The Power of Atmosphere

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Philosopher Andy Clark and David Chalmers are two philosophers who came out with an article in 1998 called the extended mind. It was rejected by three academic journals before it was, it was accepted by a journal called analysis and later became one of the most cited articles in philosophy. The idea that something outside your head could effectively carry out some of your mental functions started to seem like kind of plausible, you know? I think technology is the way into understanding the extended mind because we all know that our smartphones are kind of like mini brains,.

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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