143: The Extended Mind with Annie Murphy Paul

We don’t just think with our brains. What?! How can that possibly be true? I struggled to understand it myself for quite a while, until I read the fabulous English philosopher Andy Clark’s description of what happens when someone writes, which essentially involves ideas flowing down the arm and hand, through the pen and ink, across the paper, up to your eyes, and back to your brain. The ideas don’t literally flow, of course, but the process of writing alters the process of thinking - which is why research has shown that processing traumatic memories through journaling about them is more useful just thinking about them - the act of writing about them changes our interpretation of them in a way that just thinking about them doesn’t. The challenge with school-based learning, of course, is that it’s primarily concerned with the brain.  Our task is to remember facts and ideas so we can recount them when asked about them at a later time.  Children who fidget are told to sit still, when the research that Annie Murphy Paul cites in her new book The Extended Mind indicates that this instruction is entirely misplaced - fidgeting can be a way of managing excess energy, and movement can actually help us to remember things more effectively than we otherwise would. In this episode we learn many of the different ways that we our brains interact with the outside world to learn in ways that we might never have considered up to now. I think of this kind of learning as Full-Bodied Learning, and long before I’d read Annie’s book I had actually developed an entire module of content for the Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership on exactly this topic.  In the module we extend the ideas in today’s episode to support our children in using their full bodies to learn both in school and outside of school as well. You do have to be a member to access that specific content, but you can get a taste for similar kinds of tools that you can use with your child in the free You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop wh