Spectrum business is made to work the way small business works, made to rise and grind,

made to start small, but think big, and made to do it all with fast, easy-to-use internet

phone and mobile services that work as hard as you. Visit Spectrum.com slash work to learn more.

I'm Rufus Grisco, and this is the next big idea.

Today, at number six at our countdown, the extended mind, the power of thinking outside

your brain by Andy Murphy-Paul. Can you think outside of your body? Can your senses your surroundings

and other people make you smarter? Keeping up with the cognitive demands of modern life has pushed

our brains to their limits. But if the world around us won't change, then we have to. We have to

learn how to think more expansively. And to do that, according to science writer Andy Murphy-Paul,

we need to stop being so brain-bound. That's the rather bold claim she makes in her new book,

The Extended Mind. Andy says we can actually get smarter by getting out of our heads.

We can outsource our memories to our phones, make decisions based on our bodily sensations,

use tactile tools to solve abstract problems, draw inspiration from our surroundings,

and argue with others as a way to improve our own thinking. Here's Andy.

I'm Andy Murphy-Paul, author of The Extended Mind, the power of thinking outside the brain.

I'm a journalist who covers psychology and cognitive science, but my latest book is also a foray

into philosophy. Philosophy is where the first big idea in my book comes from, and that idea is

thinking doesn't happen only in the brain. More than 20 years ago, two philosophers Andy Clark

and David Chalmers wrote a journal article that opened with a question, where does the mind stop

and the rest of the world begin? Now that question would seem to have an obvious answer, right?

The mind stops at the head. It's contained within the skull. But Clark and Chalmers maintained that

this assumption, as common as it is, is just wrong. The mind, they said, takes elements from outside

...