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.
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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 alertness
19:00 We're creatures who are good at moving our bodies and navigating through space and interacting with other people
20:23 We rely on our surroundings to shape our sense of ourselves
26:48 We can interact with our environment in a way that supports our learning
28:33 What are some ways that we can support children in using the space around them in their learning
31:49 Journaling and sketching as a tool to process learning deeper
36:47 Thinking with relationships; encouraging children to learn from and with other people
45:25 Allowing your children to genuinely work together so that parents don’t need to support their learning individually
46:29 We tend to think of learning as when a person sits down at a desk but in fact there are all these cognitive processes that get activated in social interactions
48:08 Argument is very valuable and can be a really effective way of solving problems
52:43 It is a different cognitive process when we do learning with other people
55:45 Human thinking works best when we are able to create “loops” and the best way for parents to support their children’s learning is to look for those loops
Other episodes mentioned:
113: No Self, No Problem137: Psychological Flexibility through ACT with Dr. Diana Hill
Links
You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher MasterclassThe Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, by Annie Murphy PaulOrigins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, by Annie Murphy Paul
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