Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, where we focus on sense-making and story-telling in the turbulent twenties. We are devoted to cultivating the conditions for sagacity to emerge, like Punxsutawney Phil, from her hidden lair. No guarantee that it will happen, but we are over the moon when it does. I humbly serve as your blundering yet intrepid wayfinder, touching the elephant of reality in most unseemly ways. Bio here.
BLUF
The idea that our thinking is “brain bound” is antiquated and deserves to end. Our thinking extends to the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces that we learn and work, and the minds of the people around us. The human brain by itself is a limited instrument, in its ability to pay attention, recall specific facts, work with abstract concepts, and persisting in challenging tasks. Schooling is excessively tailored to propositional forms of knowing- rote memorization.
Metaphors of the brain as computer are wrong. Like war, we view the brain with the scientific metaphors of the day (See Bousquet’s book for that.). A better analogy for brains might be magpies, birds who fashion nests out of whatever material is nearby. The ability to think well is not a fixed property of an individual, but a shifting state dependent on access to resources outside the brain and the savvy to use them (See Emergent Futures newsletter for more—they are all over this.).
Embodied cognition (our bodies), Situated Cognition (The place we learn and work), and Distributed Cognition (Interactions with other people) are all important ways that we think outside our physical brains. “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.”
I. Thinking with our Bodies
Thinking with Sensations.
Long vignette on John Coats, author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (Review I wrote years ago here about the book.) on the importance of listening to feedback from your body for good judgment.
Interoception is the awareness of the inner state of the body. Example: Some people can feel their heartbeats, while others cannot. Other example: The famous Iowa Gambling Experiment—Four card decks (two risky, two safer), with electrodes monitoring skin conductance. On average, participants able to consciously articulate the riskier decks around card 50, but sensor equipment detected stress when reaching for the riskier decks around card 20.
Body scan and labeling of emotions good techniques to learn. Elite performers like (ahem) Navy SEALs improve their cognition after unpleasant interoceptive experiences, are better able to sense body and manage resources to meet challenges.
Practice “cognitive reappraisal”—reframe nervousness as excitement. Contagiousness of emotions from others—Calm Breeds Calm, but panic can spread just as easily. Technology like Fitbit/Apple Watch to help. It is more accurate to say, “I feel, therefore I am” rather than “I think.”
Thinking with Movement.
The chapter opens with vignette of a radiologist (Dr. Jeff Fidler) who installed a treadmill in front of his X-ray review screen. He lost 25 pounds and was convinced he was better at reading X-rays. A later study confirmed his intuition- his movement improved the detection of irregularities on the images in a study of radiologists both seated and moving.
Cognition changes according to intensity of activity. Three types of movements: Congruent movements (kids moving on a number line to learn numbers), Novel movements (movement to introduce us to an abstract term, like having the body experience the concept of torque), Self-referential movements (Einstein imagining himself as a beam of light while developing his theories), and metaphoric movements (literally having people hold hands out while they brainstorm “on one hand, on the other hand”).
Kids with ADHD- brains are chronically under-aroused, importance of allowing them to move/fidget-spinners. UC Davis study- the more kids were allowed to move, the better they were able to think.
Daniel Kahneman, famous psychologist takes long walks- 17 minutes a mile is his optimum “thinking” speed. Above 14 minutes a mile pace, he can’t think as well, loses the thread.
Example of novelist Haruki Murakami and the importance of running to his creativity- “I run in order to acquire a void.” The void may be transient hypo frontality—a state where the frontal lobe (responsible for planning, analysis, and critiques) is suppressed, and the mind is allowed to wander freely, to make connections.
Example of actors pairing movement/gestures with memorizing lines—they are easier to remember. “I move, therefore I remember.”
“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. How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” — Henry David Thoreau
Thinking with Gesture.
Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch. When you gesture, you act on the world. It cognitively offloads information to your hands. At times culturally disdained, hand gestures actually help both the sender and receiver of information to come into correspondence/attune with one another.
There is gap between affluent and poor children. Affluent children hear almost thirty million word more words during infancy, but they are also gestured at more. Not just the quantity, but the quality as well, of diverse types of gestures.
Congruence of speech and gesture can show mastery of subject material. Gesturing is an integral part of understanding concepts, a “virtual diagram” we draw while thinking. Encouraging children to gesture aids in comprehension. Gesturing is part of how actors maintain memory of lines.
II. Thinking with our Surroundings
Thinking with Natural Spaces
Example of Jackson Pollock working in nature. He changed the way he did art, and his brain was deeply affected by the setting in which it operated.
60% of American adults report spending five hours or less outside of each week. Children engage in outdoor recreation far less frequently than previous generations, and only 26% of mothers report that their kids play outside almost every day.
In general, humans prefer wide grassy expanses, dotted by loose clump of trees with spreading branches, and include a nearby source of water. We like to be able to see long distances from a protected perch. This is a concept geographer Jay Appleton terms prospect and refuge. We enjoy a bit of mystery and a promise of more just around the bend.
Time in nature can relieve symptoms of ADHD— It increases chlidren’s ability to focus and brings about a relaxed state of attention. Humans seek both order and variety. Fractals patterns are heavily found in nature and typically the fractal ratio is between 1.3 and 1.5 for natural fractals Interestingly, Pollock’s work is in that fractal range.
Time spent in nature facilitates stress relief, restores mental processes, and enhances the ability to focus and sustain attention. Within 20 to 60 seconds of exposure of nature blood pressure drops and breathing slows.
Thinking with Built Spaces
Jonas Salk was inspired by looking at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi monastery in central Italy. After returning to La Jolla, California, he created the Salk Institute, and focused on bringing in natural light, high ceilings, and views of the ocean.
It is arrogant to think an individual is self-sufficient and not dependent in any way on their surroundings. In order to engage in focused thinking a protected space can help. Walls were necessary to relieve the strain of heavy city populations—you no longer need to look around every few seconds to see what else was happening in your environment. Open floor plans have mostly been a failure for individual creativity.
Coffee shops are good for salon type discussions; however, humans flourish when they can retreat to a study to work. We need both solitude and communal time to be creative and productive. Having home turf, a relaxing location where we decorate and personalize a space—an office, study, or cubicle.
In such a place, our mental and perceptual processes operate more efficiently, with less need for self-control. A monastery is an example of a communal setting that balances time alone for study and contemplation with time spent with others.
Thinking with the Space of Ideas
The concept of a Memory Palace, connecting an object for each thing you want to remember. This method allows you to remember a ridiculous amount of numbers.
Humans are far better and experienced in spatial thinking than abstract thinking. A lack of spatial understanding maybe why young children do not have memories until they begin to walk.
Biographer Robert Caro employs a cork board, 4 feet high and 10 feet wide. He uses it to create detailed physical outline of his work in progress, able to move everything around. He uses the physical space to offload ideas and see them in visual form.
Working in front of multiple computer monitors increased recall 56% rather than a single screen. Picking one thing to observe and draw a picture of it. This curates your Vervaeke-style relevance realization— seeing an image in your mind is not the same as seeing it on a page. Once it’s on the screen, we can have a back-and-forth conversation with it. This connects to writing fiction— you can’t edit what you don’t have on the page.
III. Thinking with our Relationships
Thinking with Experts
The importance of apprenticeships for quickly building expertise in a student. Apprenticeships provide several things to humans— they model different ways of thinking, explain how to scaffold problems, structure opportunities for the learner to try the task themselves, help learners through difficulties along the way, and masters are able to fade their coaching/mentoring gradually as skill acquisition progresses.
One way to do this is the Shadowbox method, created by psychologist Gary Klein. This method guides you through a scenario in your given field, provides choices for a challenging situation, and allows you to see the decisions of experts in your field— what they found important when they made decisions.
Imitation was encouraged in many cultures, because you were copying something great rather than creating something that was not certain to be great. Using imitation allows other masters to act as filters, sorting through available options. Secondly, imitators can draw from a wide variety of solutions instead of being tied to only one. A third advantage of imitation is you can steer clear of the mistakes made by others who went before them. Fourth, imitators are able to avoid being seduced by deception or secrecy by working directly off of what others do last. Finally, imitators save time, effort, and resources otherwise invested in originating their own ideas.
Distractions and interruptions of pilots form the majority of airline incidents. The Sterile Cockpit Rule— no talking in the cockpit when the plane is below 10,000.
To imitate well: 1. Describe your own problem and identifying analogous problems that have been solved successfully. 2. Rigorously analyze the solutions. 3. Identify how one’s own circumstances differ, and then figure how to adapt the original solution to the new setting.
Showing kids examples of good art works. Some people didn’t favor showing good art to children prior to their creative endeavors, but studies have shown its effectiveness in modeling to students.
Experts in a given field are only able to articulate about 30% of what they know— this is called the task knowledge problem. The difference between experts and novices— experts know what to attend to (There’s that Vervaekian relevance realization again), and what to ignore. Experts engage in chunking/compression of information. Experts categorize information, according to deep function, not into individual entities. Finally, experts are less distracted by visual noise and can shift more easily among visual fields without getting stuck/distracted.
Thinking with Peers
Social engagement, or social interaction is one key to thinking effectively. One path to learning is debating— arguing in small groups. We think best when we think socially. None of us are smart as all of us, and iron sharpens iron, as the saying goes. During adolescence, the creation of social hierarchies can cause problems in the classroom. One solution is getting students to teach each other. That gets them motivated to learn the material.
Eye contact opens the gate between perceptual systems of two individuals and information flows. Humans learn best from other live humans. More importantly, they learn best from teaching other people. For children, studies have shown an IQ average of 2.3 points higher than the younger brothers and sisters (Don’t tell my sister about this).
Teaching is a deeply social act, one that initiates a set of powerful, cognitive intentional, motivational processes. It enhances the teacher’s learning and ability to transfer the information. One way to aid student mastery is to have children teach concepts to their parents at home.
Brad Bird and John Walker are artistic collaborators on movies like Ratatouille and The Incredibles. The two are famous for fighting openly during production. They call it creative abrasion.
As an instructor, seek to create intellectual conflict within the first few minutes of class. Otherwise, students won’t engage with the lesson. Constructive controversy opens the mind to the expression of divergent ideas and beliefs. Conflict creates uncertainty.
People should joust with their ideas— strong opinions weakly held.
The importance of story. Cognitive scientists referred to stories as “psychologically privileged meaning.” Stories are granted special treatment by our brains, compared to other informational sources. We attend to stories more closely, we understand them more readily, and we remember them more accurately,
We listen to stories as if our brains are experiencing the action themselves. When studying military personnel and first responders, scientists discovered the importance of informal storytelling in the downtime between missions, picking up anecdotes humans can use for the future. This raw, rather than polished debrief, was much more valuable to humans.
Thinking with Groups
The power of distributed cognition. Example in the book of a Navy warship bridge- the center of command and control. Group problem solving in a stressful situation.
Personally, I’ve experienced this as a Ground Force Commander (GFC) during combat operations. The triad of GFC, Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC, the operator controlling aircraft), and Radio Telephone Operator (RTO, the communications expert) become an emergent “overmind” that combine to manage the execution of the mission and keep the force safe.
Example from Japanese Radio Tiso. They do three-minute calisthenics at 6:30 am. Behavioral synchrony is a way to coordinate physical movements that can create cognitive synchrony. In the military, one way this is created is by marching in formations. Synchrony can leverage our ability to work together in groups like chimps and bees. Greater psychological synchrony creates cognitive synchrony. To do this, you need to create shared motivation and shared learning.
People who need to think together should train, learn, and feel together, in person, at the same time. This was recommendation #3 in my Master’s thesis— Complex, Repetitive Training.
The power of collective ritual in religious faith traditions— these link people together powerfully. Even a ritual like eating together can connect humans in very implicit ways. Mirror neurons fire, and humans connect. Different parts of a group can remember different things in a distributed fashion.
Conclusion
Intelligence is not a fixed lump of something in our heads; rather, it is a fluid interaction among our brains, our bodies, our spaces, and in our relationships. The capacity to think intelligently emerges from the skillful interaction of these internal and external elements.
Three sets of principles
The first set of three principles lays out habits of mind we should adapt, the second set relate to how this mental extension works, and the final set is a wider optic on the world.
Offload information to externalize it— move it off our heads and into the world.
Transfer information into an artifact to make it into something real, then proceed to interact with it— labeling it, mapping it, feeling it.
Seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor; that is relaxing, getting in nature, exercise group synchrony.
Re-embody the information we think about the body back into the thinking process.
Re-spacialize information we think about into the world around us.
Take measures to socialize the information we think about working in groups.
Generate cognitive loops— that is, to have feedback between brain, body, and world in a non-linear fashion. This way, we can interrogate our interoception and what others think.
Create cognitively favorable situations. This goes both internally through managing our state, and externally through thinking in a place we feel at home in and have good social connections.
Build extensions in our everyday environments, to externalize our cognition to work with it.