The Difference Between Western and Eastern Thinking of the Brain

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The opening of your book reminded me of something that was in a book about cultural cognition, I read a while back by Hazel Marcus. There's this attempt to disassemble everything into its component parts, productionism and watchmaker ourselves. And the thinking of the brain in that way, sort of leads to a lot of these ideas that you're busting. But then there's this Eastern thing, which is how we abstract out what we are using different cultural lineages. We need to remember that the brain is not operating in isolation. It's a body in a physical space where our focus should be on other people.

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.

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