The Extended Mind - Thinking with the space of Ideas

Important terms:

Method of Loci
Spatial learning strategy
Spatial cognition
Cognitive congeniality of a space
Physical embodied resources
1. Peripheral Vision
2. Spatial memory
3. Proprioception
Detachment gain
Recognition
Cognitive extra
Interactivity

Excerpts:

He became a celebrated memory champion only through the application of what is known as the “method of loci”: a mental strategy that draws on the powerful connection to place that all humans share.

It works by associating each item to be remembered with a particular spot found in a familiar place, such as one’s childhood home or current neighbourhood.

On their own, bits of data like the number or suit shown on a playing card are quickly forgotten. But when linked to a physical place we know well, that same information can be durably integrated into memory.

Research conducted with other memory contest winners has concluded that the strategy of tying new information to preexisting memories of physical space is the key to the extraordinary performance of many of these “memory athletes.

Superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or structural brain differences. Rather, we found that superior memorisers used a spatial learning strategy, engaging brain regions such as the hippocampus that are critical for memory and for spatial memory in particular.

The difference between “superior memorisers” and ordinary people, Maguire determined, lay in the parts of the brain that became active when the two groups engaged in the act of recall; in the memory champions’ brains, regions associated with spatial memory and navigation were highly engaged, while in ordinary people these areas were much less active.

What sets memory champs apart, then, is their conscious cultivation of an ability every one of us comes by naturally—the capacity to find our way around and to remember where we’ve been. Research has found that all of us seem to use the brain’s built-in navigational system to construct mental maps, not just of physical places but of the more abstract landscape of concepts and data—the space of ideas

This repurposing of our sense of physical place to navigate through purely mental structures is reflected in the language we use every day: we say the future lies “up ahead,” while the past is “behind” us; we endeavour to stay “on top of things” and not to get “out of our depth”; we “reach” for a lofty goal or “stoop” low to commit a disreputable act. These are not merely figures of speech but revealing evidence of how we habitually understand and interact with the world around us.

Notes Barbara Tversky, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College in New York: "We are far better and more experienced at spatial thinking than at abstract thinking. Abstract thought can be difficult in and of itself, but fortunately it can often be mapped onto spatial thought in one way or another. That way, spatial thinking can substitute for and scaffold abstract thought

way our sense of space helps organize mental content can explain the puzzling phenomenon of “infantile amnesia”—the fact that we can’t recall much about our earliest years. Because very young children are not able to move through space under their own locomotion, the theory goes, they may lack a mental scaffold on which to hang their memories.

As adults, our memories continue to be tagged with a sense of the physical place where the original experience occurred. When re-listening to a podcast or audiobook, for example, we may find that we spontaneously recall the place where we first heard the words.

The automatic place log maintained by our brains has been preserved by evolution because of its clear survival value: it was vitally important for our forebears to remember where they had found supplies of food or safe shelter, as well as where they had encountered predators and other dangers.

The elemental importance of where such things were located means the mental tags attached to our place memories are often charged with emotion, positive or negative—making information about place even more memorable.

All of us possess this powerful place-based memory system simply by virtue of being human.

The human brain is not well equipped to remember a mass of abstract information. But it is perfectly tuned to recalling details associated with places it knows—and by drawing on this natural mastery of physical space, we can (as Martin Dresler showed) more than double our effective memory capacity. Extending our minds via physical space can do more than improve our recall, however. Our powers of spatial cognition can help us to think and reason effectively, to achieve insight and solve problems, and to come up with creative ideas. Such powers are especially generative when permitted to operate not on imagined space, as in the method of loci, but on the real thing: tangible, three-dimensional space, of the kind our minds and bodies are so accustomed to navigating.

But true human genius lies in the way we are able to take facts and concepts out of our heads, using physical space to spread out that material, to structure it, and to see it anew. The places we make for ideas can take many forms: a bank of computer screens, the pages of a field notebook, the surface of a workshop table—or even, as one celebrated author demonstrates, an expanse of office wall.

Caro has to extend his thinking into physical space. One entire wall of his office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is taken up by a cork board four feet high and ten feet wide; the board is covered with a detailed outline of Caro’s current work in progress, plotting its trajectory from beginning to end.

”When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world,” psychologist Barbara Tversky has observed. Once we recognise this possibility, we can deliberately shape the material worlds in which we learn and work to facilitate mental extension—to enhance “the cognitive congeniality of a space,” in the words of David Kirsh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

On the most basic level, the author is using physical space to offload facts and ideas. He need not keep mentally aloft these pieces of information or the complex structure in which they are embedded; his posted outline holds them at the ready, granting him more mental resources to think about that same material. Keeping a thought in mind—while also doing things to and with that thought—is a cognitively taxing activity. We put part of this mental burden down when we delegate the representation of the information to physical space, something like jotting down a phone number instead of having to continually refresh its mental representation by repeating it under our breath.

Caro’s wall turns the mental “map” of his book into a stable external artifact. This is the second way in which the cork board in Caro’s office extends his ability to think: looking it over, he can now see—far more clearly and concretely than if the map had remained inside his head—how his ideas relate to one another, how the many paths taken by his narrative twist and turn, diverge and converge

the strategy he came up with is similar to one that has received substantial empirical support from psychology: an approach known as concept mapping. A concept map is a visual representation of facts and ideas, and of the relationships among them.

Research has revealed that the act of creating a concept map, on its own, generates a number of cognitive benefits. It forces us to reflect on what we know, and to organize it into a coherent structure. As we construct the concept map, the process may reveal gaps in our understanding of which we were previously unaware. And, having gone through the process of concept mapping, we remember the material better—because we have thought deeply about its meaning. Once the concept map is completed, the knowledge that usually resides inside the head is made visible. By inspecting the map, we’re better able to see the big picture, and to resist becoming distracted by individual details. We can also more readily perceive how the different parts of a complex whole are related to one another.

Although the technique originated in education, Novak notes that it is increasingly being applied in the world of work—where, he says, “the knowledge structure necessary to understand and resolve problems is often an order of magnitude more complex” than that which is required in academic settings. Concept maps can vary enormously in size and complexity, from a simple diagram to an elaborate plan featuring hundreds of interacting elements.

Robert Caro’s map, for example, is big: big enough to stand in front of, to walk along, to lean into and stand back from. The sheer expansiveness of his outline allows Caro to bring to bear on his project not only his purely cognitive faculties of reasoning and analysis but also his more visceral powers of navigation and wayfinding. Researchers are now producing evidence that these ancient evolved capacities can help us to think more intelligently about abstract concepts—an insight that showed up first in, of all places, a futuristic action film.

He is reviewing evidence of a crime yet to be committed, but this is no staid intellectual exercise; the way he interacts with the information splayed before him is active, almost tactile. He reaches out with his hands to grab and move images as if they were physical objects; he turns his head to catch a scene unfolding in his peripheral vision; he takes a step forward to inspect a picture more closely.

Working with the smaller screen, users resorted to less efficient and more simplistic strategies, producing fewer and more limited solutions to the problems posed by experimenters. When using a large display, they engaged in higher-order thinking, arrived at a greater number of discoveries and achieved broader, more integrative insights.

Large high-resolution displays allow users to deploy their “physical embodied resources,” says Ball, adding, “With small displays, much of the body’s built-in functionality is wasted.” These corporeal resources are many and rich. They include peripheral vision, or the ability to see objects and movements outside the area of the eye’s direct focus. Research by Ball and others shows that the capacity to access information through our peripheral vision enables us to gather more knowledge and insight at one time, providing us with a richer sense of context. The power to see “out of the corners of our eyes” also allows us to be more efficient at finding the information we need, and helps us to keep more of that information in mind as we think about the challenge before us. Smaller displays, meanwhile, encourage a narrower visual focus, and consequently more limited thinking.

Our built-in “embodied resources” also include our spatial memory: our robust capacity, exploited by the method of loci, to remember where things are. This ability is often “wasted,” as Ball would have it, by conventional computer technology: on small displays, information is contained within windows that are, of necessity, stacked on top of one another or moved around on the screen, interfering with our ability to relate to that information in terms of where it is located. By contrast, large displays, or multiple displays, offer enough space to lay out all the data in an arrangement that persists over time, allowing us to leverage our spatial memory as we navigate through that information.

The multiple monitor setup induced the participants to orient their own bodies toward the information they sought—rotating their torsos, turning their heads—thereby generating memory-enhancing mental tags as to the information’s spatial location. Significantly, the researchers noted, these cues were generated “without active effort.” Automatically noting place information is simply something we humans do, enriching our memories without depleting precious mental resources.

Other embodied resources engaged by large displays include proprioception, or our sense of how and where the body is moving at a given moment, and our experience of optical flow, or the continuous stream of information our eyes receive as we move about in real-life environments. Both these busy sources of input fall silent when we sit motionless before our small screens, depriving us of rich dimensions of data that could otherwise be bolstering our recall and deepening our insight.

Indeed, the use of a compact display actively drains our mental capacity. The screen’s small size means that the map we construct of our conceptual terrain has to be held inside our head rather than fully laid out on the screen itself. We must devote some portion of our limited cognitive bandwidth to maintaining that map in mind; what’s more, the mental version of our map may not stay true to the data, becoming inaccurate or distorted over time. Finally, a small screen requires us to engage in virtual navigation through information—scrolling, zooming, clicking—rather than the more intuitive physical navigation our bodies carry out so effortlessly.

Robert Ball reports that as display size increases, virtual navigation activity decreases—and so does the time required to carry out a task. Large displays, he has found, require as much as 90 percent less “window management” than small monitors.

Ball notes that much less dramatic changes to the places where we work and learn can allow us to garner the benefits of physically navigating the space of ideas. The key, he says, is to turn away from choosing technology that is itself ever faster and more powerful, toward tools that make better use of our own human capacities—capacities that conventional technology often fails to leverage.

The computer user who makes this choice, he writes, “will most likely be more productive because she invested in the human component of her computer system. She has more information displayed at one time on her monitor, which, in turn, enables her to take advantage of the human side of the equation.

THE “TECHNOLOGY” THAT allows us to explore the space of ideas need not be digital. Sometimes the most generative tools are the simplest: a pencil, a notebook, an observing gaze.

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world—and researchers have reported some intriguing findings about why this use of the (physical, spatial) world is so beneficial for our thinking. As with the creation of concept maps, the process of taking notes in the field—whether that field is a sales floor, a conference room, or a high school chemistry lab—itself confers a cognitive bonus. When we simply watch or listen, we take it all in, imposing few distinctions on the stimuli streaming past our eyes and ears. As soon as we begin making notes, however, we are forced to discriminate, judge, and select. This more engaged mental activity leads us to process what we’re observing more deeply. It can also lead us to have new thoughts; our jottings build for us a series of ascending steps from which we can survey new vistas.

Representations in the mind and representations on the page may seem roughly equivalent, when in fact they differ significantly in terms of what psychologists call their “affordances”—that is, what we’re able to do with them. External representations, for example, are more definite than internal ones.

Here, then, is one of the unique affordances of an external representation: we can apply one or more of our physical senses to it. As the tiger example shows, “seeing” an image in our mind’s eye is not the same as seeing it on the page. Daniel Reisberg, a professor emeritus of psychology at Reed College in Oregon, calls this shift in perspective the “detachment gain”: the cognitive benefit we receive from putting a bit of distance between ourselves and the content of our minds.

When we do so, we can see more clearly what that content is made of—how many stripes are on the tiger, so to speak. This measure of space also allows us to activate our powers of recognition. We leverage these powers whenever we write down two or more ways to spell a word, seeking the one that “looks right.” The curious thing about this common practice is that we do tend to know immediately which spelling appears correct—indicating that this is knowledge we already possess but can’t access until it is externalized.

When a representation remains inside our heads, there’s no mystery about what it signifies; it’s our thought, and so “there can be neither doubt nor ambiguity about what is intended,

One reads off the sketch more information than was invested in its making. This becomes possible because when we put down on paper dots, lines, and other marks, new combinations and relationships among these elements are created that we could not have anticipated or planned for. We discover them in the sketch as it is being made - the backtalk of self-generated sketches.

When setting out to generate new ideas, we should begin with only the most general plan or goal; early on in the process, vagueness and ambiguity are more generative than explicitness or definition. Think of the task not in linear terms—tracing a direct line from point A to point B—but rather as a cycle: think, draw, look, rethink, redraw.

Across the board, in every field, experts are distinguished by their skillful use of externalization; as cognitive scientist David Kirsh has written of video game virtuosos, “Better players use the world better.” Skilled artists, scientists, designers, and architects don’t limit themselves to the two-dimensional space of the page. They regularly reach for three-dimensional models, which offer additional advantages: users can manipulate the various elements of the model, view the model from multiple perspectives, and orient their own bodies to the model, bringing the full complement of their “embodied resources” to bear on thinking about the task and the challenges it presents.

David Kirsh has made close observations of the way architects use physical mock-ups of the buildings they are designing; when they interact with the models they have constructed, he maintains, “they are literally thinking with these objects.” Interactions carried out in three dimensions, he says, “enable forms of thought that would be hard if not impossible to reach otherwise.” Kirsh calls this the “cognitive extra” that comes from moving concrete objects through physical space.

The final step of Watson and Crick’s long journey of discovery demonstrates the value of what psychologists call interactivity: the physical manipulation of tactile objects as an aid to solving abstract problems.

Outside the architect’s studio—or the kindergarten classroom—interactivity is not widely employed; our assumption that the brain operates like a computer has led us to believe that we need only input the necessary information in order to generate the correct solution. But human minds don’t work that way, observes Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, a professor of psychology at Kingston University in the UK. The computer analogy “implies that simulating a situation in your head while you think is equivalent to living through that situation while you think,” he writes. “Our research strongly challenges this assumption. We show instead that people’s thoughts, choices, and insights can be transformed by physical interaction with things. In other words, thinking with your brain alone—like a computer does—is not equivalent to thinking with your brain, your eyes, and your hands.

Interact physically with the properties of the problem. Interactivity “inevitably benefits performance,” he reports. This holds true for a wide variety of problem types—from basic arithmetic, to complex reasoning, to planning for future events, to solving creative “insight” problems. People who are permitted to manipulate concrete tokens representing elements of the problem to be solved bear less cognitive load and enjoy increased working memory.

They learn more, and are better able to transfer their learning to new situations. They are less likely to engage in “symbol pushing,” or moving numbers and words around in the absence of understanding. They are more motivated and engaged, and experience less anxiety. They even arrive at correct answers more quickly. (As the title of one of Vallée-Tourangeau’s studies puts it, “Moves in the World Are Faster Than Moves in the Head.”)

Manipulating real-world objects in order to solve an intellectual problem is regarded as childish or uncouth

We often ignore or dismiss these loops, preferring to focus on what goes on in the brain—but this incomplete perspective leads us to misunderstand our own minds. Writes Clark, “It is because we are so prone to think that the mental action is all, or nearly all, on the inside, that we have developed sciences and images of the mind that are, in a fundamental sense, inadequate.” We will “begin to see ourselves aright,” he suggests, only when we recognize the role of material things in our thinking—when we correct the errors and omissions of the brainbound perspective, and “put brain, body, and world together again.

Want to innovate?!

The Extended Mind - Thinking with the space of Ideas

Important terms:

Excerpts:

Graph View

Table of Contents

Backlinks

Want to innovate?!

The Extended Mind - Thinking with the space of Ideas

Related notes:

Important terms:

Excerpts:

Graph View

Table of Contents

Backlinks