This is the 10% Happier Podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hello everybody. How we doing? When you think about thinking, I think most of us think of it as a supremely solo pursuit. You're in your head concentrating and cogitating all by yourself. But the science shows that if you want to improve your thinking, you need to get out of your head. Today we're going to talk about a concept

called the extended mind. Your mind is not just confined to your skull. It's in your body. It's in the

people around you. It's in your surroundings. The best thinking requires that you break out of

what the writer David Foster Wallace once called the skull-sized kingdom.

This may sound abstract or hard to grasp, but my guest today is going to make this all very

practical, and I have to say I've been using many of her techniques myself. Annie Murphy-Paul is a

science writer and Ted Speaker. Her latest book is called The Extended Mind, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Just to say, before we dive in, we originally

ran this episode May of 2024. And we thought it was so good we wanted to bring it back.

In this conversation, we talk about why upgrading your thinking involves using more than just

your head, how our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships

all have the power to enhance our thinking.

Practical strategies for thinking with your body, including interception, the role of intuition,

movement breaks, and even fidgeting.

The importance of gesture and movement why sitting still can actually make thinking harder

for many of us. Tips for thinking with your surroundings from stepping outside to using evocative objects

and whiteboards to organize your ideas.

The social side of thinking, how to learn from experts, how to think with peers and harness

the intelligence of groups, the challenge and potential of group collaboration, avoiding the pitfalls of group think, and fostering what psychologists call groupiness, the concept of extension inequality, why access to the resources that enhanced thinking is not distributed equally and why that matters. And finally, why returning to the way kids learn, using your hands, your body, and connection

might actually be good for everybody.

If you want to learn more about how to upgrade your thinking,

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