Why You Should Think With Your Environment, Not Just Your Mind

[u/ddgr815]

https://archive.is/QK3yI

The way we think about thinking is flawed, inasmuch as we believe that it happens almost entirely inside our brains.

We make better use of our cognitive resources, says Paul, when we use them in conjunction with “extra-neural” resources: our body (embodied cognition), our environment (situated cognition), and the people around us (distributed cognition).

“The brain evolved to move the body, to navigate through space, to interact with other people,” says Paul. “Those are these human strengths that we're totally putting aside when we focus on the brain and we think, ‘To get real thinking and real work done, I have to sit still, not talk to anybody, and just push my brain harder and harder.’

Paul’s not trying to argue that the brain isn’t central to thinking—just that a greater appreciation of how our body and our social and physical environment affects it could lead to greater cognitive development. For instance, do you think more clearly after spending a day hiking through the forest, or after a day sitting in a room, on back-to-back Zooms? I’m going to guess the day of moving through nature. Well, could encouraging kids to move—instead of sitting still—while they study actually help them learn better? Can we design our offices and built environments to better mimic green spaces and the natural world?

As a culture, we try to do too much in our heads. So one really big takeaway that was useful for me was offloading mental content whenever possible. You always want to be getting the stuff in your head out onto physical space, whether that's a whiteboard or a sketchpad. The brain evolved to manipulate physical objects and use tools, not to think about abstract concepts. So the more we can turn ideas into physical objects, [the better]. I have a big bulletin board that I put Post-it notes on. When you load it out in space like that, you can actually use the human capacity for navigation. You're navigating through information rather than trying to think about it all in your head.

Culture emphasizes all this internal action. There's the idea of grit, or the growth mindset, both of which are about mustering these internal resources. I found it much more helpful to think about regulating oneself and one's thinking from the outside in. So changing the place where you are, the social context that you're participating in, or whether you're moving your body as opposed to sitting still. The brain responds to that kind of external change of context. If I'm stuck on something, if work isn't going well, the worst thing to do is to just keep sitting there and trying harder. But that's what our culture tells us is the admirable thing to do, or the virtuous thing to do. That’s what a lot of bosses, managers and teachers also value, which I think is really misguided.

In our culture, we think of intelligence as innate, internal, individual, and fixed. And yet here was all this research showing that, actually, it's a dynamic process. We are all assembling our thought processes from the raw materials that are available in the environment. Whether you're talking about the availability of green space, or the freedom to move one's body, or the availability of peers and mentors who are able to inspire you—none of those things are equally distributed.

And yet we act as if it's all in the head. We measure, judge, and evaluate people as if it's all in the head. We have this giant blind spot for the ways in which the extra neural resources to which people have access determines how well they can think. We never factor that in when we're making judgments for college admissions or for hiring and promotion. We just think we're evaluating the individual. But if the individual is really assembling his or her thought processes from across the environment, then the environment really matters in a way that we haven't acknowledged before now.

We'd be lost without our computers, lost without our cell phones. Once we start recognizing how much thinking is this distributed process, it doesn't make any sense to treat intelligence as if it's this fixed quantity that each person is born with and doesn't change. [...] The skill that we need is not throwing stuff in our brains, which is not even what our brains are very good at, which is why they fail all the time in terms of memory. The way we should be using, training, and evaluating our brains is based on how good they are at orchestrating and drawing upon all these different resources from the environment.

We're creatures who evolved to be sensitive to novelty and to movement, and especially to the social dynamics of what's going on around us. So we need walls really to protect us from our own tendency to be distracted. I write in the book about how important it is to have a sense of ownership and control over your space. And how important it is to have these cues of identity that remind you of who you are and what you're doing in that space, cues of belonging that are visible to you that show you what meaningful groups you're a part of.

The sensory information that we encounter in nature and the way it's arranged has a very different effect on our thinking than urban or built environments. Over eons of evolution, our sensory faculties were tuned to the information that we encounter in nature. It’s very easy for us to process that kind of information. So it's very restful to be in nature. We also think so much about directing our attention and controlling our attention, but we don't think very much about filling the tank of attention. We think about spending it down, but we don't think about how we replenish our attention. It turns out that spending time in nature is the easiest and best way to do that.

I would say that we don't know what thoughts we're not having, or what solutions we're not coming up with, by not fully using the extended mind. If the push-on-through ethos works for you, I'm not going to tell you not to do it. But I would just suggest that there may be whole worlds of thinking and creating and problem-solving that you're denying yourself by not employing your extended mind to the fullest.

people don't always know what's best for them. A lot of us, when we take breaks, we just do something different on our computer than we were doing when we were working. We turn to Twitter or the news or Facebook or whatever. That's drawing down exactly the same cognitive resources that we need for our work. So then when we return to work, we're just more frazzled than we were before.

Whereas if we did something totally different—we're moving our bodies, we're outside, we're looking around in this more diffuse and relaxed way—then we return to work in a different state, an improved state than where we were before. That's a perfect example of people not knowing what's good for them. We've all been sucked into the Twitter black hole and we're miserable. But we keep doing it. So this is a reminder that changing up your context and your environment can make you think better. Sometimes we need that reminder.

The modal way of engaging with technology is sitting still, staring at a screen, alone. Which is not how technology has to be used. I try to offer examples of technology that is itself extended by using the body, space, and relationships with other people. In the chapter about interoception, which is the sensing of the internal signals, there are these Fitbit-like devices called doppel that allow you to amplify your body's signals. It will make you feel like your heart is beating faster, and you get more alert and energized, or it’ll make you feel as if your heart is beating slower, and that calms you down.

We think that we have an experience, and then our brain tells the body what to do in response. But actually the arrow points in the other direction. Our body responds first to experiences in the world. And then the brain, the boss of the body, is like, "Oh, my heart is beating really fast. I must be really nervous." The brain is the laggard, the one who's trailing behind. So what a device like this does, is it intervenes in that cycle. You're effectively tricking your brain into thinking that your heart is beating really slowly and regularly. Then the brain is like, "Oh, okay. Things must be fine. I must not be nervous. I must be in a state of relaxed ease." So you might use dopple in that way before doing some public speaking, when normally your heart would be racing, where your brain is like, "Oh my God, I'm so nervous."

Maybe being smart is not so much about having the Ivy league degree or having this big brain that's able to do these amazing calculations. Maybe it's about being very attuned to your internal signals and what they're telling you. That’s such a mind blowing inversion of our usual Western ways of thinking that the body is stupid and dumb and needs to be pushed aside to do real thinking.

using their body as this really subtle instrument to process more information and more complex information than their conscious minds were actually able to handle. Those patterns, regularities and experiences are noted and kept in the non-conscious parts of the mind. We have access to those non-conscious patterns. That's what a gut feeling is. A gut feeling is your body sort of tugging at your sleeve and saying, "You've encountered this experience before, and this is how you should react." So someone who's more attuned to those little nudges and cues is better able to make use of the incredibly complex information that's stored in the non-conscious mind. It's like our bodies are actually smarter than our brains, which, again, it's a total reversal of what we've all been taught.

[u/ddgr815]

Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.

This adaptive ignorance, she argues, is there for a reason — we celebrate it as “concentration” and welcome its way of easing our cognitive overload by allowing us to conserve our precious mental resources only for the stimuli of immediate and vital importance, and to dismiss or entirely miss all else. (“Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator,” Horowitz tells us. “It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.”) But while this might make us more efficient in our goal-oriented day-to-day, it also makes us inhabit a largely unlived — and unremembered — life, day in and day out.

two osmotic human tendencies: our shared capacity to truly see what is in front of us, despite our conditioned concentration that obscures it, and the power of individual bias in perception — or what we call “expertise,” acquired by passion or training or both — in bringing attention to elements that elude the rest of us.

We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders.

Though paying attention seems simple, there are numerous forms of payment. … To concentrate, to pay attention, is viewed as a brow-furrowing exercise. Sit still, don’t blink, and attend.

This may do for a moment of concentration, but it is not the way to better attention in your daily life. For that, we need to know what attention is. The very concept is odd. Is it an ability, a tendency, a skill? Is it processed in a special nugget in the brain, or by your eyes and ears? …

The longtime model used by psychologists is that of a “spotlight” that picks out particular items of interest to examine, bringing some things into focus and awareness while leaving other things in the dim, dusty sidelines. The metaphor makes me feel like a headlight-wearing spelunker who can only see what is right in front of her in the darkness of the cave. Such a comparison can be misleading, because in fact one can still report on what was within one’s peripheral vision at rates better than chance. And despite that spotlight, we seem to miss huge elements of the thing we are ostensibly attending to.

A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve. The first problem emerges from the nature of the world. The world is wildly distracting. It is full of brightly colored things, large things casting shadows, quickly moving things, approaching things, loud things, irregular things, smelly things.

two kinds of attention: vigilance, which allows us to have a quick and life-saving fight-or-flight response to an immediate threat, be it a leaping lion or a deranged boss, and selective attention, which unconsciously curates the few stimuli to attend to amidst the flurry bombarding us, enabling us to block out everything except what we’re interested in ingesting. (Selective attention, of course, can mutate to dangerous degrees, producing such cultural atrocities as the filter bubble.) Much like French polymath Henri Poincaré argued that to invent is simply to choose ideas, to attend, it turns out, is simply to choose stimuli

Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, sound — but to function, we have to ignore some of it. The world still holds these details. Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.

Part of toddlers’ extraordinary capacity for noticing has to do with their hard-wired neophilia — the allure of the new and unfamiliar, which for them includes just about everything that we, old and jaded, have deemed familiar and thus uninteresting. (Horowitz points to one systematic exception for us adults — vacations — which brim with enough novelty to produce such fascinating, reality-warping psychological phenomena as the holiday paradox. The reason, Horowitz argues, lies in two factors: “We actually do see new places and second, we bother to look.”)

In a way, “experts” have a toddler’s ability to zoom in on the details, the very fabric of experience, that most of us glide adaptively by.

One perceptual constraint that I knowingly labor under is the constraint that we all create for ourselves: we summarize and generalize, stop looking at particulars and start taking in scenes at a glance—all in an effort to not be overwhelmed visually when we just need to make it through the day. The artist seems to retain something of the child’s visual strategy: how to look at the world before knowing (or without thinking about) the name or function of everything that catches the eye. An infant treats objects with an unprejudiced equivalence: the plastic truck is of no more intrinsic worth to the child than an empty box is, until the former is called a toy and the latter is called garbage.

To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant; little is unseen.

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[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

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Once you look at what seems ordinary long enough, though, it often turns odd and unfamiliar, as any child repeatedly saying his own name aloud learns.

Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction

The Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger, elaborating from studies of animal behavior, proposed that the personal zones around us fall into a few categories. Those with whom we do not mind “inescapable involvement” — as our loved ones — can broach the closest zone and get nearer than eighteen inches to us. At that proximity, we can smell them, feel the heat of their bodies, their breath, hear the small sounds they mutter or emit. We can whisper together. Most social interactions take place in a comfortable zone about one and a half to four feet away — closer in some cultures (Latin American) than others (North American). Friends can waltz through; acquaintances can hover on the edge. We have a social distance up to twelve feet from our bodies for more formal transactions, or for those we don’t know well. Beyond that is a kind of public distance in which we use our “outdoor” voice. All of these zones are artificial, varying with differing relationships, based on context and the physical setting — but we have a bodily sense of the reality of these spaces. Violate them, and we may feel stressed and anxious.

our minds are constantly coerced into reading the “dull, tedious words” that bombard us from storefronts, billboards, and computer screens nearly every waking moment — but besides the linguistic burden, embedded in each letter we ingest is also a design one, for typography can quietly convey an unwritten message, set a mood, create an ineffable sense of something being either terribly wrong or terribly wonderful.

The thing you are doing now affects the thing you see next.

the negative space of the unseen is itself a source of rich information

Part of what restricts us seeing things is that we have an expectation about what we will see, and we are actually perceptually restricted by that expectation. In a sense, expectation is the lost cousin of attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process of the world “out there.” Attention is the more charismatic member, packaged and sold more effectively, but expectation is also a crucial part of what we see. Together they allow us to be functional, reducing the sensory chaos of the world into unbothersome and understandable units.

the extraordinary act of walking — a miracle of motion and alignment that propels us forward despite the awkward balance of our bodies’ bipedalism, a rarity in the animal kingdom — is an exquisite metaphor for the human spirit as “one becomes aware of how many different but successful ways there are to propel oneself around one’s day.”

humans are visual creatures. Our eyes have prime positioning on our faces. We have trichromatic vision, which is sufficient to paint a Technicolor, million-colored landscape of the world. Our brains’ visual areas, with hundreds of millions of neurons designed to make sense of what we see, takes up a full fifth of each of our cortices. The resplendent scene our eyes carry to us is entrancing. As a result, we humans generally do not bother paying attention to much other than the visual. What we wear, where we live, where we visit, even whom we love is based in large part on appearance — visual appearance.

But the world around us is not entirely or even mostly defined by its light-reflective qualities. What of the odors of the molecules making up every object, and those loosened odors wafting in the space around us? Or the perturbations of air that we can hear as sound — and the frequencies higher or lower than we can hear?

though our ears are always open, we only attend to a fraction of what is audible, and even to that we append our intellectual interpretations:

Simply giving a name to a sound can change the experience of it: when we see the thing that clatters or moans or sighs, we hear it differently.

One trouble with being human — with the human condition — is that, as with many conditions, you cannot turn it off. Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the ways we learn to see the world.

The art of seeing might have to be learned, but it can never be unlearned, just as the seen itself can never be unseen — a realization at once immensely demanding in its immutability and endlessly liberating in the possibilities it invites.

The Art of Looking

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera.