Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? One answer is that it stops at the skull, but the extended mind hypothesis (Clark, 1998) argues that the human mind extends into our body, out into the physical world and also merges with the minds of other people.
In other words, the hypothesis believes that we think with our bodies.
One striking example from research found that people with Botox, and therefore restricted facial expressions, become slower at reading and understanding sentences that express emotional events (Havas, 2010).
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So how can teachers harness this ability to think beyond the brain? What sort of things should they look to introduce in the classroom?
1. Encourage hand gestures and fidgeting
We use hand gestures more when articulating new ideas and, in fact, hand gestures can often be one or two steps ahead of our thoughts, helping to shape the emerging idea. Even very low-intensity micromovements such as fidgeting create the conditions for an expansive state of mind by modulating physiological arousal (Paul, 2021).
Interestingly, both gesturing and fidgeting are often derided, missing the fact that they are leading towards a newly articulated idea. In fact, there’s strong evidence that gestures help with meaningful learning.
There are four types of gestures that help us explain things: beat, deictic, iconic and metaphoric. Beat gestures emphasise certain points, perhaps with the up and down flick of a hand. Deictic gestures are essentially pointing movements used to indicate an object or a person, a direction, a location. Iconic gestures are in some way perceptually similar to the thing you are talking about, such as holding out a flat hand while talking about a flat surface. And finally, metaphoric gestures represent abstract ideas, such as a maths teacher holding one hand steady while she moves the other hand toward it as she discusses the concept of approaching the limit.
2. Focus on physical surroundings
We can extend the mind further - into our physical surroundings. The context of being in nature is cognitively effortless because the brain evolved to process this information. This undemanding context frees up space for creative thinking - it’s as though your mind can expand into the surroundings.
It may not be possible to conduct every lesson walking through a forest, but there are environmental changes within our control in the classroom.
Teachers could experiment with music and natural sounds, move students around to work in groups, have them sit upon their tables, get them to personalise their learning space - let’s try these things out and see how it affects our students’ expanded minds.
3. Manipulate physical objects
The mind can also extend itself into the manipulation of physical objects. Just imagine the way that dissecting an organ while you explain its function is enhancing a student’s thought process. That object is part of the student’s extended mind - palpably affecting their ability to think about the subject at hand.
This doesn’t need to be overly technical. Card sorts, Post-its and whiteboards can all be used as a physical extension of a student’s mind. These physical extensions become part of the thought process. Even now, as I write this, it’s not simply a process of downloading thoughts from my brain onto the screen. I read what I have written and redraft it - the text has become an extension of my mind.
4. Interactive thinking and learning
Finally, there’s the way in which our extended mind is affected by other people. A traditional view might be that of a teacher downloading information into her students’ brains. But the philosopher Andy Clark argues that our thoughts emanate from the brain out into the minds of others and back again, creating productive learning loops.
This throws up a much more interactive, social idea of thinking and learning. Carl Wieman, a professor of physics at Stanford, touched on this when trying to figure out why his postgraduate students quickly seemed to “think like a physicist” in a way that none of his undergraduate students could. He discovered that the informal social interactions - chatting, discussing, spending time with each other - was the key to the change in the thinking of his postgraduates (Wieman, 2019).
We often think about a clear social time, intellectual time divide in our schools - break time is social and class time is intellectual. But teenage minds are constantly extended into the group, this doesn’t switch off in the classroom. So, let’s use it to help them to think with other people through storytelling, debating, teaching each other, discussion, collaborative seating arrangements, even going off-topic in interesting ways while chatting.
Teacher Sarah Jones recently tweeted about her use of in-class retrieval practice “because it builds the collective memory and experience of the class-part of the narrative of what we all have done and know”. Shared remembering is a great example of students’ minds extending into the collective and back again to consolidate learning.
The importance of the physical brain
But can we really extend the mind beyond the brain? Doesn’t it all eventually come back to neural processing?
Think about how you would answer the question, “what makes a car go?” Your first thought might be, “the engine”. But what about the drive shaft? The human who turns the key? The fuel? The network of roads? The smartphone that tells you how to navigate?
Arguing that the mind is nothing more than the physical brain is like arguing that an engine is all you need to make a car go. Opening up to the idea of the extended mind is to open up a myriad of opportunities to help our students think in effective ways.
Aidan Harvey-Craig is head of psychology at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire and also runs its wellbeing centre. He is the author of the book 18 Wellbeing Hacks for Students: using psychology’s secrets to survive and thrive, and creator of the online student wellbeing ambassador programme. He tweets @psychologyhack
