Supersizing the Mind: The Science of Cognitive Extension

You enter your kitchen for a quick lunch: how is it exactly that your brain solves the problem “prepare lunch as efficiently as possible”?

Your brain effortlessly, almost instantaneously “assembles” a diverse mix of problem-solving resources on the spot. These “resources” can include knowledge, tools, or structures, and can be:

Mental: knowledge, experience, intuition
Physical: tools, environments, objects, visuals
Informational: instructions, diagrams, data
Biological: hands and fingers, limbs, the senses
Audio: sounds, songs, words
Social: relationships, communities

As you prepare your lunch, you are drawing on the informational resource of the printed recipe. But you may also lay out the ingredients you’ll need as you read, “storing” the sequence of actions you’ll take via their physical location. You may keep a count of how many eggs you’ve added by muttering under your breath, tracking this information using an auditory resource. You are also drawing on many mental resources, such as the meanings of the words you’re reading, common cooking conventions, and basic math to convert from liters to cups. You may ask your roommate where the seasonings are, or call your mom for her famous roasting tips, which are social resources. And of course, you are using your biological resource, your body, every step of the way to accomplish all of the above.

It’s very difficult for us to appreciate what an astonishing feat all this is, because we do it effortlessly. We are inventing, on the fly, not only new ways of using these resources, but new ways of using them together. Our brains have evolved to treat the external world not only as a problem space, but as a solution space.

What’s important to notice about this process is that it is soft assembly. “Soft” because the ways in which we use these resources are not fixed. Our brain brings them together in complex, yet elegant relationships that can change day to day, or even minute to minute. By soft-assembling our tools, instead of physically attaching them together or building a “cooking machine,” we remain far more flexible. We are able to explore trajectories through “thinking space” that wouldn’t be available through rigid approaches.

THREE PRINCIPLES OF COGNITIVE EXTENSION

We are in the midst of a revolution in cognitive science. One of the most exciting frontiers is a shift in our understanding from “embodied cognition” (the body is essential for thinking), to “extended cognition.”

Here’s a definition:

Extended cognition (n): a process centered in and managed by the biological brain, which includes outward loops into the external environment as essential functional parts; a network of problem-solving activities that promiscuously criss-crosses the boundaries of brain, body, and world.

We are beginning to understand ourselves not just as minds in brains in bodies. Our minds are also directly embodied in the external world itself. Our thinking is both grounded in the environment, and distributed throughout it.

This article is my summary and interpretation of the book Supersizing the Mind (Affiliate Link), by Andy Clark. It is a bold (though very long and dense) trek deep into the heart of the most recent research in situated cognition, robotics, child development, and emergence, among other fields.

The science of cognitive extension as it currently stands operates on three core principles:

Principle of Ecological Assembly
Principle of Cognitive Impartiality
Principle of Motor Deference

#1 PRINCIPLE OF ECOLOGICAL ASSEMBLY

The first principle states that our minds are ecological control systems. We are natural-born environmental engineers. We achieve goals not by micromanaging every detail, but by relying on existing structures in the environment around us.

Consider what makes a fish an incredibly efficient swimming machine. The fish is not a good swimmer in isolation. It has evolved to adapt its swimming behaviors to the pools of kinetic energy found in its environment: swirls, eddies, vortices, currents, tides, waves, etc.

The reason this is environmental engineering, not just adaptation, is that it includes both external events (an unexpected swirl or rock in the river) and self-generated ones (a well-timed flap of the tail). It is the environment and the fish together that make up the swimming machine.

As humans, we have far greater abilities to shape our environment, which we’ll discuss later.