A second theme to emerge from a review of research on the extended mind is its distinctive take on the nature of expertise. Traditional notions of what makes an expert are highly brainbound, focused on internal, individual effort (think of the late psychologist Anders Ericsson’s famous finding that mastery in any field requires “10,000 hours” of practice). The literature on the extended mind suggests a different view: experts are those who have learned how best to marshal and apply extra-neural resources to the task before them. This alternative perspective has real implications for how we understand and cultivate superior performance. For example: although the conventional take on expertise highlights economy, efficiency, and optimality of action—geniuses and superstars “just do it”—research in the vein of the extended mind finds that experts actually do more experimenting, more testing, and more backtracking than beginners. They are more apt than novices to make skillful use of their bodies, of physical space, and of relationships with others. In most scenarios, researchers have found, experts are less likely to “use their heads” and more inclined to extend their minds—a habit that the rest of us can learn to emulate on our way to achieving mastery.
Expertise, Extension, and Externalization
Finally, in surveying the study of the extended mind, there’s one more theme that is impossible to ignore: the matter of what we might call “extension inequality.” Our schools, our workplaces, the very structure of our society are based on the assumption that some people are able to think more intelligently than others. The reason for such individual differences is taken as self-evident: obviously it’s because those people are smarter—because they have more of the stuff called “intelligence” inside their heads. Research on the extended mind points to a different explanation. That is: some people are able to think more intelligently because they are better able to extend their minds. They may have more knowledge about how mental extension works, the kind of knowledge that this book aims to make accessible. But it’s also indisputable that the extensions that allow us to think well—the freedom to move one’s body, say, or the proximity of natural green spaces; control over one’s personal workspace, or relationships with informed experts and accomplished peers—are far from equally distributed. When reading the chapters that follow, we should keep in mind the way access, or lack of access, to mental extensions might be shaping the thinking of our students, employees, co-workers, and fellow citizens.
Metaphors are powerful, and none more so than the ones we use to understand our own minds. The value of the approach described in these pages ultimately lies in the novel analogy it offers, an analogy we can apply to our everyday efforts to learn and remember, to solve problems and imagine possibilities. 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.
Research by Goldschmidt and others shows that those who are skilled at drawing excel in managing this lively dialogue. Such studies find, for example, that expert architects are far more adept at identifying promising possibilities within their existing sketches than are relative novices. In one in-depth analysis of an experienced architect’s methods, researchers determined that fully 80 percent of his new ideas came from reinterpreting his old drawings. Expert architects are also less likely than beginners to get stuck perseverating on a single unproductive concept; they are proficient at recombining disparate elements found in their sketches into new and auspicious forms.
From these observations of expert draftsmen, some promising prescriptions can be drawn. When setting out to generate new ideas, we should begin with only the most general plan or goal; early on in the process, vagueness and ambiguity are more generative than explicitness or definition. Think of the task not in linear terms—tracing a direct line from point A to point B—but rather as a cycle: think, draw, look, rethink, redraw. Likewise, don’t envision the mind telling the pencil what to do; instead, allow a conversation to develop between eye and hand, the action of one informing the other. Finally, we ought to postpone judgment as long as possible, such that this give-and-take between perception and action can proceed without becoming inhibited by preconceived notions or by critical self-doubt.
Across the board, in every field, experts are distinguished by their skillful use of externalization; as cognitive scientist David Kirsh has written of video game virtuosos, “Better players use the world better.” Skilled artists, scientists, designers, and architects don’t limit themselves to the two-dimensional space of the page. They regularly reach for three-dimensional models, which offer additional advantages: users can manipulate the various elements of the model, view the model from multiple perspectives, and orient their own bodies to the model, bringing the full complement of their “embodied resources” to bear on thinking about the task and the challenges it presents.
David Kirsh has made close observations of the way architects use physical mock-ups of the buildings they are designing; when they interact with the models they have constructed, he maintains, “they are literally thinking with these objects.” Interactions carried out in three dimensions, he says, “enable forms of thought that would be hard if not impossible to reach otherwise.” Kirsh calls this the “cognitive extra” that comes from moving concrete objects through physical space—a mental dividend that made the difference for one scientist struggling with a seemingly insoluble problem.
Expertise in Groups
As he observed: “Nobody remembers everything. Instead, each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally—and then can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t. In this way, we become part of a transactive memory system.”
Over the past few decades, psychologists have confirmed Wegner’s claim that a robust transactive memory system effectively multiplies the amount of information each group member has. Members of such groups are able to work on deepening their own areas of expertise while still remaining in contact, through their colleagues, with a broader range of relevant information. Their cognitive load is reduced, as they need only to attend in the moment to the portion of incoming information that concerns them, secure in the knowledge that their teammates are doing the same. And members of these groups are able to engage in smooth and efficient coordination, directing tasks to those members who are best suited to carry them out. As a result, research finds, teams that build a strong transactive memory structure perform better than teams for which that structure is less defined.
Within a group of any size, a transactive memory system will spontaneously assemble itself, as it did for Daniel Wegner and Toni Giuliano once they married and began living together. But because such systems usually aren’t cultivated in an intentional way, much of their potential to extend the group’s intelligence is lost. The goal of such cultivation is to make the group aware of what its members know, without requiring each member to take on the full burden of her teammates’ specialized knowledge. Notice how this model differs from early notions of the “group mind,” in which members of a group were believed to be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. By contrast, the value of a transactive memory system lies in its members thinking different thoughts while also remaining aware of the contents of their fellow members’ minds. The struggle to cope with information overload has led many of us to turn to technological filters—smartphone alerts and email applications that offer to sort for us the information that must be attended to from the information that can be ignored. Research suggests, however, that other people can function as the most sensitive and discriminating filters of all—as long as we’re aware of what they know and can access their knowledge when we need it.
All of us maintain a set of mental markers that help us locate information we don’t currently possess; we may not recall every detail contained in a report, but we know the folder (physical or digital) where the report can be found. Such markers also point us toward the people who possess information we do not; the aim in building a robust transactive memory system is to make these pointers as explicit and as accurate as possible. The process of setting out these markers should begin early in a team’s work together. It’s important to establish from the outset not only who’s responsible for doing what but also who’s responsible for knowing what. Group members should be explicitly informed about their colleagues’ distinctive talents or spheres of specialization, and clear protocols should be established for directing questions and tasks to the appropriate individual. Research shows that groups perform best when each member is clearly in charge of maintaining a particular body of expertise—when each topic has its designated “knowledge champion,” as it were. Studies further suggest that it can be useful to appoint a meta-knowledge champion: an individual who is responsible for keeping track of what others in the group know and making sure that group members’ mental “directory” of who knows what stays up to date.