Our Workplaces Think We’re Computers. We’re Not.
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The Ezra Klein Show. (2021, July 20). Our workplaces think we’re computers. we’re not. – The Ezra Klein Show. Overcast. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://overcast.fm/+oiPU0IRr0
Ezra Klein: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
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Ezra Klein: Something I’ve been wrestling with lately, both in my head and then, of course, on the show, is what I’ve come to think of as productivity paradoxes, these things that look and feel to us like work, like productivity, that the culture tells us are work and productivity but turn out to be the opposite. They turn out to be distractions or they turn out to miss something profound about how we work or how we think or even how we live.
If you remember, for instance, my interview with Cal Newport from earlier this year, that was about one of these: the way constant communication on platforms like Slack and Teams and to some degree even email, it codes as work, it looks like work, and it’s often a distraction not just from work but from its fundamental precursor, focus. There are also, of course, distractions from life and leisure. When we’re not able to work well in productivity in the time we’re supposed to do it, it expands outward into everything else. So this isn’t just about work but about being able to balance work and the rest of life.
Then I began reading this new book, “The Extended Mind” by Annie Murphy Paul. Paul is a science writer, and her book, the work here, began as an inquiry into how we learn, but then it became something else. It became a book about how we think. Because what came to tie her research together was this 1998 article by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers called “The Extended Mind,” which argued that there was a, quote, “active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes,” end quote. That what you should think of as our mind, and certainly the way our mind worked, was extending out beyond our head and was intimately shaped, like actually intertwined, with tools, with people, with the environment, with the visual field. And subsequent research really, really bore this out. And the implications of it, I think, are profound.
A lot of this book is about recognizing that we have the intuitive metaphor of our minds, that they’re an analytical machine, a computer of sorts. And we’ve taken this broken metaphor of the mind and then built schools and workplaces and society on top of it, built the built environment on top of it. And the result is that our work and school lives are littered with these productivity paradoxes.
What so often feels and looks like productivity and efficiency to us are often the very activities and habits that stunt our thinking. And many of the habits and activities that look like leisure, sometimes even look like play, like if you’ve taken a walk in the middle of the day or a nap, those end up unlocking our thinking. If the question is, how can we be the most creative or come up with the most profound productive insights, you need to do that stuff.
And so if you read it correctly, in my view at least, this is a pretty radical book. It has radical implications not just for how we think about ourselves but for policy, for architecture, for our social lives, for schooling, for the economy. And I’ll say that it has stuck with me quite a bit. It has changed the way I structure a bunch of my days. I’m trying to work with my mind more and against it less. As always, my email for guest suggestions, reading recommendations, whatever, is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Annie Murphy Paul, welcome to the show.
Annie Murphy Paul: Thanks, Ezra. I’m really glad to be here.
Ezra Klein: You have a quote in the book that encapsulates kind of the whole of it for me, and you’re talking here about the limits of the brain as a computer, this analogy that we use all the time. And you write, quote, “When fed a chunk of information, a computer processes it in the same way on each occasion, whether it’s been at work for five minutes or five hours, whether it is located in a fluorescent lit office or positioned next to a sunny window, whether it’s near other computers or is the only computer in the room. This is how computers operate.
But the same doesn’t hold for human beings. The way we’re able to think about information is dramatically affected by the state we’re in when we encounter it.” End of the quote. Why is that true? Why doesn’t our brain work the same way in all contexts?
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, it has to do with the fact that our brain is a biological organ and an evolved organ that’s very different from a computer. And the computer metaphor for the brain has been dominant since the emergence of cognitive science in the middle of the last century, and it really permeates the way we think and talk about the brain, and it places these sort of invisible limits on how we use the brain, how we regard other people’s brains, and it’s because that metaphor is so faulty it leads us to act and to make choices in ways that are not at all optimal.
And so in this book, I wanted to challenge the metaphor of the computer and point out that, no, actually the brain evolved in particular settings, mostly outside. It evolved to do things like sense and move the body to find its way through three dimensional landscapes, to engage in encounters in small groups of people. These are the things that the brain does effortlessly, naturally. The brain is not a computer. It never was, and its failures are particular to its own nature, and it has to be understood on its own terms.
Ezra Klein: You argue that a lot of thinking — I don’t know if you’re quite saying happens in the body, but it’s certainly picked up by the body as opposed to picked up by our mental ruminations. And the body can in some ways be even more rational than what we think of as a brain. What do you mean by that? Make that argument for me.
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, as we go through our everyday lives, there’s way more information than we can process or retain consciously. It would just completely explode our mental bandwidth. But we are taking in that information, noting regularities and patterns, and storing them in the non-conscious mind so that it can be used later when we encounter a similar situation. Then the question becomes, well, if it’s non-conscious, how do we make use of that information?
And it’s because the body lets us know. I mean, that’s what we call a gut feeling or what psychologists, what scientists call interoception, which is the perception of internal sensations that arise from within the body. And people who are more attuned to those internal signals and cues are better able to draw on that wealth of information that we know but we don’t know. We possess it, but we don’t know it explicitly or consciously. So that’s what a gut feeling is. It’s sort of your body tugging at your mental sleeve and saying, hey, you’ve been here before. You’ve had this experience before. Here’s how you responded. It worked or it didn’t work. Here’s what is the right thing to do now.
But in our world where we are so brain bound, so focused on the cerebral and the things that go on in our head, we tend to push the body aside, to quash those feelings, to override them, even, in the service of getting our mental work done, when really we should be cultivating that ability, becoming more attuned and more sensitive to it, because it has all this accumulated experience and information to share with us.
Ezra Klein: You cite a study that just floored me by the psychologist Antonio Damasio, which looked at the body picking up some of these unconscious processes in a pattern recognition game. Can you describe that?
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. So Damasio set up a kind of card game online on a computer where players were asked to turn over cards from one of four decks. And they could choose which cards they wanted to turn over. And they were given a starting purse. The object was to gain as much money as possible and lose as little money as possible, because each card came with an associated reward or took some money away. And so the experimenter said go. People started clicking on the decks and turning over cards.
And unbeknownst to them, two of the decks were good decks. They contained many more rewards than punishments. And two of the decks were bad decks. They contained many more punishments that took away money than rewards that granted money. And the interesting thing is that as the participants played this game, their skin conductance was being monitored. That’s a measure of our nervous system arousal. And as the game progressed and the players were turning over these cards, their skin conductance started to flare whenever they considered taking a card from the bad deck, indicating that their bodies, their physiology, was reacting to the presence of threat.
And yet consciously, the players had no idea that two decks were good and two decks were bad. He knows this because he asked them and they had no clue about the pattern that was present in the game. But they began to slowly but surely learn this pattern in an unconscious way and avoid those bad decks more and more as the game went on, showing that they were learning, in a sense. But again, this was all non-conscious. So those of us who are more in touch with our internal sensations, and this is an ability that can be deliberately cultivated, can make better use of that wisdom and experience that is stored in a sense within the body.
Ezra Klein: You also cite some studies of Wall Street traders who seem to make more money when they’re more interoceptively attuned, when they’re better at reading their own body signals. But let’s stop here and say this is weird. If you’ve grown up in this culture and you’re a human who has been taught to trust the cold, rational processes, at least theoretically, of your brain, whereas intuition, bodily intuition, it sounds woolly. It sounds fuzzy. I mean, I live in the Bay Area. I hear about it all the time. I’ve come to take it more seriously in part for reasons like this. But it’s not just that some of us are bad at picking up our bodily signals but that we are taught that that’s a dumb way to go through the world. What does your body know? So what do you think is happening here? How is the body picking up a pattern before the brain is? What is being listened to there?
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. Well, I think the attitude that you mentioned that paying attention to the body is sort of silly and sort of foolish comes from a very old idea in Western culture that mind and body are separate and that mind is made of this sort of special spiritual stuff and the body is this grubby kind of animal creature that needs to be subdued and that is irrational and doesn’t have anything — certainly doesn’t have anything to contribute to intelligent decision making or intelligent thinking.
And I argue in the book that a lot of what we consider to be built-in heuristics and biases that are inevitable that come along with having a human brain only show themselves when we’re using the brain alone and when we’re not incorporating this other resource of the body and its source of information. So I think this idea that the brain is the be all end all of sort of rational thinking is wrong. And you’re right. It is a radical challenge to the way we’re used to thinking.
Ezra Klein: If the point is to listen to the body, and it is clearly true that the body sometimes tells us not to do things that we should do … the body being afraid of an airplane strikes me as a very rational thing for the body to be afraid of. But you should get on airplanes. Now maybe that’s an obvious one, because of course airplanes are unnatural given the evolution of our species. We don’t have wings and things that are heavy tend to not fly. But there are a lot of other things in our lives where the body gives us bad information or just challenging information.
And so what I’m hearing from you is actually another brain- bound way of interpreting the body. That’s trying to reconstruct what my body’s telling me to match what my brain thinks I should believe about the situation. But I think what I’m asking is if the body has so much wisdom but also sometimes that wisdom fails, when should I be listening to the body and when should I be listening to my prefrontal cortex?
Annie Murphy Paul: I would say that I think we need to become more skilled at determining when the body’s signals are steering us in the right direction. I write in the book about keeping what’s known as an interoceptive journal. And that means when you’re contemplating a choice or decision, pay attention to how your body feels and note that down. And then maybe after that decision has been made and you have a sense of whether it was a successful decision or not, go back and take a look at how you felt when you made it.
And over time, collect many of these kinds of vignettes and look for a pattern. Does your body steer you right in certain kinds of situations, certain kinds of decisions, and would it have steered you wrong in others? That’s the kind of thing where right now we’re using our gut feelings, our interoception in a kind of haphazard way and in a non-intentional way. And when we become more aware of it, we don’t always have to follow its promptings. That’s true. But we should be aware of them and we should be aware of what they’re telling us. And we should be skilled enough to know when to listen and when to ignore.
Ezra Klein: That strikes me is really important. And I’ll liberally sprinkle in some personal experiences throughout this conversation. Over the past 10 or 15 years, I’ve deepened my meditation practice quite a bit. And one of the things that did unexpectedly was made me much more attuned to how my body was feeling. And I remember realizing at a certain point, this was probably five or six years ago now or maybe even a bit more, that I had been telling myself for years I was stressed when what I was was tired. And that I had actually lost the ability to hear my body well, and I was just trying to put everything in a cognitive framework that made sense to me.
But then the second part of that that I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on is we do a lot to try to keep our cognitive performance high that makes it hard to hear our bodies. So particularly for meditation, I notice if I’ve had a lot of caffeine that day, my body is just totally weird feeling. But I think there’s a lot like that. A therapist once told me that looking at social media is a kind of stimulant because it’s fast moving, it gives you little bits of dopamine, and that made total sense to me, that I look at social media to wake back up. I’m curious if you’ve thought about that, beyond just meditation, what we do that makes our body easier to hear and what we do that makes it harder to hear.
Annie Murphy Paul: Oh, so interesting. I mean, well, meditation is definitely one of those things that makes it easier to hear, as you’ve found in your own experience. I talk in the book about doing a particular exercise that often starts off a meditation session called a body scan, which is when you pay attention in succession to parts of your body in this open minded, nonjudgmental way. And I recommend that people do this periodically, not even in a formal way, but just sort of checking in with their body throughout the day so that they stay rooted in their body and they know what’s going on in their body and they get the sort of regular infusion of interoceptive awareness. Because we can go through our day. We’re so busy. We’re so stimulated. A lot of these stimulants, whether it’s social media or caffeine, they mask the body’s signals and cues so that we can’t perceive them quite so well. So yes, I think it’s important to tune into those signals not only so we know what’s going on with us inside our own bodies, but it’s also the key to understanding what’s going on in other people. And this was very moving to me, actually, this strand of research that I explored for the book, which is that we don’t have a direct connection to other people’s brains, to what’s going on inside their heads. It’s rather opaque to us.
And so it’s actually the body that provides the channel for understanding in a really visceral way what they’re feeling. And when we speak to someone face to face, and this is another reason why in person contact is so important, when we speak to someone face to face, we very subtly mimic their expressions, their posture, their demeanor, and then we kind of read off from our own bodies what that feels like, what emotion is being created within us.
And that’s how we know how other people are feeling. That’s kind of the basis of empathy and emotional intelligence. And again, studies suggest that people who are more introceptively aware are able to be more empathetic. They’re able to be more accurate in how they understand other people, because they’re using their own body as a conduit to connect with the feelings inside that other person.
Ezra Klein: I want to move to another space of working with the body. So we’ve been talking here about listening to the body, listening to the body as an almost thinking organ that is giving you information in terms of how it feels. But you talk a lot in the book about using the body to create contexts in which we think better. Can you tell me a bit about what we’ve learned in recent decades about the relationship between bodily movement and cognition?
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. And here again we’re talking about reversing the causal arrow in a sense. The way we usually think about it is the brain has an idea and it directs the body to do something and the body executes it. And that’s a very brain- bound way of thinking, obviously. But there’s another way, which is that we induce the body to make certain movements or enter certain kinds of spaces, like the outdoors, or move our hands in a certain way in a gesture, and that influences the way we think. And this is often a more efficient and effective way of affecting our thinking than starting and ending often with the brain and having it all happen inside our heads.
So for example, ideas will come to us when we’re moving, when we’re walking rather than when we’re sitting at our desk. Which the brain- bound computer model says it shouldn’t matter, but it does matter. And so when we change our context, when we change the way our body is moving, we can change the way the brain operates.
Ezra Klein: So I think we know that, but we don’t, for the most part, do it. And this, to me, is a really, really, really important part of the book that I want to tag out here explicitly. I thought one of the most challenging ideas laced through the book is what I came to think of as the productivity paradox, which is: the things that we have been taught to think of and feel as being productive are often not the best way for us to be productive. And I’ll use taking a walk as an example.
When I am behind on a piece, when I am struggling with my work, when I am having trouble getting something done, what feels to me like the responsible thing to do is chain myself to my computer and my desk and keep banging away at it. That there is some static number of minutes between me and the completion of this task, and I just got to get through them.
And if I were to go take a long walk or go to a coffee shop and just sit there and drink a coffee just on my own and eat a pastry, or do all kinds of things that are I would think of them as restful. I would think of them as a form of leisure. But your argument is that’s wrong, that that’s probably the best thing you can do at that moment, because your brain is not a computer and it’s not just working on the problem. But there is a cultural barrier to doing it, because shouldn’t I be working given that I’m behind?
Annie Murphy Paul: Right, right. Well, and another factor in our culture that we haven’t mentioned yet that reinforces that idea are ideas from popular psychology like grit and the growth mindset, both of which have at their core another metaphor. Not the metaphor of brain as computer, but the metaphor of brain as muscle.
And people start thinking that the brain actually is a muscle, which of course it isn’t. And even as a metaphor, it’s very powerful because it carries with it — there are all these assumptions embedded in it — that lead us to think, oh, if the brain’s a muscle, then the more I work it, the more tirelessly and exhaustively I work this muscle, the stronger it gets, and the better I’ll be able to think.
And again, because metaphors are so powerful and they shape the way we use the brain, I propose my own metaphor in the book for what the brain is like. I compare the brain to a magpie, one of these birds that plucks a twig here and a piece of string here but also more unusual things. I mean, the catalog of things that magpies have incorporated into their nests is amazing, but the point is that they build their nests from whatever is available in their immediate environment and that the brain is something like that. It’s assembling its thought processes from what’s available in its environment. And that means that thinking better is not about working the brain ever harder. It’s about creating a space and a set of capacities wherein you have more and better resources from which to assemble your thought processes.
Ezra Klein: I’m going to try to offer another metaphor that I’ve thought about over the past couple of years. And this actually came to me when I was on a meditation retreat and I couldn’t stop thinking about something. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be thinking about this thing. I didn’t rationally think it was important anymore. I didn’t think any good was coming of thinking it, but I couldn’t stop.
And I began on that retreat, sitting in endless silence just with myself and my annoying brain, to think about the brain as a big corporation, like a multinational corporation that has, in theory, some goals it is trying to achieve as a whole but all these different divisions, and they’re all doing different things. And some of them are getting attention and some of them are well run and some of them, what they do comes to the focus of the main office all the time. And then others are just there still working on problems that the rest of the corporation has long ago moved on from. But there’s this way in which there are all these different divisions.
And one of the difficult things for me about the brain, but one of the things that your book sort of helped clarify, is that a question about the context you’re putting yourself in is which divisions of the brain are getting attention and are getting the raw materials, I guess, in this metaphor, maybe simply the budget, to actually do their work? There’s a different division that is helped by going on a walk than by staring at my computer, a different division that has helped by going on a vacation, a different division that has helped by meditation, a different division that is — and so on and so forth.
But it’s this weird way in which it’s not one thing. Different things are happening. And sometimes just like in a big organization, it’s unclear why or by whose order or why people aren’t all on the same page anymore. But it’s an emergent property of a lot of different processes that sometimes seem to be, certainly in my head, to be at cross purposes with each other.
Annie Murphy Paul: Mm-hmm. I would just want to add to your metaphor, Ezra, that I’d like to see some of those divisions offshored, like outside the head. I’d like to understand some of those divisions as maybe not being inside the brain.
Ezra Klein: They’re contractors.
Annie Murphy Paul: Contractors, contractors, right. Yeah, I mean, and that reminds me of yet another metaphor, because you can never have too many metaphors, but another metaphor I use for the brain, which is we shouldn’t think of it as a workhorse that we just need to keep lashing until your assignment is done, for example, but rather more like an orchestra conductor. Obviously there’s still a role for the brain. I don’t ever want to be understood as saying that the brain isn’t important or isn’t a central locus for thinking.
But it’s the role that we expect the brain to play that I think should be altered. I mean, if we think of the brain not as a workhorse but as an orchestra conductor, then we see the brain playing this role of bringing in this resource here and bringing in that resource now and knowing, in a skillful way, which resources to use and when. And that’s the kind of intellectual facility that we should be developing, I think, in our students and employees and in ourselves.
Ezra Klein: But I want to come back to this productivity paradox. And I’m going to give an example that struck me, because it happened while I was reading your book and it seemed like a good example of it. So two weeks ago, I was having a day where I wasn’t being that productive. And I was stressed because I had a lot of errands I had to do, including bringing my dogs to the dog camp, I guess, because we were going to go away for a couple of days. And it was going to take me about an hour, hour and half to do it. I had to pick them up new food. We had to drive like 30 minutes in each direction. There was traffic at the time I was doing this. And I was behind on my work. And more profoundly, I did not have a column idea, and it was coming to the point where I really needed one. And so what I’d be doing that day is clicking around the internet, reading news sites, reading Twitter, reading the different information flows that I thought would spark something for me. And I got nowhere with it.
And then at a certain point, I had to take my dogs. And I was frustrated by this. But it’s actually a nice drive. I was going down the 1. And just at some point on that drive, with no conscious work of my own at that moment, a great column idea popped into my head, totally different than everything I’d been looking at already. Something I actually really was excited about. Interoceptively, I got excited about it.
And I want to ask two things about this. One is what happened there? What occurred? And two, to be a little mindful about this, who the hell was thinking? It’s such a weird — directed thought is a process that makes some sense to me. But the thing where just an idea pops into your head, like you just pulled down the lever on the slot machine and won a prize. Or maybe you didn’t even pull down the lever. You just won a prize. It’s really wild. I think about this a lot in meditation. Who thought that thought? And so what is happening? And then I guess this speaks to our metaphors conversation. Who is thinking?
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, someone who’s focused on the brain would say that that was your default network in action, that that was this sort of more associative and relaxed kind of mode that our brain gets into when we’re not intensely focused on a task, like when you were making that drive with your dog. And that can be allowing that mode to emerge, often by taking a walk or by being outside, those are some of the best ways to do it. Or taking a shower. People always have their best ideas in the shower or in the bath.
But because I’m not so focused on the brain and I’m focused on mental extensions, I want to point to something that I think about a lot said by Andy Clark. And Andy Clark is the philosopher who originated the idea of the extended mind. And he talks about how we are intrinsically loopy creatures, we’re loopy, and that that’s something that makes us very different from computers. Because computers work in this very linear fashion. It’s input output. It’s all a straight line.
But humans, because of the way our brain evolved, we benefit from looping information and knowledge and ideas in and out of these different domains, bringing in the contribution of our body, or passing it through the brains of other people, or experiencing and thinking about our ideas in a new setting, a new physical setting.
And as Andy Clark points out, a computer would never have an idea printed out, have to read it with their eyes, make up lots of marks in the margins, and then pass it around to their colleagues and then have a whole new understanding of that idea. That’s not how computers work, but that’s how people work. And so when we think of ourselves as loopy creatures, we can kind of create those loops where we’re passing information and ideas in and out of these different domains — the body, spaces, other people’s minds — and then back through our own heads. And that’s a much more fertile and generative way of dealing with information than just always keeping it inside our own heads where it’s not going to be changed or altered or improved in any way.
Ezra Klein: So I’ve been talking a lot about this idea of looping with my colleague Roge Karma, who worked with me on preparing this episode. And this, again, I think goes to this productivity problem about the ways in which things that feel or have the aesthetic of productivity are often not the most productive way to do things.
So if you look at the way we prepared to have this conversation with you, I read the entire book. Roge they read the entire book. We had three conversations about the book. He did a prep document about a book I had already read. Then we talked about that prep document. Then we did questions. Then we talked about the questions again. Then I rewrote the questions.
And compared to what you might think of as the efficient way to do the preparation here, which is that one of us reads the book and writes questions and then I walk in and read you questions, that just seems a lot more efficient. It’s one step and then it’s two steps, and then I’m done. But we found over time that it is this constant passing of the books and the work and our ideas back and forth and the conversations we have about them that lead to great conversations. And it looks and in some ways feels very inefficient, but the show does really well and I think is pretty good. And so it’s obviously working.
But one of the problems, I think, with looping for people is that it feels inefficient. It feels, if you’re working on something to then go take a walk or go play basketball or then talk to your friend and then come back to it and then write some of it down on a piece of paper, it seems ridiculous. You’re adding all of these steps. But your point is that this is how the brain works, and working the way the brain works is what’s going to get you the best results, which in theory is what all this efficiency talk is meant to get you to.
Annie Murphy Paul: Right. Well, let’s work with the brain as it really is instead of pretending that it’s something else and getting mad at it or feeling that it’s failing when it doesn’t act like a computer.
Ezra Klein: One of the pieces of this that I just want to make sure we touch on before we leave this section of the conversation is, and this is not going to sound like a big deal before I say it, so I implore the audience to think of it as a big deal, that sitting still imposes a greater cognitive burden on the brain than standing or walking. And I think that sounds normal enough, and then you realize how much time and energy and social structure and public money has gone into trying to get us to sit still most of the time. And it actually seems quite crazy. So could you talk about that finding?
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. Yeah, that really strikes me too, so I’m glad that you brought it up. I talk about that in the context of research having to do with children who have an ADHD diagnosis, but it applies to all of us in the sense that, again, we are these biological evolved creatures who are meant to be moving. Being still is not necessarily our natural state, certainly not for long periods of time. And so when we have to be still in an office or in a classroom, we have to inhibit our natural urge to move. And that uses up some of the mental bandwidth that could otherwise be applied to our learning or our work.
And then, in the case of kids who have attention deficit disorder, it’s actually the case that they use physical activity as a kind of stimulant just the way an adult would drink a cup of coffee before they needed to focus. Kids with ADHD use movement to kind of get them into the right mental state where they can concentrate. So meanwhile, parents and teachers are trying to get them to sit still so they can think, when really these kids, and many of us, need to move in order to think.
And one strand of research that I just love that I included in this section is about fidgeting. Again, because of our brain- bound attitudes, we see fidgeting as sort of gauche or maybe almost shady, like why is this person — why can’t they be still? When actually fidgeting is this brilliant kind of very subtle way of adjusting on a moment by moment basis our arousal, our physiological state of alertness.
And so if we were more intentional about fidgeting, we could even develop, and psychologists are exploring this, different kinds of fidget objects that induce different kinds of mental states in us that really precisely calibrate our mental state through this “embodied self regulation,” which is the phrase that one of these gesture researchers used. So all these different kinds of movements from the macro to the micro we could be using in a much more thoughtful and intelligent way, intentional way, to modulate the way our brains work.
Ezra Klein: But I want to talk about the macro, because I’m all bought in on the fidget research. When I led Vox, my office was filled with fidget toys. And I think people thought that was a kooky stylistic decision, but it’s actually because I have a lot of trouble paying attention in meetings if I can’t do something with my hands. But the thing where maybe sitting is not the right way to think, and yet everything in our life forces us to sit in the built environment, is I think actually pretty profound, and all the more so because it seems so banal when you say it.
So I’ll give a very simple example from this podcast. Before coronavirus, I did this in studios. And studios are little rooms. You sit at a desk and there’s a microphone there and somebody is watching you and you got to sit there, and that’s how the conversation goes. Then we hit the pandemic and now, like a lot of people, I record from home, because my office isn’t open. And during this period, I got a standing desk because I have some back and neck issues. And I noticed at a certain point that if, instead of sitting when I did podcast conversations I stood, it was much easier for me to maintain attention.
And in fact, not just that, but one reason I turn the video off when we do this is because I walk around while you talk. So I am pacing the room while you give your answers, not to give people too much insight into this. Because again, it’s much easier for me to listen if I’m moving. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. But then if I’m not, the fact that we make kids sit all day in school, the fact that meetings, it would be seen as very gauche, as you were saying, to just stand up in the middle of a meeting and wander around the perimeter of the room …
We have desks at our offices. It goes to this idea that because we have misunderstood the metaphor we use for the mind, we’ve actually built an entire environment which makes it hard to think even as the point of that environment, in many cases, like school or work, is to make it easy to think, at least in certain kinds of jobs. It just seems wild to me.
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. Yeah, I would add too that it may be, Ezra, that when you’re standing, you’re freer to gesture. And research suggests that gesturing by the person who’s doing it actually makes their speech more fluent. So maybe your own speech has become even more fluent as you’ve been recording in your home studio because you’re able to use your hands much more freely when you stand and walk around.
Ezra Klein: I want to ask you about that structural piece of it. Because what you’re describing here is a phenomenal market failure, a phenomenal market failure, right? Putting all of the ways in which it would be better for our lives or better for our minds or more fun to move around aside, we have all these different businesses. They all want to get a leg up on the competition. A huge amount of the American economy now is built around work where people have to come in and think about problems. I mean, manual labor is somewhat different. And by the way, manual labor often has a lot more movement built into it.
And so what you’re saying is that a tremendous amount of the global economy, the global built economy, the global work structure, is just wrong. It’s not a good way for people to work. I mean, we’ll get into some other pieces of this, like open space offices. But just the simplest one, that everybody gets a desk and that it’s hard to stand and hard to move around. What the hell happened? If this research is solid, and I think it’s intuitive. Like if you watch people on the phone, they like to walk around and talk. Then what the hell happened? How did we forget all this when we built every office on the planet Earth, basically?
Annie Murphy Paul: And every school. Yeah, I mean, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reporting and researching psychology for 25 years is that we often don’t know what’s best for us, and so we cling very firmly to these practices that don’t serve us. And it takes a kind of paradigm- changing new view to make us think, oh, maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe the way we’ve been doing things isn’t so great.
And I actually think the pandemic might be that kind of disruption that changes some of the ways that we educate kids and that we go about our own work. I think a lot of us have spent the last 16 months as brains in front of screens, and a lot of us have been working from day till night without a chat around the water cooler, without even a commute, without a break. All we do is work. All we do is use our brains.
And if the brain as muscle metaphor were really accurate, we would all be superheroes at this point, and we’re not. In fact, many of us feel that we’re not thinking nearly as well as we used to or normally do. And that’s because the pandemic, for many of us, cut off many of the mental extensions that really support our thinking. And I’m hoping that in a way they’ve made the existence and the importance of those mental extensions visible to us in a way that they have not been before.
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Ezra Klein: Let’s talk a bit about how offices are designed more broadly. So years ago I worked at The Washington Post, and this was in their older building. They’ve moved since then. It was a pretty gray aesthetic, which is to say, a lot of desks. They all had little cubicle extensions on them. It didn’t look cool, but I got a lot of good work done there.
When I moved to Vox Media, and Vox Media was a media company with a heavy tech flavor, and it was super cool when I walked into that office. Exposed brick and exposed piping and it’s all open and everybody’s at these big, long tables together. Way cooler than cubicles. And within not long at all, I really yearned for a cubicle again. Can you talk a bit about open space offices, some of the ideas that have emerged about collaboration as kind of human collision, and what maybe we misunderstood there?
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, I really think your anecdote just there tells us how important it is to be sensitive to the effect of physical context on how we work. And again, that brain as computer metaphor would say, well, you can work anywhere. You should be able to think just as well anywhere, but clearly that’s not the case. And so that should lead us to pay more attention to what it is about these environments that are not working for us, that are not supporting intelligent thought or allowing us to extend our minds. And yes, the open office is one of the biggest culprits.
I write in the book about how the open office was based on an idea, a vision, and that was the coffee shop where people are moving and bustling around and having spontaneous conversations and colliding with each other in serendipitous ways. And the notion was that this was the perfect model for how knowledge work should be done. And in fact, it’s turned out to be a disaster, because again, the brain is an evolved organ that did not evolve to sit in one place and focus on symbols and abstractions for long periods of time. That’s a really difficult thing for the brain to do. It’s not one of those things that comes naturally to the brain.
So it needs lots of external support to do that. And one of the key external supports that it can have are walls. Walls that protect us from seeing and coming into contact with all the things that distract us most, which are novelty movement, social interactions among people. These are the things that our attention is just irresistibly drawn to. We can’t help it. It’s literally biologically wired into us. And so to put a whole bunch of people in one room and say, OK, now work together on separate projects, these complex involved cognitive kind of work that we do these days.
I think most people who have worked in an open office can acknowledge how very difficult it is. When we’re talking to people all the time, we all sort of coalesce because we are a very social species that’s concerned with creating consensus. We all kind of coalesce around some OK ideas, not great, but medium quality ideas. And then people who are all alone, the people who are kind of out on the outskirts doing all their own thinking, they come up with some amazing ideas and also a whole lot of losers.
And the best results are produced by those people who have a kind of oscillation between talking with people, going back and having a private space and private time and quiet to think about their own ideas, and then it’s actually another kind of loop. They’re looping it through the minds of other people and then they’re looping it back inside the space of their own mind. And so I think the monks who have been living in this kind of hybrid space for hundreds and hundreds of years actually were onto intermittent collaboration long before the researchers got to it.
Ezra Klein: There’s a bit of a tension here between parts of your book that are all about movement and collaboration and thinking with other people’s minds, and then you need walls and you need things to be quiet and you want to be able to shut out distractions. Can you talk a bit about that? Because there’s a way of reading this stuff where every study on its own it’s like, this thing makes you more productive and also its opposite makes you more productive. How do you balance all of it?
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, I did sit with all this material for a very long time. This is one of those books that took a while. And I really did choose those examples and offer those recommendations that had the weight of evidence behind them. And people are different. And so they’ll find that different things work for them. And in fact, on Twitter I’ve heard a lot of people who say, hey, I work really great in coffee shops, like the real thing, like coffee shops. And I think there’s probably some interesting reasons behind that.
But I also do think that psychology has landed on some pretty basic ideas and recommendations for how we work best. A couple that we haven’t mentioned yet are that we think best in spaces where we feel like we have a sense of ownership and control. It concerns me that so many offices that are coming back online now are adopting this hot desking or hoteling model where it’s like, you come in, you grab a desk. It wasn’t your desk yesterday. It’s not going to be your desk tomorrow. I think that’s probably not an ideal situation for supporting intelligent thought.
Likewise, we think better when we have cues of identity around us that remind us who we are and what we’re doing in that particular setting and cues of belonging that remind us of the meaningful groups to which we belong. And all those things are stripped away and gone when we’re just occupying a desk in a very temporary way, which seems to be the model that many offices are moving toward.
Ezra Klein: One of my hypotheses reading the book and thinking back on my own experience is also that maybe all of these things work, but they don’t work all at the same time. And that always struck me as the odd irony of open floor or open office plans. And you tap this in the book, that there’s some evidence that when companies move to being an open plan office, they often see a reduction in the amount of collaboration and conversation that happens. And when I used to do that, I had noise canceling headphones on all the time, and I was simultaneously always over socialized and a little under socialized, which is to say that I couldn’t get away from people. So it’s not like I was yearning for more people. But the interactions I was having were not deep and they were not interactions I often wanted. So at the same time, it wasn’t that I was getting my social needs met. And I thought back to other times when I’ve been in offices or in more cubicles when you’re working and you want to leave the office and talk to people. You want to move to that other modality, which I guess speaks to your idea of looping.
It seems to me there’s a need to actually fully change the modalities, and the problem is when you try to combine too many of them at once. So you’re in an open office where you’re around people and you’re also on Slack where you’re digitally around people, but you have noise canceling headphones in, so in theory you’re not. And you just kind of keep going like this and you’re stacking them all in tension with each other instead of moving one to the next to the next in a more intuitive way.
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, one of my goals with this book was to give people alternatives to this reigning brain- bound model, which tends to be very rigid, and as we said, imagines that the good student or the good worker is someone who sits quietly and still and doesn’t talk and is just sitting there until the work gets done. And that we actually need to acquire a kind of second education. We have this education and training within the workplace that tells us how to use our brains. Our brains have been cultivated, but how to use these outside the brain resources in a skillful way to bring in the right resource at the right time.
That’s not something anyone’s ever taught us. We’ve had to teach ourselves to the extent that we know how to do it. And so I agree; it’s not as if you can just pile up one technique on top of another and presto, you’re a genius. It’s more like we need to develop the flexibility and the knowledge of when to use which tool when. I mean, there might be times when a brain- bound approach is really appropriate. I am myself a very brain bound person. And I think that in some ways, writers write what they need to hear. [LAUGHS]
Ezra Klein: There’s definitely something to that.
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Ezra Klein: Let me ask you about another of the techniques in here, or the spaces that you explore in here, which is offloading. Can you tell me a bit about offloading?
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. So offloading, this is probably the technique that has made the biggest difference in my own work. We really as a culture — again, this brain bound ethos we have — we really valorize people who can do things in their head. If you think of the memory champions who can calculate however many digits of pi or chess grandmasters who can work out the whole game in their head. We think that’s so amazing. And it is an amazing human feat.
But really what produces effective work in our own daily lives often involves offloading our mental contents onto physical space, whether that’s a whiteboard or a set of post-it notes, which is my favorite tool, or onto multiple monitors so that we can start using this whole other suite of abilities that are built into the human organism. We have evolved to sort of effortlessly use these spatial and navigational capacities that our bodies have to use our spatial memory, to move through space in ways that allow us to get a new perspective on things, to manipulate tools. And when we can turn our ideas and pieces of information effectively into manipulable objects and into a 3D landscape that we can navigate through, we all of a sudden have access to all these embodied resources that are wasted when we’re just sitting there very still looking at a small screen.
Ezra Klein: Two questions on this. So one, why is the particular material or medium that we offload to so important? You just mentioned looking at a small screen. I was thinking as you said it that — so my version of offloading is my workstation is I have a computer and then I keep next to it two notebooks at all times. And one notebook is for any to do item that ever pops into my head.
Email this person. Call the doctor. Write a column. Whatever it might be. Just anything that is, it has to happen later, and then another just for notes and ideas. But I found over time I couldn’t do that on the computer. I have all kinds of to- do apps and note taking apps, but I had to move over to paper, which has a different feeling when I’m on it. So you talked about screens. Why do we think differently when looking at different things?
Annie Murphy Paul: That’s really interesting. Well, the size of the screen matters. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of benefits to be gotten from having multiple or very large screens. And that’s because it consumes cognitive bandwidth to have to scroll and make things bigger or smaller or find where we filed something. All of that gets offloaded when it’s spread out in front of us and we can remember with our spatial memory, oh, that piece of information is over here on my right, rather than having to navigate with our electronic tools. And so it’s not necessarily that screens are the problem, because big screens can and do enhance our thinking.
On the other hand, I write a lot in the book about how artists and designers and people who swear by the pencil and the conversation that happens between pencil and hand and eye and paper that, again, it’s kind of a misunderstanding to think that the brain conceptualizes an idea or an image and then tells the hand how to execute it and then it’s done. That’s a very computer-like idea of how work happens. Instead, artists and designers find that it’s much more of an iterative process where they draw something. They make a mark, and then the mark reminds them of something. And they add another mark. And it’s a conversation, again, between hand and eye and paper and pencil. And I think the materials we use to do our thinking with, our external outside the brain thinking, can make a big difference in terms of what kinds of thoughts we’re able to have.
Ezra Klein: You don’t talk too much about why this might work worse on screens, but let me try something out on you, which is that screens also have a pretty intense conversation. So when I move to write something on my to do notebook, it just goes on the notebook and that’s all that really happens. If I go open up my app, it’s like my dock expands and I see notifications and all kinds of things begin to happen.
And so it’s a conversation not just between your eye and your pencil and your paper, but everything that your computer is doing. When I’m looking right now at the screen on which we’re recording, I’ve got all — I can see some tabs. I can see extensions. And if I’m thoughtful about it, I remember to get rid of that stuff before I try to get into a focused place. But every time I change a screen, a lot more comes up.
So is part of it simply that when you’re offloading, part of the danger is you don’t want to onboard new things? You’re actually trying to get things off. And computers, phones, et cetera, so many of the things are built to onboard new things in order to capture our attention for a little bit longer.
Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, that makes me think of how ecological psychologists talk about how different tools have different affordances. We can do different things with them. We’re led to do different things with them. And part of the beauty of an old fashioned print book or a notebook that is just — or a sketchpad that just has a bunch of blank pages — is there’s not all those built in distractions that are just waiting to leap out at you.
And the idea of the extended mind actually originated not in thinking about how we extend our minds with the body or with spaces or with other people. Those kind of came in later, because the idea of the extended mind is so generative and can operate as this kind of umbrella concept. Originally the idea of the extended mind was looking at tools like a notebook, like a smartphone, and how they assume some of our mental functions for us and thereby extend our minds.
But I am really interested in the ways that many of our tools, especially our digital tools, don’t end up extending our minds at all. They actually contract them. I could write another book called the contracted mind. But I think we have to, again, be really intentional and really skillful in the way that we use our devices to make sure that they are extending our minds in the way that they can and not actually diminishing our thinking.
Ezra Klein: Well, let’s talk about the distinction you made right there between expanding and contracting the mind. Because a point you make in the book is that we often think about the demand side of our attention, which is to say, we think about what we want to devote our attention to and that we need to be tougher about being rigorous about where we put our attention. We need to work harder at devoting our attention. But you talk about working on the supply side of our attention, trying to expand the amount of attention we have, trying to replenish the attention we have. So how does using that framework change what you do? If I’m tired or I’m getting ready for a podcast, what do I do to expand the supply side of my attention?
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, it helps to know that — I’m going to be a broken record with this — the human brain evolved in a very specific environment, and that environment was outside. And that’s how our forebears spent their time for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a fairly recent development that we spend all this time, more than 90 percent of our time, inside buildings and inside cars and even when we’re outside in sort of urban, highly built up urban settings.
And the thing about the outdoors and the way that the human species evolved in the outdoors, all the information that we encounter, the sensory information that we encounter in nature, is processed really easily and effortlessly and efficiently by the brain. Our sensory faculties are kind of tuned to the kind of information and stimuli that we encounter in nature. And so this is, again, this is the scientific reason behind what everybody knows, which is that you feel more relaxed and more at ease when you take a walk outside and when you spend time in nature.
But what that has to do with attention is that that kind of diffuse attention that we’re able to spend in nature, where we’re not focusing very intently on anything but we’re just kind of allowing the gentle movements and the sort of soft contours of the things that we see outside just entertain our attention but in this very diffuse way, and the phrase psychologists use that I like is called soft fascination. It’s not a hard edged concentration. It’s a kind of soft fascination that you might experience when you’re looking at leaves rustling in the wind or watching waves on the ocean.
That state restores our attention. It kind of refills the tank in a sense. And so then we can return to our desk and we can return to that hard edged kind of concentration that we have to do to complete our studies or do our work. So I would say in your example that if you need to concentrate but you’re feeling frazzled, even a brief look out the window can have this kind of restorative effect. But ideally, a longer walk in nature would be good.
Ezra Klein: So I have two questions about that. And let me start with this one. There is this overwhelming amount of research that I’ve read in all these different books about how much better the mind works in nature and how nature replenishes our memory and it makes us more creative. And have somebody take a walk and then have them solve problems and their problem solving is better afterwards. And yet people are much more productive in cities.
The locus of economic and to some degree idea generation is going more and more towards agglomerations of people. It’s not like per person rural areas are wildly more productive than urban ones. And it seems to me there is some tension between how clear the research seems to be that nature is good for our minds and how clear the actual patterns of economic and creative growth are that being around a lot of other people in a concrete jungle is good for idea generation and human organization and economic organization. How do you reconcile those?
Annie Murphy Paul: That’s an interesting point, Ezra. I mean, I would point out that even within cities and suburbs, there’s a really unequal distribution of access to green areas and green spaces. And your paper had an excellent article about this a couple of weeks ago, about how much more tree cover affluent areas have as opposed to poor areas. And so even within those urban environments, there’s often a chance to go out to a park or to encounter green space in some other way, a green roof, for example, or a garden planted within a building.
But that actually brings up for me a point that is very dear to my heart that emerged from this book. As I said, I felt sort of radicalized by this book. And one thing I realized as I was writing it is that there is a kind of inequality that we don’t really recognize, again, because our brain-bound society has this sort of blind spot for all the ways that we think outside the brain. There’s an extension inequality.
By that I mean that people don’t have equal access to the mental extensions that allow us to think well. And differential access to green space, I think, is an example of that. Some people are able to restore their attention in green spaces and return to their work refreshed and able to focus, and some people simply don’t have access to that kind of opportunity. And yet we don’t really see that as the kind of inequality that affects how well people can perform and how we judge them in terms of their performance.
Ezra Klein: So if all that’s true, why do so many people live in New York? Why is there so much creativity there? Why is there so much economic generation there? Why don’t these studies that seem very compelling one by one at the micro level ladder up to the macro patterns of our economy?
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, people are complicated, I would say, and there’s all these different factors that we’re talking about, and we haven’t even really gotten to this idea of how we extend our minds with the minds of other people. And it may be that in the case of a place like New York, where there’s this intense creative activity going on, having access to a critical mass of these intelligent, creative, stimulating people is what really makes the difference.
I would also point out that just because you live in a rural area doesn’t mean you’re outside any more than the average urban dweller. Americans spend very little time outside, and that’s true across the kinds of places that people live. It’s just how we operate these days. It’s what modern life is like for all of us.
Ezra Klein: So then let’s move to this question of the inequality of it all. Because everything we’ve been talking about, from having control of your workplace to having greenery around you to, I mean, you talk about gestures, and there’s even an inequality in the gestures that poor kids and richer kids see growing up. There’s a tremendous amount of inequality in these mind extenders. And that’s a real problem that there is not, I think, an obvious agenda for fixing. So how did this make you look at inequality in cognitive development and then in the economy differently?
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, it makes me think of an encounter I had. I live in New Haven, Connecticut, and I teach Yale students sometimes and I encounter them a lot. And I was describing this idea of the extended mind to a group of them recently, and I was especially interested to hear what they thought, because this is a generation that grew up extending their minds with their smartphones, that never didn’t have smartphones around. So I thought it would be really interesting to hear what they thought about it.
And many of them did seem excited by the idea or interested in the idea. But there was one young man who just looked more and more perturbed as I described the idea and its implications. And finally he burst out, this is a very dangerous idea. And I thought, why? I’m interested that you have that response. Why? And as he explained, it came to seem that this young man who, following the dictates of his culture and his particular subculture, had been striving his whole life for this kind of individual achievement and had been rewarded very handsomely for it. And the idea that actually maybe it wasn’t all his brain that did it was quite threatening.
And I think as the implications of my own research and reporting and writing were becoming clear to me, I too had to kind of wrestle with all these assumptions I’d made about what constitutes individual achievement and what intelligent thought is and where it happens and how to foster it. More than any book I’ve written, I would say it really kind of forced a reconsideration for me of many long held assumptions and beliefs.
Ezra Klein: Because here is my concern. And I get why that student said these are dangerous ideas. That as these ideas filter out, if they are true, and they seem true to me, they are going to be just one more generator of inequality as people come to understand them. That you will have rich kids being sent to schools where you can move around, which is already to some degree true, and poor kids in schools where you really got to sit your butt at your desk all day.
And it kind of goes all up and down the line, from trees to your office space to the kind of job you have, and even just having a more accurate conception of your own mind allows you to work with it differently. And that will filter first too. So that to me is the slightly scary thing about this whole set of ideas, which is that on the one hand, it’s a very structural way to me of thinking about cognitive capacity.
And it allows you to think about deficiencies in it and inequalities in it from a structural perspective, not just about insufficient willpower or stick-to-itness on the part of people. But on the other hand, it really implicates a lot of our society in ways that would be hard to change. So the people who will get to change them are the people who have the resources and the freedom and the employers who will make new accommodations and try to read the research. And so it just becomes one more way that we widen the chasms in our society.
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, a more optimistic perspective, and it’s the one that I tend to take, is that the scariest situation of all would be not even seeing that these mental extensions exist and have an impact on how well we think, which is the state we’ve been in, I think, for a long time. So the first step would be to see and acknowledge the role of mental extensions in thinking and how people don’t have equitable access to mental extensions.
And then a second step might be starting to adjust our systems of assessment and judgement to take into account the kinds of mental extensions that students and workers have access to or don’t. And then the third and the most difficult step of all would be to try to actually in some ways redistribute mental extensions, equalize them, make sure that everyone has access to these basic goods, these raw materials of intelligent thought. And yes, that will be incredibly difficult.
But I think if we have that as a goal, that’s much better than this sort of benighted and blinkered state we’re in now where we think that all that matters is how big a lump of brain you have inside your skull, which is really such a constrained and impoverished idea of what intelligence is and where it comes from.
Ezra Klein: I think that’s a good place and an optimistic place to end. So let me ask you always our final question, which is, what are three books you would recommend people use to extend their minds with?
Annie Murphy Paul: Well, the first is “Supersizing the Mind” by Andy Clark. He’s the originator of the extended mind theory. And although he’s an ivory tower philosopher, he writes like a dream. He’s so funny and clever, and I really enjoy his writing always. The second is “Mind in Motion” by Barbara Tversky. She’s a professor at Teachers College in New York. And that’s about how the body affects the way the mind operates, and it’s just a great primer on embodied cognition. And then the third one, I thought it was going to be kind of a wild card out from left field, but actually we touched on it quite explicitly during this conversation, Ezra. It’s “Thoughts Without a Thinker” by Mark Epstein, who is a psychiatrist who practices Western psychotherapy but also is a scholar of Buddhism and integrates the two. And you were saying in our conversation earlier today, who is the one who’s thinking? Who is the person who’s having these thoughts? I really think Mark Epstein takes on those questions in a really interesting way.
Ezra Klein: Annie Murphy Paul, thank you very much.
Annie Murphy Paul: Thank you, Ezra.
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Ezra Klein: The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.
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