The Reduction Of The Mind

Even our metaphors for the mind have taken us further and further from our essential nature as creatures shaped by our environment and our interactions with other creatures, dishonouring Rachel Carson's science-rooted poetic insight that "there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity."

We left Plato's cave of consciousness and, corralled by Descartes and the Industrial Revolution, reduced the mind to the brain and explained its workings by drawing analogies to the technology of the hour.

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The Emerging Science of Thinking with the Whole World Beyond the Brain

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads - the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us - drawing them into our own mental processes

By reaching beyond the bra...

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Understanding Mental Processes

Thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain.

For another: the kinds of materials available to “think with” affect the nature and quality of the thought that can be produ...

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Interoception - Our 8th Sense

One major aspect of this extended mind is our capacity for interoception — an awareness of the internal sensations of the body that gives us a kind of non-conscious knowledge, which we might term intuition but which is rooted in concrete embodied experience and somatic pattern-recognitio...

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Benefits Of Our Interoceptive Sense

When a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically th...

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