What would it mean to think outside of your brain? I am fascinated by the idea that we can think with our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships—and that thought is so much more interconnected than we might think. It defies an individualism that we often rely on, and recalls the intelligence of the body and how our thought processes vibrate against one another, shaping new thought.
Today, I’m sharing my conversation with Annie Murphy Paul, who is the author of the brilliant work The Extended Mind, a book that challenges our understanding of where thinking occurs and how it happens. In this interview, she also tells us a secret that has to do with imposter syndrome. So, if you have ever thought to yourself “I am a fraud!”, you should give it a watch. Thank you so much, Annie!
Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected by that publication as a "Notable Book," and The Cult of Personality, hailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a “fascinating new book.” Paul has spoken to audiences around the world about learning and cognition; her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 2.6 million people. A graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she has served as a lecturer at Yale University and as a senior advisor at the Yale University Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.
Where does the mind stop and the world begin?