Thinking outside of your head

More thoughts on The Extended Mind

Hey y’all,

I first heard about Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain when I heard her on The Ezra Klein Show. I’ve since read the book and started reading Paul’s newsletter, The Science of Creativity.

I wrote to you last year about thinking on the page, but I wanted to write a little bit more about The Extended Mind, because I found that it gave me an interesting framework for thinking about so much of the creative work I do.

Our culture tends to think about thinking as happening mostly in our heads, and that all we need to do to think better is sit down, distraction-free, and concentrate. You know, like Rodin’s The Thinker:

Paul calls this “brainbound” thinking. Her message is that we actually do some of our best thinking when we’re moving our bodies, navigating our surroundings, and interacting with other people. This message has profound lessons for our schools and workplaces. When I was reading the book, I imagined these three categories — body, surroundings, other people — as concentric circles that radiated outwards.

With the body, we can think with sensations, gestures, and movement.

Your sensations are your gut feelings, your goosebumps, the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, etc. It’s your body knowing things way before your brain does. A good way to get in touch with these sensations is to practice meditation: to learn to sit and listen to your body and what it’s trying to tell you.

Gestures are ways we use our hands. Paul focuses on the power of gestures while speaking (see: Bruno Munari’s book Speak Italian) but I thought a lot about drawing and sewing and playing music and writing by hand.

Exercise — moving the body — is a good trick to getting the mind moving. Paul points out “the words we use when we can’t seem to muster an original idea — we’re ‘stuck,’ ‘in a rut’ — and those we reach for when we feel visited by the muse. Then we’re ‘on a roll,’ our thoughts are ‘flowing.’”

In our surroundings, we can think in nature, with built spaces, and the space of ideas.

As for nature, simply getting outdoors seems to do wonders. (“Get out now.”)

Our built spaces are best when they act as a kind of external brain, with all our stuff surrounding us. We need walls to keep people out, our materials at hand, and special objects to make us feel at home. (I thought so much about this when building my dream studio. Here’s a peek inside.)

The space of ideas seems abstract, but it’s everything we talk so much about in this newsletter: getting ideas on paper so you can really see them, journaling, taking notes, making a map of your mind, etc. (It was from this chapter that I quoted the story of Darwin learning to journal.)

Finally, when thinking with our relationships, we have experts, peers, and groups.

We imitate experts, apprenticing ourselves to the good work that’s come before us.

Our peers give us a chance to teach and learn from each other. When we try to share what we think we know with others, we find out what we really know and don’t know. (I wonder where children fit in this scheme — I would actually create a whole other category for them. Perhaps that’s a book I should write: Thinking With Children.)

As for groups, this I’m the least personally sold on, but then again, I am a big believer in scenius.

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A post shared by Austin Kleon (@austinkleon)

While I was reading, I was inspired to make a volvelle that has spinning circles so I could spin it around and line up different combinations of these ways of thinking.

For example, if you line up movement and nature, you basically have a solo bike ride, which is great for clearing your head. If you add peers to the mix, you’ve got my weekly bike rides with my bike gang. A lot of good thinking happens on those rides.

Gesture + ideas + experts = reading with a pencil.

Etc.

Two books I thought a lot about when reading: David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is so much about getting things out of your head so you can do something with them, and Alan Jacobs’ How To Think, which makes the case that “Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social.”

If you want to dive deeper on the theory behind these subjects, look up “embodied cognition.”

Now I want to hear from you all: How do you get out of your head so you can think? Tell us in the comments:

xoxo,

Austin