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146: The Extended Mind, with Annie Murphy Paul

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CHAPTER

Thinking With the Space of Ideas

Author David Perry talks about thinking with the space of ideas and using technology to extend our minds. He says we can use digital tools such as Google Docs or a bolten board to offload thoughts on to physical spacewhe that's a computer screen. The book is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £16.99.

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Speaker 3
I think you explain that really well. That a, this a lot of things that you can do as it pertains to your environment. Specifically, i think that can can set up your brain to engage with the task at hand and 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. Ca 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i'm going through this, you mention in the book about, from darwin acquiring the habit of writing very copious notes, not for publication, but as a guide for yourselfand i couldn't help but think of these connected notes aps. And this is, you know, david and i not out about this all the time. Maybe you're, you're aware, like, the whole settl cast in approach, and like how things all tied together, and how that can facilitate the the thinking process. I'm kind of curious how you implement this talk about thinking on paper, and then, like, how do you actually take your notes and then connect these dots?
Speaker 1
Ye, ya. Well, thisis chin 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 the that first one first, which is, um, you know, again, i'm, 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 to m to use tools and and a 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 a psychologist like to say. And so when we, in our modern lives, are dealing with ideas and inform an we want as much as possible to turn those ideas and pieces of information into physical objects that we can manipulate, or into a kind of landscapes that we can navigate as if, 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, you know, your sense of where our body parts are in space, and m all these things that lay dormant when we just keep these thoughts and these ideas inside our heads. So i, i in particular, am a big fan of posted notes. And i will often, if i'm working out, say, a very complicated structure for an article or a chapter, all right, you know, one idea per post it. No, stick them up on a bulleting board and then literally move them around. Now, some of that, some of that functionality em now can be carried out with with technological tools, as as you were mentioning, my an em and i think thats that holds a lot of promise for extending the mind with our tools. You know, i i there our tools don't always extend our minds or our technologies. I think sometimes contract our mind in the sense our minds, in the sense that they can distract us or am not serve our needs. But those kinds of em those kinds of absent and platforms that allow us to off load are the contents of our heads on to physical spacewhe that's a bolten board or computer screen, i think a're really promising in terms of genuinely extanding, extending our minds.
Speaker 2
I've always felt like, and i know that o the computer as brains is a bad metaphor, but to use it anyway, um, we i think our brains are good at processing. They're knot good at ram they're not good at memory. So so to the extent you find digital tools that you can use hold the ram and en furry your man to do the processing, you actuallyn you can actually make progress. And whether it's post hip notes or some dirty application, i feel like there's something to explore. There for anybody? Yes, i
Speaker 1
think i find it helpful to think in terms of what is the brain good at, you know, and what are what our computers get atd and to very deliberately and tentionally, a employ computers for what they're good at. For example, the computers have a very stable memory. You know, you don't em enter something in your, in your google calendar and then find that google has gone and changed the date without you realizing it. You know, whereis our brains, or at least my brains, does that all the time. So we actually want to use our computers for what they're good for, and then that freeze up mental bandwith 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 leasts as of yet, can approach.

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