Nietzsche, he reminds us, wrote that we should “sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.” — *location: 56* ^ref-21813 --- For humans these parts include, most notably, the feelings and movements of our bodies; the physical spaces in which we learn and work; and the other minds with which we interact—our classmates, colleagues, teachers, supervisors, friends. Sometimes all three elements come together in especially felicitous fashion, as they did for the brilliant intellectual team of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The two psychologists carried out much of their groundbreaking work on heuristics and biases—the human mind’s habitual shortcuts and distortions—by talking and walking together, through the bustling streets of Jerusalem or along the rolling hills of the California coast. “I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos,” Kahneman has said. — *location: 67* ^ref-57854 --- entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone. — *location: 166* ^ref-49456 --- The human brain is limited in its ability to pay attention, limited in its capacity to remember, limited in its facility with abstract concepts, and limited in its power to persist at a challenging task. — *location: 178* ^ref-36513 --- The gap between what our biological brains are capable of, and what modern life demands, is large and getting larger each day. With every experimental discovery, the divide between the scientific account of the world and our intuitive “folk” understanding grows more pronounced. With every terabyte of data swelling humanity’s store of knowledge, our native faculties are further outstripped. With every twist of complexity added to the world’s problems, the naked brain becomes more unequal to the task of solving them. — *location: 187* ^ref-62453 --- The introduction of the ENIAC was not just a milestone in the history of technology. It was a turning point in the story of how we understand ourselves. In its early days, Mauchly and Eckert’s invention was frequently compared to a human brain. Newspaper and magazine articles described the ENIAC as a “giant electronic brain,” a “robot brain,” an “automatic brain,” and a “brain machine.” But before long, the analogy got turned around. It became a commonplace that the brain is like a computer. Indeed, the “cognitive revolution” that would sweep through American universities in the 1950s and 1960s was premised on the belief that the brain could be understood as a flesh-and-blood computing machine. — *location: 254* ^ref-31810 --- Dweck’s idea, which she initially called “the incremental theory of intelligence,” would eventually become known to the world as the “growth mindset”: the belief that concerted mental effort could make people smarter, just as vigorous physical effort could make people stronger. — *location: 281* ^ref-29974 --- These two metaphors—brain as computer and brain as muscle—share some key assumptions. To wit: the mind is a discrete thing that is sealed in the skull; this discrete thing determines how well people are able to think; this thing has stable properties that can easily be measured, compared, and ranked. — *location: 296* ^ref-44009 --- For centuries, brains had been likened to machines—to whichever appliance of the time appeared most advanced: a hydraulic pump, a mechanical clock, a steam engine, a telegraph machine. — *location: 299* ^ref-56490 >As with UFOs --- The belief that some core quantity of intelligence resides within each of our heads fits with a pattern of thought, apparently universal in humans, that psychologists call “essentialism”—that is, the conviction that each entity we encounter possesses an inner essence that makes it what it is. “Essentialism shows up in every society that has been studied,” notes Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom. “It appears to be a basic component of how we think about the world.” — *location: 315* ^ref-36677 --- Set beside the brain-as-computer and brain-as-muscle metaphors, it’s apparent that the brain as magpie is a very different kind of analogy, with very different implications for how mental processes operate. For one thing: thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. For another: the kinds of materials available to “think with” affect the nature and quality of the thought that can be produced. And last: the capacity to think well—that is, to be intelligent—is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them. — *location: 339* ^ref-56539 --- David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, makes a useful distinction between “biologically primary” and “biologically secondary” abilities. Human beings, he points out, are born ready to learn certain things: how to speak the language of the local community, how to find their way around a familiar landscape, how to negotiate the challenges of small-group living. We are not born to learn the intricacies of calculus or the counterintuitive rules of physics; we did not evolve to understand the workings of the financial markets or the complexities of global climate change. And yet we dwell in a world where such biologically secondary capacities hold the key to advancement, even survival. The demands of the modern environment have now met, and exceeded, the limits of the biological brain. — *location: 355* ^ref-45132 --- Continual engagement with the mental rigors of modern life—along with improving nutrition, rising living conditions, and reduced exposure to infectious disease and other pathogens—produced a century-long climb in average IQ score, as measured by intelligence tests taken by people all over the globe. But this upward trajectory is now leveling off. In recent years, IQ scores have stopped rising, or have even begun to drop, in countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, and Britain. Some researchers suggest that we have now pushed our mental equipment as far as it can go. — *location: 362* ^ref-16635 --- It may be that “our brains are already working at near-optimal capacity,” note Nicholas Fitz and Peter Reiner, writing in the journal Nature. Efforts to wrest more intelligence from this organ, they add, “bump up against the hard limits of neurobiology.” — *location: 366* ^ref-18982 --- A team of scientists who set out to evaluate all the peer-reviewed intervention studies cited on the websites of leading brain-training companies could find “little evidence” within those studies “that training improves everyday cognitive performance.” — *location: 374* ^ref-40707 --- Engaging in brain training does improve users’ performance—but only on exercises highly similar to the ones they’ve been practicing. — *location: 375* ^ref-16599 >No transferrence --- The best way—and, at least for now, the only way—for us to get smarter is to get better at thinking outside the brain. — *location: 382* ^ref-27647 --- Embodied cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition: each of these takes up a particular aspect of the extended mind, investigating how our thinking is extended by our bodies, by the spaces in which we learn and work, and by our interactions with other people. — *location: 407* ^ref-55482 --- Traditional notions of what makes an expert are highly brainbound, focused on internal, individual effort (think of the late psychologist Anders Ericsson’s famous finding that mastery in any field requires “10,000 hours” of practice). The literature on the extended mind suggests a different view: experts are those who have learned how best to marshal and apply extra-neural resources to the task before them. — *location: 429* ^ref-35652 --- We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts. — *location: 448* ^ref-34025 --- What we do know is that interoceptive awareness can be deliberately cultivated. A series of simple exercises can put us in touch with the messages emanating from within, giving us access to knowledge that we already possess but that is ordinarily excluded from consciousness—knowledge about ourselves, about other people, and about the worlds through which we move. Once we establish contact with this informative internal source, we can make wise use of what it has to tell us: to make sounder decisions, for example; to respond more resiliently to challenges and setbacks; to savor more fully the intensity of our emotions while also managing them more skillfully; and to connect to others with more sensitivity and insight. The heart, and not the head, leads the way. — *location: 505* ^ref-17973 --- Interoception is, simply stated, an awareness of the inner state of the body. — *location: 478* ^ref-40531 --- The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. (One psychologist has called this guide our “somatic rudder.”) — *location: 531* ^ref-697 --- The body not only grants us access to information that is more complex than what our conscious minds can accommodate. It also marshals this information at a pace that is far quicker than our conscious minds can handle. — *location: 555* ^ref-59819 --- HERE, THEN, is a reason to hone our interoceptive sense: people who are more aware of their bodily sensations are better able to make use of their non-conscious knowledge. — *location: 559* ^ref-21696 --- Mindfulness meditation is one way of enhancing such awareness. — *location: 560* ^ref-57734 --- One particular component appears to be especially effective; this is the activity that often starts off a meditation session, known as the “body scan.” — *location: 562* ^ref-1150 --- Research shows that the simple act of giving a name to what we’re feeling has a profound effect on the nervous system, immediately dialing down the body’s stress response. — *location: 580* ^ref-56747 --- Brain-scanning studies offer further evidence of the calming effect of affect labeling: simply naming what is felt reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain structure involved in processing fear and other strong emotions. Meanwhile, thinking in a more involved way about feelings and the experiences that evoked them actually produces greater activity in the amygdala. — *location: 585* ^ref-63788 >Name feelings but dont ruminate --- Psychologists recommend keeping two things in mind as we try it out. The first is to be as prolific as possible: the UCLA scientists reported that study participants who came up with a larger number of terms for what they were feeling subsequently experienced a greater reduction in their physiological arousal. The second is to be as granular as possible: that is, to choose words that are precise and specific when describing what we feel. — *location: 589* ^ref-56387 --- We can clarify and codify the body’s messages by keeping an “interoceptive journal”—a record of the choices we make, and how we felt when we made them. Each journal entry has three parts. First, a brief account of the decision we’re facing. Second, a description—as detailed and precise as possible—of the internal sensations we experience as we contemplate the various options available. An interoceptive journal asks us to consider the paths that lie before us, one by one, and take note of how we feel as we imagine choosing one path over another. The third section of the journal entry is a notation of the choice on which we ultimately settle, and a description of any further sensations that arise upon our making this final selection. — *location: 647* ^ref-52746 --- every action we take requires the expenditure of scarce, precious energy. On a level below awareness, we’re constantly keeping tabs on how much energy we have on hand and how much energy we will need to take the actions the world demands of us. Interoception acts as a continually updated gauge of our present status. Its cues let us know when we can push ourselves and when we have to give ourselves a rest. They help us match our effort to the magnitude of the challenge and pace ourselves so that we can see it through to the end. — *location: 666* ^ref-3969 --- The body and its interoceptive capacities can also play another role: as the coach who pushes us to pursue our goals, to persevere in the face of adversity, to return from setbacks with renewed energy. In a word, an awareness of our interoception can help us become more resilient. — *location: 660* ^ref-64068 --- Mental activity, like any other we undertake, requires the mobilization and management of energy; indeed, the brain consumes fully 20 percent of the body’s energy supply. The ability to allocate our internal resources effectively in tackling mental challenges is a capacity researchers call “cognitive resilience.” — *location: 715* ^ref-34313 --- Stanley has found that the most cognitively resilient soldiers pay close attention to their bodily sensations at the early stage of a challenge, when signs of stress are just beginning to accumulate. She instructs her workshop participants to do the same, using mindfulness techniques similar to the ones described by Jon Kabat-Zinn. By remaining alert to these preliminary signals, she says, we can avoid being taken by surprise and then overreacting, entering a state of physiological arousal from which it is hard to come down. — *location: 732* ^ref-799 --- Stanley also demonstrates for her students a technique she calls “shuttling”—moving one’s focus back and forth between what is transpiring internally and what is going on outside the body. Such shifts are useful in ensuring that we are neither too caught up in external events nor too overwhelmed by our internal feelings, but instead occupy a place of balance that incorporates input from both realms. — *location: 737* ^ref-40407 --- AN AWARENESS OF our interoceptive signals can assist us in making sounder decisions and in rebounding more readily from stressful situations. It can also allow us to enjoy a richer and more satisfying emotional life. Research finds that people who are more interoceptively attuned feel their emotions more intensely, while also managing their emotions more adeptly. This is so because interoceptive sensations form the building blocks of even our most subtle and nuanced emotions: affection, admiration, gratitude; sorrow, longing, regret; irritation, envy, resentment. People who are more interoceptively aware can interact more intimately and more skillfully with the emotions that interoceptive sensations help construct. — *location: 744* ^ref-21166 --- Research finds that people who are more interoceptively attuned feel their emotions more intensely, while also managing their emotions more adeptly. This is so because interoceptive sensations form the building blocks of even our most subtle and nuanced emotions: affection, admiration, gratitude; sorrow, longing, regret; irritation, envy, resentment. People who are more interoceptively aware can interact more intimately and more skillfully with the emotions that interoceptive sensations help construct. — *location: 746* ^ref-26796 --- The pioneering American psychologist William James deduced this more than a century ago. Imagine you meet a bear in the woods, James wrote. Your heart pounds, your palms sweat, your legs break into a run—why? It might seem that it’s because your brain generates a feeling of fear, and then tells your body to get moving. But James suggested that it works the other way around: we feel fear because our heart is racing, because our palms are sweating, because our legs are propelling us forward. — *location: 754* ^ref-12520 --- Psychologists who study the construction of emotion call this practice “cognitive reappraisal.” It involves sensing and labeling an interoceptive sensation, as we’ve learned to do here, and then “reappraising” it—reinterpreting it in an adaptive way. We can, for example, reappraise “nervousness” as “excitement.” Consider the interoceptive sensations that accompany these two emotions: a racing heart, sweaty palms, a fluttering stomach. The feelings are almost identical; it’s the meaning we assign to them that makes them, variously, an ordeal to be dreaded or a thrill to be enjoyed. — *location: 766* ^ref-40738 --- When interacting with other people, we subtly and unconsciously mimic their facial expressions, gestures, posture, and vocal pitch. Then, via the interoception of our own bodies’ signals, we perceive what the other person is feeling because we feel it in ourselves. — *location: 807* ^ref-30730 --- Craig maintains that interoceptive awareness is the basis of the “material me,” the source of our most fundamental knowledge of ourselves. Because our hearts beat, because our lungs expand, because our muscles stretch and our organs rumble—and because all these sensations, unique to us, have carried on without interruption since the day of our birth—we know what it is to be one continuous self, to be ourselves and no other. Interoception, says Craig, is nothing less than “the feeling of being alive.” — *location: 859* ^ref-15182 --- Moderate-intensity exercise, practiced for a moderate length of time, improves our ability to think both during and immediately after the activity. The positive changes documented by scientists include an increase in the capacity to focus attention and resist distraction; greater verbal fluency and cognitive flexibility; enhanced problem-solving and decision-making abilities; and increased working memory, as well as more durable long-term memory for what is learned. The proposed mechanisms by which these changes occur include heightened arousal (as Kahneman speculated), increased blood flow to the brain, and the release of a number of neurochemicals, which increase the efficiency of information transmission in the brain and which promote the growth of neurons, or brain cells. The beneficial mental effects of moderately intense activity have been shown to last for as long as two hours after exercise ends. — *location: 987* ^ref-14875 --- we should be figuring out how to incorporate bursts of physical activity into the work day and the school day—which means rethinking how we approach our breaks. Lunch breaks, coffee breaks, downtime between tasks or meetings: all become occasions to use exercise to maneuver our brains into an optimally functioning state. — *location: 997* ^ref-50889 --- Scientists speculate that the phenomenon of transient hypofrontality may underlie all kinds of altered states, from dreaming to drug trips—but intense exercise may be the most reliable way to induce it. — *location: 1029* ^ref-19903 --- Hypo means low or diminished, and frontality refers to the frontal region of the brain—the part that plans, analyzes, and critiques, and that usually maintains firm control over our thoughts and behavior. When all of our resources are devoted to managing the demands of intense physical activity, however, the influence of the prefrontal cortex is temporarily reduced. In this loose hypofrontal mode, ideas and impressions mingle more freely; unusual and unexpected thoughts arise. — *location: 1025* ^ref-56621 --- movements engage a process called procedural memory (memory of how to do something, such as how to ride a bike) that is distinct from declarative memory (memory of informational content, such as the text of a speech). When we connect movement with information, we activate both types of memory, and our recall is more accurate as a result—a phenomenon that researchers call the “enactment effect.” — *location: 1048* ^ref-38604 --- The research on using movement to enhance thinking identifies four types of helpful motion: congruent movements, novel movements, self-referential movements, and metaphorical movements. — *location: 1117* ^ref-49268 --- The first of these, congruent movements, express in physical form the content of a thought. With the motions of our bodies, we enact the meaning of a fact or concept. Congruent movements are an effective way to reinforce still tentative or emerging knowledge by introducing a corporeal component into the process of understanding and remembering. — *location: 1118* ^ref-9430 --- Another kind of physical action capable of advancing our thinking is novel movements: movements that introduce us to an abstract concept via a bodily experience we haven’t had before. — *location: 1148* ^ref-9419 --- YET ANOTHER TYPE of motion with the capacity to improve the way we think is self-referential movements: movements in which we bring ourselves—in particular, our bodies—into the intellectual enterprise. — *location: 1175* ^ref-5719 --- Thinking and learning with our bodies takes advantage of humans’ fundamentally egocentric mindset. We’ve evolved to understand events and ideas in terms of how they relate to us, not from some neutral or impartial perspective. — *location: 1192* ^ref-13545 --- Remember Friedrich Nietzsche, from earlier in our journey. “Only thoughts which come from walking have any value,” he maintained. Søren Kierkegaard felt similarly. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” remarked the Danish philosopher. Walking is “gymnastics for the mind,” observed the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am unable to reflect when I am not walking; the moment I stop, I think no more, and as soon as I am again in motion, my head resumes its workings,” averred the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne lamented that his thoughts often came to him when he was on the move, at moments when “I have nothing to jot them down on”; this was wont to happen “especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.” — *location: 1265* ^ref-11996 --- “Walking,” the essay by philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau first delivered at the Concord Lyceum in 1851. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,” he declared. That same year, Thoreau expanded on the theme in his journal. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” he exclaimed. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” — *location: 1280* ^ref-62595 --- ONE FINAL CATEGORY of thought-enhancing movements encompasses those that enact an analogy, whether explicit or implicit. The language we use is full of metaphors that borrow from our experience as embodied creatures; metaphorical movements reverse-engineer this process, putting the body through the motions as a way of prodding the mind into the state the metaphor describes. — *location: 1231* ^ref-10997 --- Gesture can mentally prime a word so that the right term comes to our lips. When people are prevented from gesturing, they talk less fluently; their speech becomes halting because their hands are no longer able to supply them with the next word, and the next. Not being able to gesture has other deleterious effects: without gesture to help our mental processes along, we remember less useful information, we solve problems less well, and we are less able to explain our thinking. Far from tagging along as speech’s clumsy companion, gesture represents the leading edge of our thought. — *location: 1357* ^ref-29614 --- In one experiment, for example, a group of college students was asked to learn about a set of “stereoisomers”—chemical compounds that feature the same number of atoms but that differ from one another in the way the atoms are spatially arranged. The extent to which the undergraduates made gesture-speech mismatches while learning “predicted their ability to profit from instruction,” writes Goldin-Meadow, who was lead author of the study. “Namely, the more they expressed correct conceptual information in gesture that they did not verbalize in speech, the more they were subsequently able to learn.” When our words and our movements diverge, it’s our gestures that signal what happens next. — *location: 1425* ^ref-58547 --- We like the capacity to see long distances in many directions from a protected perch, aspects that geographer Jay Appleton memorably named “prospect” and “refuge.” — *location: 1706* ^ref-57155 --- More than a century ago, psychologist William James drew a distinction that bears closely on our understanding of nature’s restorative powers. There are two kinds of attention, wrote James in his 1890 book The Principles of Psychology: “voluntary” and “passive.” Voluntary attention takes effort; we must continually direct and redirect our focus as we encounter an onslaught of stimuli or concentrate hard on a task. Navigating an urban environment—with its hard surfaces, sudden movements, and loud, sharp noises—requires voluntary attention. Passive attention, by contrast, is effortless: diffuse and unfocused, it floats from object to object, topic to topic. This is the kind of attention evoked by nature, with its murmuring sounds and fluid motions; psychologists working in the tradition of James call this state of mind “soft fascination.” — *location: 1754* ^ref-3114 --- “Natural scenery,” wrote landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, “employs the mind without fatigue and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.” — *location: 1693* ^ref-1386 --- our near-universal struggles with attention and focus (not to mention motivation and engagement) suggest that we ought to pay more heed to the supply side of our attentional economy—that is, not simply drawing down our mental resources but also ensuring their regular replenishment. — *location: 1764* ^ref-59399 --- Biophilic design is an emerging discipline, but a handful of studies have begun to suggest that working and learning in buildings inspired by nature can grant some of the same benefits for cognition as actually being outdoors. — *location: 1894* ^ref-12512 --- Scientists theorize that the “soft fascination” evoked by natural scenes engages what’s known as the brain’s “default mode network.” When this network is activated, we enter a loose associative state in which we’re not focused on any one particular task but are receptive to unexpected connections and insights. — *location: 1978* ^ref-60912 --- The time we spend scrutinizing our small screens leads us to think small, even as it enlarges and aggrandizes our sense of self. Nature’s vastness—the unfathomable scale of the ocean, of the mountains, of the night sky—has the opposite effect. It makes us feel tiny, even as it opens wide our sense of the possible. It does all this through an emotion that we confront most commonly in nature: awe. — *location: 1994* ^ref-17320 --- The experience of awe, Keltner and other researchers have found, prompts a predictable series of psychological changes. We become less reliant on preconceived notions and stereotypes. We become more curious and open-minded. And we become more willing to revise and update our mental “schemas”: the templates we use to understand ourselves and the world. The experience of awe has been called “a reset button” for the human brain. — *location: 2002* ^ref-64477 --- Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has led much of the recent research on awe; he calls it an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.” — *location: 1997* ^ref-4469 --- In behavioral terms, people act more prosocially and more altruistically following an experience of awe. — *location: 2010* ^ref-41783 --- But there is one all-encompassing encounter with the natural world that, to date, has been experienced by only a handful of our contemporaries: the view of Earth from outer space, as glimpsed by astronauts. So emotionally overwhelming is this sight—and so consistent are the psychological consequences for the few who have seen it—that scientists have given it a name: “the overview effect.” “If somebody’d said before the flight, ‘Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?’ I would have said, ‘No, no way,’ ” recalled Alan Shepard, an American astronaut who walked on the moon in 1971. “But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried.” — *location: 2019* ^ref-22501 --- “The spirituality of the architecture there was so inspiring that I was able to do intuitive thinking far beyond any I had done in the past,” Salk would later write. “Under the influence of that historic place I intuitively designed the research that I felt would result in a vaccine for polio. I returned to my laboratory in Pittsburgh to validate my concepts and found that they were correct.” — *location: 2060* ^ref-42848 ---