors, our brains are tuned and our sensory faculties are tuned to make sense of that kind of information in a very effortless and easy and pleasant way. because whatever the brain finds easy, it also tends to find pleasant. So that's why we associate being outside with kind of having, you know, an elevated mood. But because it's so easy for us to take in the kind of stimuli

that characterizes nature, it tends to have a restorative effect on our attention. And we, you know, we think so much about managing our attention, directing our attention, we worry about our attention being distracted. And that's all kind of like the demand side of attention. But we don't think so much about the supply side of attention. You know, like what are we doing to refill the tank? You know, what are we doing to replenish our attentional capacity? And it turns out that the fastest and easiest and best way to restore our attentional capacity is to spend time outside. And then we can return to our very hard-edged focus that we need to bring to our work with symbols and language, or to an urban setting where we have to cope with fast-moving cars

and loud noises and bright lights. But being in nature is going to restore that attentional capacity that gets drained by just sort of life in our modern world. You mean we can't just sit and grind at our desk for 10 hours a day with no consequences? I don't understand. Right. Because that's worked so well for all of us, right? During the pandemic, we all are working at our very best. In your research, did you find any specific advantages to different types of nature or is it just getting in nature that provides the general benefit?

you know, it can matter how long you spend in nature, there seems to be a special kind of benefit that kicks in after, say, three days, you know, if you're able to take a hike into the wilderness and really have an extended time in nature. And part of that is that, you know, that's one of the only times we really get away from our devices. But there also seems to be a real relaxing of the mind. There's a kind of an associative or an imaginative faculty that comes into play, you know, the default network of the brain that is responsible for daydreaming and imagination that kind of comes to the fore. So, um, but you know, not all of us have three days to, to wander off into the wilderness. So research suggests that even looking out the window, um, for a few moments and just sort of gazing at a tree, um, or at the

sky can be restorative instead of just, um, again, staring at that screen, uh, for hours, hours at a time. One of the best decisions I ever made when COVID happened was at that screen for hours, hours at a time. One of the best decisions I ever made when COVID happened was at the beginning of it, I decided I was going to get outside every day. And I ran or biked every day from March in Wisconsin until the snow started to fly. I hope you had good clothes. I did. I did. But I did definitely notice the benefit from that. Initially, I thought that

it would just help me cope with all the uncertainty. But I found that as soon as I got out on the bike trail or the running trail, that's when I had the best ideas and found the solutions to the problems I couldn't figure out as long as I was sitting in front of my computer. Yeah. And you were getting kind of a double benefit there because you also were moving. You were engaging in physical activity, which again, like we have this very misguided idea that real thinking happens when we're sitting still. And again, that's not how we evolved to think. I mean, when you think about the activities that our forebears engaged in, things like foraging and hunting, those are activities that are both cognitively demanding and they're physically demanding. And those two things went together, you know, and that's really

what produced our particular brand of human intelligence. And yet we have this idea that in order for the mind to be operating at peak capacity, the body has to be still. And that's really a mistaken notion, but a very common one. Well, the book really kind of lays it out. But it's just remarkable to me, this disconnect, because I would guess that everybody listening to this show has had an experience where they were stuck on a problem at their desk and they took the dog for a walk or they walked through a park or they maybe they just even just you know drove to Starbucks or just went you know put themselves somewhere else and suddenly the answer just pops to their brain and and we have these experiences but yet we still keep coming back to the idea of this grindstone. And I just don't understand how that disconnect exists.

I know. I do think it's, I do go back a lot to the metaphor of a brain is computer. You know, a computer, it's like input, output, you know, you give it the information it needs, it churns away, it grinds away for a while, and then it produces an answer. And so we just rather simple-mindedly kind of think that the brain works the same way when, in fact, because the brain is so context-sensitive, often the best thing to do if we're not thinking well in the current moment is to change the context, not to drive the brain harder, but to change what's around the brain. And as you were saying, that often makes the difference. On the topic of driving the brain harder, something that you had said a little

bit earlier, I just can't shake. When the brain finds easy, it finds pleasant. How does that fit into like the challenge of solving a difficult problem and the whole concept of flow? Oh, that's interesting. Well, I think, you know, one of the beautiful things about flow, and we've probably all experienced it now and then, is that it is so enjoyable and it makes the time fly by. And, you know, if we could all be doing our work in a state of flow, I think we'd be quite happy. But, you know, flow requires us to calibrate the difficulty of the challenge to our capacity so that it's just at the edge of what we're able to do, as I understand the idea of flow. And so that speaks to this idea that what the brain, you know,

because the other side of it is that the brain doesn't enjoy being bored, either the brain is is a novelty kind of seeking organ, and it wants to be stimulated. It wants to encounter novelty. It loves surprise. But it also doesn't like to be frustrated or to take on tasks that it can't complete. getting all the stimulation and excitement of a challenge that's difficult enough to energize you, but not so hard as to frustrate you. And when you can get yourself into that spot, you're rewarded with this very pleasurable, enjoyable feeling of just mastering what you're doing. And that's a great place to be. Yeah, I think you explained that really well, that there's a lot of things that you can do as it pertains to your environment specifically, I think,

that can kind of set up your brain to engage with the task at hand in maybe a different way. And that causes it to kind of naturally move towards that state of flow. And for me, one of the ways that that happens is through the thinking process and creating. And you have a whole chapter in here on thinking within the space of ideas, which I just absolutely love that concept because I'm fascinated with like, well, where do ideas come from and how come they pop up over here and not in other scenarios and things like that. As I'm going through this, you mentioned in the book

about the quote from Darwin, acquiring the habit of writing very copious notes, not for publication, but as a guide for yourself. And I couldn't help but think of these connected notes apps. think of these connected notes apps and this is you know david and i nerd out about this all the time uh maybe you're you're aware of like the whole zettelkasten approach and like how things all tie together and how that can facilitate the the thinking process um i'm kind of curious how you implement this you talk about thinking on paper, and then like, how do you actually take your notes and then connect these dots? Yeah, yeah. Well, this is touching on two aspects of mental extension, you know, thinking with the space of ideas, as you mentioned, and thinking with technology. And I'll just take that first one first, which is,

you know, again, I'm going to sound like a broken record talking about the evolutionary history of the brain. But, you know, the brain did not evolve to sort of contemplate abstract ideas, it really evolved to move the body through space to sense and move the body and to manipulate objects, you know, to use tools and grapple with things in the real world. And it does those things, the brain still does those things very easily, effortlessly without, you know, a lot of cognitive load, as psychologists like to say. And so when we in our modern lives are dealing with ideas and information, we want as much as possible to turn those ideas and pieces of information into physical objects that we can manipulate or into kind of landscapes that we can navigate as if it's a three-dimensional

landscape. And when we do those things, we can draw on this whole suite of embodied resources like spatial memory and proprioception, which is our sense of where our body parts are in space and all these things that lay dormant when we just keep these thoughts and these ideas inside our heads. So I, in particular, am a big fan of post-it notes. And I will often, if I'm working out, say, a very complicated structure for an article or a chapter, I'll write, you know, one idea per post-it note, stick them up on a bulletin board, and then literally move them around. Now, some of that functionality now can be carried out

with technological tools, as you were mentioning, Mike. And I think that holds a lot of promise for extending the mind with our tools. Our tools don't always extend our mind. Our technologies, I think, sometimes contract our minds in the sense that they can distract us or not serve our needs. to offload the contents of our heads onto physical space, whether that's a bulletin board or a computer screen, I think are really promising in terms of genuinely extending our minds. I've always felt like, and I know that the computer as brain is a bad metaphor, but to use it anyway, I think our brains are good at processing. They're not good at RAM. They're not good at RAM. They're not good at memory.

So to the extent you find digital tools that you can use to hold the RAM and then free your brain to do the processing, you can actually make progress. And whether it's Post-it notes or some nerdy application, I feel like there's something to explore there for anybody. Yeah. application, I feel like there's something to explore there for anybody. Yeah. I find it helpful to think in terms of what is the brain good at and what are computers good at and to very deliberately and intentionally employ computers for what they're good at. For example, computers have a very stable memory. You don't enter something in your Google calendar and then find that Google has gone and changed the date without you realizing it. Whereas our brains, or at least my brain, does that all the time. So we actually want to use our computers for what they're good for.

they're good for. And then that frees up mental bandwidth for what only the human brain can do, which is, you know, these higher cognitive functions of imagination and planning and making connections among ideas, things that computers, you know, at least as of yet can't approach. You mentioned the idea of the idea, turning ideas into landscapes. And I know that there are both digital and analog tools that allow you to do this, but I couldn't help but think of the practice of mind mapping when you use the word landscape. Is that something that you practice? Is that sort of what you do with your sticky notes? Of a kind, yeah. I write in the book about concept maps and how what's so interesting is that neuroscience research suggests that we actually use the same structures in the brain to map in our brains ideas and scenarios, sort, mental scenarios in the same way that we map a physical

landscape. So what's so useful about a concept map that we draw and have sort of, you know, on the outside, is that it's making concrete and stable, the same kind of maps that we're creating in our own minds. And so, you know, once we, again, get those thoughts and ideas outside of our heads and put them onto physical space, we create all these new opportunities for interacting with that information in new ways. For one thing, we can apply our senses to information that's outside of our heads. We can look at it, we can speak it aloud, we can move it around. And we also get what one psychologist calls the detachment gain. When we take our ideas out of our heads and put them into space, onto physical space, we actually, we're no longer so identified with them. We've put a little bit of

space between ourselves and our ideas, and we're able to think about them differently. So it's almost like the same ideas are not the same. The same information is not the same when it's inside our heads as opposed to outside our heads. And it really can be a game changer to get those ideas and information outside of our heads, and we deal with them in a whole new way. I never thought about that before, but that makes a lot of sense to get something external so it's no longer associated with your identity. And now you can freely say this is not a good idea without condemning yourself. Yeah, sometimes. There's one section in the book where you talk about a study done with very large monitors and like full wall size i think whiteboards and uh that has really

stuck with me it's like man i i've got to like figure that out because that is it's kind of on the same vein but you know getting that stuff out somewhere where you can see it and pull it apart, all this stuff, I think we've all experienced the truth of what you're writing. But it's just such a weird situation where we're also at the same time logic. I'm not saying logic, but tradition is telling us something different. When I first started working in an office, you were expected to be at your desk when the boss showed up and at your desk when the boss left. And it wasn't about getting the work done. It was about being at your desk. Yeah. And I do think the pandemic, as terrible as it has been, does offer us an opportunity to rethink all these ways of working that maybe

were not very effective to begin with. For example, the open office, you know, that, you know, may rest in peace. I hope the open office maybe has been killed off by the pandemic, but it really, it was the worst of all worlds in the sense that it doesn't allow for protected, private, deep work. And it also was not very good at facilitating true collaboration and fruitful encounters between people because people were just so desperate to retreat, you know, into their headphones and get a little work done. So I was particularly drawn to this idea that I write about in the book called intermittent collaboration, you know, that the best way to work is to is to

oscillate between periods of isolated, you know, private, protected time and periods of very intentionally social and convivial and collaborative kinds of spaces. And I've been wondering whether the home office divide could support that, you know, whether home, for those of us who work remotely, could be that place where we do our deep protected work in isolation. And then maybe the workplace could be reinvented to be a place that is very consciously a place where collaborative activities are elevated and promoted. I don't know. We'll see what comes out of all of this. But I do think that many of the ways that we've been working and learning have been oddly at odds, strangely at odds with our nature as human beings. And so I think it's time to sort of reexamine that. Yeah, these community workspaces or collaborative workspaces at the office are it seems to me like they're not going away there it's like they're showing up even more um what would you recommend to employers that

currently have like the big bullpen style office what kind of steps could they take to make their give their their workers better of an opportunity yeah well. Well, in the book, I talk about how for a while it was all the rage among company leaders and managers to think of the office as a coffee shop, you know, and the coffee shop has this lovely historical pedigree as the place where a lot of modern ideas took root. And it is a nice idea, this idea that you just sort of bring people together and, you know, they'll collide and poof, you know, you'll get these amazing, innovative ideas. But as I say, you know, it's actually very hard to get demanding cognitive work done in an environment where people are constantly distracting you. You know, the human brain, that evolved human brain is really attuned to novelty in the environment, especially to the doings of other human beings, to we process the meaning of the words that are being spoken around in the book, is to look not to the coffee shop,

which I think is kind of a terrible model for the modern office, but an even older form, which is the monastery. And I wrote about a 400-year-old monastery that managed to sort of anticipate this idea of intermittent collaboration in the sense that there are privates, there are spaces for private thought and reflection, you know, the monks' cells. And then there are spaces that are explicitly intended for the monks to come together and to collaborate and to work together and study and pray together. So I think that there are actually forms in our human history that we can draw on that are much better suited than the ones that maybe we're using right now to try to work and learn in. Yeah, we just talked about this in our last episode about focus and workspaces.

And it was striking to me, two Apple-related buildings. The first one is the Pixar building, which Steve Jobs took a vital role in. And that kind of has a monastery feel to it. The animators have their own private office spaces, but they also have very public areas. In fact, famously, he only wanted to put one bathroom in the building to force people to bump into each other. So he really, I think, was on the right track. But then when they built the Apple, you know, big mothership campus they have now, it's almost all community space. And it's so funny to me that they would kind of lose the thread in that process. Yeah. And unfortunately, it's even worse when you kind of go down the scale

from Apple, which obviously had enormous resources to build any kind of building that they wanted. I think what got kept from the idea of activity-specific workspaces was just this, as you say, this sort of open bullpen approach, which is not incidentally much cheaper than giving everyone private offices. So we got the big open spaces that were supposed to facilitate collaboration, but we didn't get the private spaces, which are equally necessary. So that's a rebalancing that I think we need to consider. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Ahrefs. Do you want more Google traffic to your site? Maybe you're struggling to rank and you're not sure what you can do about it. But the idea of hiring an SEO agency might be outside your budget. Your solution is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, and it's free. The best part of this is it isn't a 14-day free trial offer. It's just free.

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your business. Go to ahrefs.com slash webmaster dash tools to get the free tool now or click the link in the show notes. That's ahrefs.com slash webmaster dash tools. Our thanks to Ahrefs for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. When you were talking about the workspaces and the open office in particular and the collaboration that it's supposed to inspire but often doesn't. I couldn't help but think of a concept that you talk about in the book called groupiness, which I love that term. And I'm kind of curious if you don't mind explaining this because it seems like the general idea here is that we want to do life together before we would work together, but maybe there's some obvious places we should be looking to put up those

walls or those boundaries. Yeah, I love the term groupiness too, if only because psychologists so rarely come up with something so appealing and colloquial as groupiness because the more technical term also used by psychologists is entitivity, which is like how much does a collection of individuals feel like an entity, feel like a group? And that can differ. It can really feel like just a group of atomized individuals doing their own thing. And I think we've all kind of probably been on, on teams or in groups that feel like that. And then there can be groups or teams that are characterized by very high levels of groupiness, where you really feel that you are thinking

with a kind of group mind and in which a kind of collective intelligence is generated that is greater than the sum of, that is smarter than any one individual on the team. And what's interesting to me about creating a sense of groupiness is that, although I think the groupiness is really demanded by our modern world where, you know, information is so, expertise is so specialized and information is coming at us in such great quantities and the challenges that we face as a society are so challenging. You know, all of these are facets of the modern world that really demand the group mind as a solution. But the way that groupiness is generated so often are very, they're very visceral, they're very primitive in a way, they go back to our very, our nature as biological creatures. And I'll give you an example. I mean, one of the classic ways of creating a sense of groupiness is synchronized movement. So when people move in the same way at the same time as other people, the divisions between us get kind of blurred and we start to think of ourselves as just part of one big blob, you know, and that allows us to cooperate and to collaborate with each other more easily.

And I think you can see that institutions like the military and churches and all kinds of organizations have known this, at least on some level for centuries, because it's things like armies marching together or people in churches, motions together and performing rituals together that really bonds a group together and makes them feel as if they are part of a group rather than simply an individual. Clyde in our modern workplaces. I'm not going to advocate that people start marching together, but they could share meals together. That's a really important thing that most of us have lost over the past couple of years. We can perform rituals of a kind. Lots of teams have certain rituals that are associated with important events in the team's life. And we can learn together. We can have emotional experiences together.

All of these things work best when we're in the same place at the same time. And I think that that's the fact that we've missed out on that kind of face-to-face, The fact that we've missed out on that kind of face-to-face, in-person interaction where the flow of signals between people is just so much richer than is possible when you're looking at someone on a screen. I think that explains some of the languishing that many of us experienced during the pandemic. And I really hope that we can get back to seeing each other in person sometime soon. I have for a very long time resisted every form of team building. But when I read this section in the book, I think you've convinced me that it's important. Yeah, well, me too. I mean, I'm a freelance writer who's been working on my own

for many, many years. And I must say that I was a very brain bound person when I started this book that the book really kind of convinced me almost against my will that sitting in front of my computer and pounding away at my keyboard was maybe not the best way to get my work done. Well, I also think the groupiness stuff she talks about is a lot more like, you know, the kind of corporate quote, you know, I've got air quotes of team building stuff. That's so often it's manipulative and everybody knows it and it's not really a groupiness action. But I was thinking like he's not only the military, but even like Tai Chi and some of these things people do together,

that's a completely different vein for me. But your book is really, I felt like it was kind of a wake-up call for me. It brought a lot of stuff to the front of mind that was at the back of mind. What are a few things somebody could do to kind of take action on some of the ideas you've shared in this book? Sure. I'll grab a couple from each section of the book. You know, if you were looking to think with your body more, you could engage in that body scan that I mentioned, or try to incorporate physical activity into your workday, not separating it from the workday. You know, so often we save our gym workouts for like after work when really, ideally, we would be incorporating shorter movement breaks into our workday. And also another thing we didn't really get to talk about is using gesture

more, you know, moving your hands around more and making sure that others can see your gestures, that you're sitting far enough away from the camera when you're on Zoom, that your gestures are being seen by others and that hopefully you can see other people's gestures too, because that's, you know, gestures are, are again, themselves part of the thinking process. And we think less well when we when we inhibit our gestures. So then, you know, thinking with spaces, I would recommend that people get outside as much as they can also to be thoughtful about how they arrange their interior spaces. You know, I write in the book about the importance of filling your workspace with cues of identity and cues of belonging. So

objects and signs and signals that remind you of who you are and what you're doing in that space, what your role is there. And also reminds you of the valued groups to which you belong that can really prime you to do your best thinking in that space. And we talked a lot about cognitive offloading, try to get those thoughts, those ideas and information out of your head as often as possible. And then finally, that last section about thinking with people, with relationships, you know, we humans have these powerful social brains that we think, again, we separate social life from mental and academic and intellectual life. But really, you know, we're social all the time.

And the key is to harness our social brain in the service of learning and working. And some of the ways that we can do that, in addition to what we were talking about in terms of groupiness and the group mind is bringing social activities like storytelling and debating and arguing and teaching other people, those social activities activate cognitive processes that remain dormant when we're just thinking by ourselves. Human beings weren't really designed to think alone. And we're actually prone to a lot of cognitive biases and distortions when we think alone. So it's really a good idea to bring social activity into your thinking as much as possible. You made a comment about how you almost discovered against your will that sitting in front of the computer wasn't the right way to do your work. What was the biggest aha moment or revelation that you got from doing all this research and writing this book? I think, you know, this is something of a pandemic thing,

too. I also started to incorporate a daily bike ride into my workday. And I found it was almost sort of magical that I would spend the morning researching, thinking, writing, and then head out for a bike ride in the later afternoon. And it was always during those bike rides that all those thoughts of the day would kind of come together. And I talk a bit in the book about, you know, again, the brain uses metaphors to think about abstract ideas because, you know, we're really much better suited to thinking about concrete material things. And there's something about the act of moving forward through space that is kind of a loose metaphor for dynamism and creativity. I mean, when you think about how we, the figures of speech we use when we feel like we're being creative or not being creative, you know, if we're not being creative, we say we're

stuck, we're in a rut. And if we're being creative, we say we're on a roll or things are flowing, you know, and there's something about actually initiating the movement with the body, with literal movement, that I found primed my brain, I think, to think in those same kind of fluid dynamic terms. And so, you know, I really think the bike rides were integral to pulling this book together. I don't know that it could have happened otherwise. You also talk about, you know, internal spaces, and we were just curious, what have you done to your internal space now that you've done the research? Have you made changes? To my interior space? Yes. Yeah, you know, this is another thing just to mention in terms of returning to the office. it's so important that we feel a sense of ownership and control over our space. And fortunately, that's something that most of us have in our

home. So yeah, I did take the initiative to take my own advice in terms of redecorating and rearranging my home office, putting into my view those cues of belonging, cues of identity. And also I got a giant oversized bulletin board, which I now use to sort of create my landscape of ideas. So, you know, I'm doing my best to walk the walk, walk the talk, I guess is how you say it, to use another embodied metaphor. But I have found those things to be helpful. Also, I also remind myself to look out my window periodically. I have a big tree right in front of my window, so I find that helpful, too. I'll just give one more.

This was one of Mike's questions, but I thought it was a good one. Annie, what do you do when you feel stuck? Well, I mean, as I say, that's one of the things I love about the extended mind is that it gives you so many options. You know, it's not, your only option is not just sitting there, you know, and flogging your brain until you're done. I would, some of the menu of options that I would take up, you know, depending on the circumstances would be taking a walk, getting outside, going for a workout, you know, getting some real physical activity underway, changing the context, like just changing the place where I'm working. And then finally, kind of bringing the social element into it, talking to a friend or a mentor and kind of creating what philosopher Andy Clark calls a cognitive loop. He likes to say that human beings are intrinsically loopy creatures. And this is another way in which we're different from computers. Computers don't need to, moving and gesturing, creating loops through our environment, you know, putting those ideas and, and pieces of information out into physical space or creating loops through the minds of other people. You know, those are all ways that our thinking gets better. And we don't have the

opportunity to improve our thinking that way when we keep our thoughts inside our heads. Well, I, like I said at the beginning of the show, this book, The Extended Mind, really helped me kind of get through some of it, which I felt like I knew intuitively, but I didn't really know it. And some of it, which is brand new to me, but it really changed the way I think and work. And I would recommend this highly. It's called The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul. You are on my list on Amazon of instant buys, Annie. Whatever you're going to make next, I'm going to be there day one.

Oh, that's so nice. It may be a while, but thank you so much. I have one customer at least. You do. You're good. You're good. And we so much appreciate. Now, if someone, I don't know, do you do anything on social media?

Are you on Twitter or anything? I do. I am a big fan of Twitter, and I love encountering people there. So they can look me up on Twitter. My handle is at Annie Murphy Paul. And also, I have a website with www.anniemurphypaul.com. Also, I'll just drop my email here if anybody wants to ask me a question. I'm at anniemurphypaul at gmail.com. Well, it was an excellent book. Thank you so much for doing all the hard work of putting

the research together. And like I said, it's just an excellent book. I just want to like admit it. Thank you, Annie, for coming in today. Did we get it all, Mike? Did I miss anything? There's so much I want to ask, but we got to let her go. Yeah, we got to respect Annie's time. But I just want to say thank you for enabling my fidgeting

because you talked about in chapter three, that's a form of self-regulation. Yes, yes, I know. It should not be stigmatized. I'm really glad to hear that you, that got, that spoke to you. All right. So AnnieMurphyPaul.com on the web. Thanks Annie for coming in. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focus. Thank you to our sponsors today. And that's our friends at Indeed and Ahrefs. We'll see you next time.