The Extended Mind summary

OK, so we’ve learned that our bodies can store and process subconscious information and that we can tap into it by increasing our awareness of subtle bodily cues. 

But here’s something you might be pleased to learn: you don’t have to wait for subconscious information to rise into your awareness to give your cognition a boost. There’s a far simpler way: moving your body!

Christian Heath, a communications researcher, collects tapes of people interacting. He’s filmed and studied hundreds of interactions, and he’s come to pay special attention to a particular body part: the hands. 

In one interaction, a doctor has prescribed a patient an anti-inflammatory drug. To explain the medication, he gestures downward three times. The patient nods, signaling that she understands even before the word “inflammation” has passed the doctor’s lips.

In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock couldn’t get his abstract paintings into the galleries of New York City. Worse, he struggled with depressive exhaustion and alcohol abuse. In 1945, he and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, made an important decision. They left Manhattan for a rundown farmhouse on Long Island.

From their new home, Pollock would look out on green fields and marshes, the light falling through the trees. He’d taste the salt air sweeping in from Long Island Sound. Then, he’d retreat into a barn that he’d converted into a studio. There, he tapped into something larger than himself and created paintings unlike any that had ever been seen before, paintings that were at once serene and wild.

Let’s stay on Long Island for a while longer and follow Pollock into his barn-turned-studio. It was here, after all, that he painted his most famous paintings; he wasn’t out in the fields with his brush. He was here, inside, in the refuge of his studio. 

Pollock’s studio was full of his paints, jugs of turpentine, sticks that he had collected, and of course his brushes and painting knives. Everything was arranged just so – in an order that reflected his highly personal needs. His canvases, in various states of completion, covered much of the walls around him. The door was closed, and the life of the village, not to mention the bustle of New York City, was far away. 

The American journalist Robert Caro is in the middle of something big. Over the last four decades, he has completed four volumes of his biography of US President Lyndon Baines Johnson. You know, Lyndon B. Johnson, the guy who signed the Civil Rights Act into law – this guy: 

At present, Caro is about 3,500 pages into the biography. His books are full of scrupulously researched detail, and yet it all goes down as smooth as a scotch and soda made with Cutty Sark whiskey – Lyndon Johnson’s favorite drink. Point is, though: Caro’s process involves reams of research and thousands of hours of interviews. And Caro, who is 85 years old, is still hard at work on volume five. So how the heck does he keep track of everything – let alone weave it into a compelling story? 

Ok, we’ve covered a lot of ground in these blinks so far. We’ve learned some of the ways in which the mind extends through our bodies and through our environments. So here, in this final blink, we’ll look at the last of the three areas Clark and Chalmers explored in their Extended Mind paper, namely, how the mind extends through our social relationships and through other human brains. To do that, I’m going to tell you the tale of Carl Wieman – and his teaching difficulties.

As far as physicists go, Carl Wieman is top of the line. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in creating an extreme state of matter known as the Bose-Einstein condensate. 

This blink contains a guided mindfulness body scan. If this sounds like something you’d like to try, please switch over to audio. You can also come back to it later, if you’d like.