Annie is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing. She is the author of Origins and The Cult of Personality, and her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 2.6 million people. A graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is currently a Learning Sciences Exchange Fellow at New America.



Annie-Murphy-Paul.jpg

Annie Murphy Paul

<h4
 id="h-annie-murphy-paul-is-a-journalist-and-author-whose-books-include-origins-how-the-nine-months-before-birth-shape-the-rest-of-our-lives-the-cult-of-personality-testing-and-the-extended-mind-the-power-of-thinking-outside-the-brain-in-part-2-of-this-interview-by-uday-kumar-she-speaks-more-about-interoception-and-self-awareness-and-how-gestures-and-physical-expressions-are-as-important-as-verbal-communication-in-helping-our-children-to-learn">
 ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
 is a journalist and author whose books include
 Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives,
 The Cult of Personality Testing, and The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. In
 part 2 of this interview by
 UDAY KUMAR, she
 speaks more about interoception and self-awareness, and how gestures and
 physical expressions are as important as verbal communication in helping our
 children to learn.
</h4>

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<h3 class="has-text-align-center" id="h-how-to-nurture-your-children-s-inner-strengths-part-2">
 HOW TO NURTURE YOUR CHILDREN’S INNER STRENGTHS – PART 2
</h3>

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 Q: As you do research on the extended mind, what do you think
 about the
 role of mirror neurons?



 AMP: I don’t
 refer to mirror neurons. I am not convinced that we know enough about how they
 operate and how central they are to the processes of empathy and
 communication. And I don’t think it is necessary to understand. I say this in
 the book: Humans naturally engage in mimicry, subtle automatic miming of each
 other, when talking face to face. It’s by making those expressions and
 gestures, and by assuming the postures of the other person, that we then read
 off our own bodies what those postures and expressions make us feel. That’s
 how we get access to what another person is feeling and thinking. Research has
 found that people who are more attuned to their own internal signals can be
 more empathetic because they then feel more acutely the signals they read from
 the other person. I am fascinated by processes like this in which humans
 bridge the divide between us, so we are not as separate as we think we are. So
 in my case I didn’t feel the need to draw in the research about mirror
 neurons.



 Q: You also touch upon sensing, labeling and verbalizing of
 emotions. One
 of the core practices of many meditation systems, including Heartfulness, is
 journaling at the end of a meditation sessions.



 AMP: Oh,
 interesting!



 Q: We observe ourselves at the physical, mental, emotional, and
 spiritual
 levels, and train ourselves in the vocabulary of journaling. We develop the
 capacity to have one eye always looking inward while looking at another
 person. We learn to become adept at witnessing through meditation and
 journaling.



 AMP: So, I would
 like to know your thoughts on any research you have come across on journaling
 and how it helps.



 That sounds like a really fruitful exercise, and it makes me think of two
 areas of research I write about in the book. One is around interoception.
 There is a suggestion that the most effective way to use those interoceptive
 sensations is to alternate or oscillate between attending to the outside world
 and attending to the inside world, so that you’re getting a constant infusion
 of information from both places. You don’t get lost in the internal
 sensations, but you are not so focused on the outside that you are not in tune
 to what is going on inside. That is an effective way to gain wisdom from both
 spheres. It sounds like journaling might facilitate that.


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<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The most effective way to use those
 interoceptive sensations is to
 alternate or oscillate between attending to the outside world and attending
 to the inside world, so that you’re getting a constant infusion of information
 from both places.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Second, it is very useful to take the mental contents of the brain and put
 them out into physical space, whether it is on a whiteboard, post-it notes, or
 a field notebook. I have read about how important field notebooks are to
 scientists. Although it may seem that a thought in our head and a thought we
 write down on a page are the same, they really are different – what
 psychologists call different affordances. We can do different things with
 them. Once we put a thought down on paper, we can inspect it with our senses.
 We can look at it, we can read it out loud, we can change it around, we can
 manipulate it in ways that remain inert when it is inside our head. In
 journaling, we externalize our thoughts and feelings so we can look at them in
 the moment, and we can also revisit them later in a way that is difficult to
 deal with if it remains in our head. I think it is a really productive and
 fruitful exercise.



 Q: My teacher says that when you are on a hike, if you look back
 every few
 yards, you won’t know how much ground you’ve covered, but when you come to
 the summit you will see the whole thing. He says it is exactly like that
 when you read your journal from three years ago. You see what thoughts you
 were getting in meditation, and how observant you were of your own inner
 environment. That’s a good way of gauging your own progress, of tracking
 your inner progress and figuring out how it is coming along.



 AMP: It is
 remarkable how difficult that is to do if you don’t write things down. It is
 hard to remember how you were three years ago. And that is a useful difference
 between an external resource like paper and pen or a computer file and our
 brains, which are always transmuting and changing our memory, often in a
 fruitful and productive way, but not in a way that keeps things as they were.
 We need something that is kept as it was so we can push against it or remember
 how things were, which is what the brain is not meant to be. The brain is not
 good at being a fixed and unchanging record of what happened.


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<div class="block-image">
 <figure>
 <img width="700" alt="nurture_children_strrength_part2" class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/nurture_children_strrength_part2_2_700x459_171b902801.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T10:54:55.930Z" />
 </figure>
</div>

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 Q: I am taking a jump here, but the better we are at our own
 interoceptive
 reading, the better we are at reading others, too. Not in terms of getting
 into their minds, but feeling what they are feeling, understanding what they
 are going through, and that’s how we can communicate better with people. It
 starts with “me,” but if we are honest with our own changes, then it
 radiates outward in concentric circles.



 AMP: I think that
 is absolutely true, in a way that if we stayed locked inside our own head we
 wouldn’t be able to make that connection with other people.



 Q: Can you talk a little bit about your research around
 meditators and the
 ultimatum game?



 AMP: I was just
 fascinated by some research I came across that seemed to push against the very
 common and old idea in Western culture that it’s the brain that is rational
 and the body is an unruly, irrational animal-like entity, and the rational
 brain controls this unruly body. What was so fascinating to me about the
 research on the ultimatum game is that the body can be more rational than the
 brain.



 In the experiment, groups of participants were asked to play the ultimatum
 game, where there are partners. One partner has control of the kitty of money,
 and they decide how much to offer their partner. The expectation of the
 partner generally is that growing out of reciprocity the other person will
 fairly divide the kitty in half.



 Often, however, the offering person gave their partner less than half and kept
 more for themselves.


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<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 
 What was so fascinating to me about 
 the research on the ultimatum game is that the body can be more
 rational than the brain.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 The rational thing for a recipient partner to do was to take whatever was
 offered: If they were given one dollar, that was one dollar they would not
 have had otherwise. But because they had a social expectation of reciprocity,
 often the people who were offered less than half, or less than what they
 thought they should get, refused it out of spite, almost to say, “If you are
 not going to give me what I think is fair, I am going to spite myself by not
 accepting that offer at all.” So that’s very irrational in a sense.


The research found that long-time meditators were:

<ol>
 <li>more likely to accept the low offer, to do the rational thing, and</li>
 <li>
 when they made that choice, the part of their brain called the insula, which
 is the interoceptive hub where all the sensations of the body are processed,
 was more active when they were contemplating this offer.
 </li>
</ol>


 And in people who did not meditate it was the prefrontal cortex that was
 active, which is the part of the brain that makes judgments and decides when
 something is fair or not. In other words, those people who were meditators,
 and probably more attuned to their bodies, were making a more rational choice
 in this economic game than people who were using their heads. I found that
 result really fascinating.



 Q: Me too! My interpretation of that study was that as you
 meditate, your
 ego becomes more humble and grounded. If you think of the ego as a spectrum,
 one extreme is humility and the other is arrogance, and you are somewhere in
 the middle. You may not think it’s fair, but you accept and move on.



 AMP: Right! I
 don’t have to put my big ego out in front and let it make all the decisions.


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<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Research now shows that gesture is similarly important for
 building
 vocabulary and later academic success.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div class="block-image">
 <figure>
 <img width="700" alt="nurture-children-strrength" class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/nurture_children_strrength_part2_3_700x459_75e2bf7deb.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T10:55:51.651Z" />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I would like to ask you more about gestures, especially for
 children. I
 was familiar with the word gap study by Hart and Risley, and I come from the
 Indian culture where everybody talks to their children all the time. What I
 hadn’t understood, and what you called out, was how important gestures are
 for a child. I still remember my grandmother and her gestures. She was very
 animated, and it did something. Can you talk about gestures and their role
 in our lives?



 AMP: That’s a
 lovely memory. It must have been very engaging to listen to her and watch her.
 You got the full helping at the start of your life!



 What’s interesting is the idea of a gesture gap. In the Hart and Risley study,
 they found that affluent children may hear as many as 30 million more words by
 the time they start school than less affluent children. This word gap has an
 enormous implication on how they perform in school. Research now shows that
 gesture is similarly important for building vocabulary and later academic
 success. We see a similar effect on how much affluent parents gesture with
 their children and how much less affluent parents gesture with their children.
 We can say there is a gesture gap along with a word gap, which may be just as
 significant.



 And the good news here is that with a little bit of training and awareness
 raising, parents from all socio-economic groups can employ more gestures in
 their interactions with their children. For example, when they are reading a
 book with their children, pointing with their finger, or making a cat gesture
 when they are talking about a cat. Those gestures made by parents lead
 children to make more gestures, and later on it shows up in a larger spoken
 vocabulary for the children.



 This is just another example of how we are so focused on verbal language that
 we don’t focus on gesture. Once we know the importance of gesture, however, we
 can bring it onto our parenting practices



 Q: Amazing! I love it because it shines the light of science
 onto something
 we take for granted.



 Thank you, I really appreciate it.



 AMP: Thank you
 for reading the book so carefully, and for having such thoughtful questions. I
 really appreciate it.


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<hr />

<h4 class="has-text-align-center">Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL</h4>

<hr />

The importance of gestures in communication

<h4
 id="h-annie-murphy-paul-is-a-journalist-and-author-who-writes-about-the-biological-and-social-sciences-her-books-include-origins-how-the-nine-months-before-birth-shape-the-rest-of-our-lives-the-cult-of-personality-testing-and-the-extended-mind-the-power-of-thinking-outside-the-brain-in-this-interview-by-uday-kumar-she-speaks-about-her-latest-book-and-the-implications-the-extended-mind-has-for-children-s-development-and-how-we-learn"
>
 ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
 is a journalist and author who writes about the biological and social
 sciences. Her books include
 Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives,
 The Cult of Personality Testing, and The Extended Mind: The Power of
 Thinking Outside the Brain. In this interview by
 UDAY KUMAR, she
 speaks about her latest book, and the implications the extended mind has for
 children’s development and how we learn.
</h4>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I want to congratulate you on The Extended Mind, because this topic is
 not for the faint-hearted. The more I read, the more I feel the pains and
 the tribulations you have gone through to stitch the whole story together
 and make sure it holds. How did you come across this? What gave you the
 signal that this is it?



 AMP: It was a long
 and winding road, as books sometimes are. I started out with the idea of
 writing about the science of learning. I focused on that in my magazine
 journalism for a while. It actually pretty closely followed the contours of my
 own life, because I had done the research and recording for
 Origins when I was pregnant with my second son. Then, when my sons
 were older and went to school, I became very interested in their learning, the
 instructions their teachers were giving them, how that all worked. I knew I
 wanted to write something about the science of learning, but I couldn’t seem
 to find a big idea that would pull it all together. The more I explored the
 science of learning, the more it felt like a collection of techniques and
 methods that were very useful, but there wasn’t a big idea for me as a writer,
 which I need to get excited and pull me through all that hard work.



 So I started widening the range of things I was reading, including venturing
 into philosophy and cognitive science, and that’s how I came across the 1998
 article by Clark and Chelmer on the idea of the “extended mind.” I don’t
 remember it being a lightbulb moment, but it eventually came to be the idea
 that pulled together all the threads. I felt they were in some way related,
 but I really could not put my finger on how. Things like embodied cognition
 and situated cognition, the way the physical place affects the way we think,
 and then socially-distributed cognition, the idea that we think with other
 people. All those things seem to be modelling how thinking happens, as opposed
 to the conventional idea that it all happens in the head.



 But until I encountered the idea of the extended mind, I didn’t have a name
 for what exactly I was talking about. And then from there, I wouldn’t say it
 all fell into place, but it gave the book the spine that I needed to string
 all those different pieces together.



 Q: How long was the project overall?



 AMP: It’s hard to
 say, because the science of learning stuff kind of morphed into what I was
 writing about the extended mind; the science of learning material flowed into
 the extended mind. I would say I was working on the book itself probably for
 five years, but I was writing articles, doing research, and reporting on the
 science of learning for five years before that. That really informed what I
 eventually wrote in The Extended Mind.



 Q: It shows! I am halfway through your book right now, and I am taking my
 time because I am also looking up the research studies that you are
 referring to, and in many ways it has made me a student of the subject. In
 Heartfulness there is the idea of moving from thinking to feeling – the
 journey of consciousness moves from thinking to feeling to being to a state
 of non-being. So I got onto your concept of the extended mind immediately.
 This is brilliant coming from the angle of science. In your book, there is a
 sentence, “The future lies in thinking outside the brain.” Do you want to
 talk a little about that – what you see from that standpoint when you talk
 about the future?



 AMP: Yes. I think
 I wrote that the future lies in thinking outside the brain in the context of
 how very complex our culture has become. As humans, we have created this
 incredibly complex culture and society, which in many ways is beyond the
 capacity of our biological brains to handle. We are interacting with this 21st
 century world, with all these enormous challenges and complexities, but we are
 still using our Stone Age brains, which evolved for very different kinds of
 purposes. Our brains didn’t evolve to deal with abstract concepts so much as
 they evolved to move the body, manipulate physical objects, relate to other
 people, and navigate through space.



 So these are the things the brain does easily, effortlessly and well. The more
 we can leverage those natural human strengths in the service of the things we
 ask the brain to do, at school, at work, and in our daily lives, the better
 those activities will go. But we have this bias – I really think it’s a
 prejudice – against thinking outside the brain. We almost fetishize the brain
 as a sacred organ, when it really has these built-in limits that are just a
 product of its status as a biologically-evolved organ, and they are shared by
 all of us. We are obsessed with individual differences and intelligence, when
 the main thing we should really be focusing on are the limits that are common
 to all of our brains, and thinking about how to transcend those limits,
 because we really do have to meet the challenges of the moment.



 I am thinking about climate change and political polarization. These huge
 challenges we have are so complex, and we need to meet these moments as
 individuals and as a society, and the biological brain is not really up to
 that job. So thinking outside the brain, drawing in these extra neural
 resources, and using them skillfully is our best shot. It’s humanity’s best
 shot to tackle the serious problems that face us.


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<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Thinking outside the brain, drawing in these extra neural resources,
 and using them skillfully is our best shot. It’s humanity’s best
 shot to tackle the serious problems that face us.
</h5>

<hr />

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<div>
 <figure>
 <img
 width="492"
 height="752"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_2_a1321980ea.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:22:22.669Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I intuitively get it. I think it is something we have lost over time. It
 comes to us naturally if we are receptive enough, and that’s where you talk
 about the whole idea of interoception, and how the body is actually
 communicating with the brain.



 In your work, as you were looking at and reading some of these things, was
 there any research or idea around the interplay of the heart and the mind? I
 am not talking about the pump, the organ, but the field of operation that we
 keep harmonizing with and with which we achieve a state of flow.



 AMP: Yes. That’s
 how I tried to structure the book. Extending with the body, then space, and
 our relationships with other people, I see it like a set of concentric circles
 that are rippling ever outward.



 Q: As a reader, how do I apply some of these basics as a busy professional
 in consulting, who has billed all the hours and still has work left to do?
 Do you have any tips you want to share with a working person on how to
 extend the mind?



 AMP: Let’s start
 with that one thought you just mentioned – interoception, the capacity for
 sensing the internal signals of our bodies. I think we have this notion in our
 society that to do difficult mental work means to push the body aside, to push
 it out of the picture, just be a brain working at a desk, at a screen. It is a
 mistake to think that that is how the best kind of thinking happens. It’s
 actually cutting out a huge source of human intelligence.



 What I would recommend for that consultant, to help with his busy schedule, is
 rather than powering through and gritting your teeth and ignoring the body,
 take a moment to settle back into your body, and remember you have a body.
 Tune into what your body is telling you. That can be a source of really
 valuable information that you will be missing out on if you are not in touch
 with it.



 In the book, I describe using a meditation exercise, the body scan, to pay
 close, non-judgmental and open-minded attention to all those sensations that
 are arising in the body all the time, but which we often in our busy-ness
 ignore or push away. Pay attention to those signals and, over time, you can
 learn what they are telling you, and how they can guide your behavior.



 It doesn’t have to take long. It’s just a matter of remembering to do that –
 checking in with your body rather than acting as if you are just a head, from
 the neck up.


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 <figure>
 <img
 width="600"
 height="392"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_3_6e5c6c730d.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:29:24.618Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>

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<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Experts are the ones who are out there mucking around in the real
 world, getting feedback in the real world, trying out new
 things, and figuring out how things work. That is another type
 of thinking outside the brain: where you’re not doing it all in here
 the head, you’re doing it out in the world.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I like that, and the body awareness exercise you share in the book. In
 Heartfulness, we have some of these exercises like guided relaxation that we
 teach to children. I had my kids do this through the pandemic before they
 started school, because they were not used to so much screen time. Also,
 observing which nostril is dominant at any point in time and seeing how it
 switches.



 I also read the part in your book where you talk about expertise – how
 being an expert is not just about mastering those 10,000 hours. Experts are
 actually extending, trying more, tracking more. While we are breaking down
 the holy altars of the brain, can we also break down the concept of
 expertise?



 AMP: I definitely
 see that connection. A word that I really like, which was coined by one of the
 originators of the theory of the extended mind, Andy Clark, is “brain-bound.”
 We have this brain-bound approach to work and school, and also to expertise.
 We think about expertise as an individual putting in those 10,000 hours to
 become an expert, and there’s very little reference to how, for example,
 nobody becomes an input by themselves. It’s quintessentially a social process,
 and that’s something I write in the book: People like physics graduates or
 doctors-in-training become experts by interacting with others and being
 socialized into their fields. It’s true of all of us.



 I mentioned those two because I cite some studies in regard to them
 specifically. We think of experts as doing it all in their heads, we think of
 experts as knowing exactly what to do and doing it, and it is very clean and
 efficient. But actually, experts are the ones who are out there mucking around
 in the real world, getting feedback in the real world, trying out new things,
 and figuring out how things work. That is another type of thinking outside the
 brain: where you’re not doing it all in here the head, you’re doing it out in
 the world.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The more we can incorporate these other aspects of the body, of
 movement, and of social interaction, the more we can pull those into
 academics, and leverage them to make learning more
 effective.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 When you think about an expert designer or architect, they’re often making
 models of the project they’re working on or the problem they’re trying to
 solve, and interacting with that model, moving their body around the model.
 They’re not doing it all in their head. Artists and designers often say that
 their best ideas emerge in the process of sketching, and drawing, and
 iterating their ideas on paper. It’s not as if they have the idea inside their
 head and they just dictate it. It happens in the process of doing the work
 itself. I think we have some mistaken ideas, some brain-bound ideas about what
 expertise is and how it works, and if we want to become experts it would be a
 good idea to revise those.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div>
 <figure>
 <img
 width="600"
 height="392"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_4_43967d1e0f.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:30:32.655Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I completely agree. There is also this element of intellectual humility
 that experts have. They’re willing to accept what they don’t know and
 listen. I think it is also a sign of the extended mind, where the mind has
 factored in the humility of “What I know is less than what I don’t know.” I
 think that’s where experts keep growing, while others maybe taper off over
 time.



 Now, extending the idea of expertise, that instead of people thinking
 better they extend their minds better, how do we teach our children these
 skills? Not in terms of a policy, but from what you see, from your research,
 are there any thoughts on how to teach kids, how to design their work
 spaces?



 AMP: I think there
 are so many implications for what we could be doing right now with our kids,
 with our students. You mentioned earlier that you tell your kids about tuning
 into their bodies before school starts. Scientists have found all these
 individual differences in how people are attuned to their internal signals,
 and the reason those individual differences arise is because of differences in
 the kinds of messaging children receive from their caregivers. “Is it okay to
 listen to my body? Is it okay to take those messages seriously, or am I
 supposed to ignore those messages and pretend they don’t exist?”



 So encouraging our kids to tune into their bodies is certainly one thing I
 have taken away from the research, in terms of what I do with my own kids.


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 <figure>
 <img
 width="600"
 height="392"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_5_22d981aa60.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:32:15.793Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>
<hr class="vertical-space1" />

 I’ve also stressed to them the importance of movement and gesture. Again, we
 have this idea that thinking and academic work happens when students are
 sitting quietly at their desks, when really the human brain and body evolved
 to move, and there are so many ways movement can enhance thinking. Likewise,
 being outside, often we can combine those two things: movement and being
 outdoors. Those two things can work together to really replenish depleted
 stores of attention and executive function. It’s a lot to ask kids to sit
 inside hour after hour, focusing on these things that they are not necessarily
 naturally interested in.



 The more we can incorporate these other aspects of the body, of movement, and
 of social interaction, the more we can pull those into academics, and leverage
 them to make learning more effective. I talk about thinking with other people,
 and thinking with peers, about teaching others, debating, and storytelling.
 These are all ways we can leverage children’s natural sociability, social
 instincts and interest in the social world in the service of what we want them
 to learn.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

To be continued. 

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h4 class="has-text-align-center">
 Interviewed by UDAY KUMAR Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
</h4>

<hr />