There Is More to Us Than Just Our Brains

Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind was reviewed in the New York Times.

We have to stop thinking of the three-pound lump inside our skulls as the only cognitive show in town. We are not solo actors, stranded alone in the cosmos — forced to rely only on what’s in our heads to think, remember and solve problems — even if the pandemic has made us feel that way. Rather, we’re networked organisms who move around in shifting surroundings, environments that have the power to transform our thinking, Paul writes.

We get constant messages about what’s going on inside our bodies, sensations we can either attend to or ignore. And we belong to tribes that cosset and guide us. Still, we “insist that the brain is the sole locus of thinking, a cordoned-off space where cognition happens, much as the workings of my laptop are sealed inside its aluminum case,” Paul writes. Paul’s view is that we are less like data processing machines and more like soft-bodied mollusks, picking up cues from within and without and transforming ourselves accordingly.