The Importance of Social Activities

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Social activities like storytelling, arguing and debating engage cognitive processes that remain dormant when we're just alone in a room thinking by ourselves. We should be taking advantage of all our strengths as social beings and bringing that into the learning and working processes to make them better. And I think it's a shame that we've really excluded those kinds of activities from formal education and from the workplace.

In this episode we sit down with Annie Murphy Paul, the acclaimed science writer, whose new book, The Extended Mind is all about how the brain is part of systems, and it is those systems that constitute the mind. In other words, our minds are not, as she puts it, brainbound, but they extend to our computers, our notebooks, our friends and neighbors and colleagues and partners. The environments in which we move, natural and otherwise, deeply influence how we think, what we think, and what we CAN think, and in addition, everything the brain does becomes a reference for extended thinking, and these feedback loops extend what the mind can do.

Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart