Imagine Inga and Otto live in the city and are independently walking to the museum. Inga has a fabulous memory and knows the precise location of the museum on 53rd street. Since she has a deep orientation of the city navigating there is very easy for her.
Otto, on the other hand, does not know where the museum is. He needs to consult the notebook he carries around with him all the time (he is a fan of the city and keeps a log of the places he wants to go). But once he sees that it is on 53rd street, all Otto has to do is pull out his trusty map and find a path to the museum.
This scenario was pitched by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in the late nineties in a paper called “The Extended Mind” (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). Their argument was that environmental supports are leveraged by human reasoners all the time. While Clark and Chalmers further argue about the cognitive implications and semantics, the takeaway is that humans have relied on tools and physical objects for reasoning and remembering for centuries.
Diaries and journals help us remember our past. Slide rules help us with complex computations. GPS helps us figure out where we are going (helpful for other streams of information such as construction, accidents, toll road notification, too). Michelle Miller suggests in her new book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology that at a basic level, using a tool such as a spreadsheet can offload some mundane work that affords us time to be productive elsewhere. On an abstracted level,
These tools can change our mastery of the skills associated with the software, producing intellectual impacts that persist even when we aren’t actively using that tool any more. So for example, my spreadsheet app might change the ways in which I think about organizing quantitative information, helping me develop a more sophisticated conceptual understanding of how things like formulae work, thereby producing an improvement in my cognitive abilities.
Miller, p. 30
This idea that physical objects outside the – as Clark and Chalmers call it – “skin/skull barrier” can influence the way we think and extend our cogntive capabilities are at the heart of the Extended Mind Theory. Think about long division – it is certianly much easier with a pencil and a piece of paper. David Kirsh and Paul Maglio discussed the notion of epistemic actions – “physical actions that make mental computation easier, faster, or more reliable-are external actions that an agent performs to change his or her own computational state” (Kirsh and Maglio, p. 513). As an example, they pointed out that Tetris players often rotate the pieces on the screen before they know where the pieces will end up because a physical rotation and examination of the screen is much quicker than mentally rotating the piece and figuring out where to put it (300ms compared to 1000ms). You may observe the same behavior playing the New York Times Spelling Bee game or Words with Friends where physically scrambling the letters helps jolt anagram discovery or patterns.
In the museum story, Otto had instant, reliable, and self-endorsed access to the information he needed. So did Inga. But was there a cognitive advantage to Inga? Sure, Otto’s notebook might get damaged or lost. But Inga equally might forget the address of the museum over time – or she may have an injury that affects her memory. It’s plausible that Otto’s notebook may run out of room but he could always get another one. Inga might not even remember all the places she wants to go, so in this dimension perhaps Otto is better suited using his method.
The Extended Mind Theory is more than off-loading cognitively complex actions (or mundane information, or reminders, or things to look up) to technology; it is about extending our abilities because of our ability to work in concert with technology.
Whereas we grew up using stickynotes as a mechanism for remembering, right now we have a much more sophisticated hierarchy of “stickynotes” – OneNote, for instance. OneNote (and similar software like Evernote, Notion, and Cursive) have features like organization, tagging, collaboration, searching, linking, integrations with email, and other features. Can these features alter the way we think (both individually and collectively) in a similar way that Marshall McLuhan posited that media changes our social behavior (McLuhan, 1994)?
Michelle Miller (and other scientists) seems to think so:
The existence of calculation tools like spreadsheets doesn’t just extend my abilities and it doesn’t just change my own mind. It could change all of our minds as far as how we think about data and calculation in general. In other words: Spreadsheets change how we think about numbers. So did calculators, and so did abaci. Word processing changes how we think about language. So does the existence of a written alphabet (Priess and Sternberg, 2013). In sum: The unique properties and affordances of the things that we invent all color, shape, and eventually transform the things we think about.
Miller, p. 31
There is a lot to unpack in Miller’s new book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology. The list of chapters includes:
- What Technology Does to Us (and for Us)
- Why We Remember, Why We Forget, Enhancing Memory and Why it Matters (Even though Google Exists)
- Memory Requires Attention
- The Devices we Can’t Put Down: Smartphones, Laptops, Memory, and Learning.
Each chapter includes an itemized list of techniques educators can leverage to enhance student learning.
The book is worth reading – and not forgetting.
REFERENCES
Clark, A. (2004). Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 29(3), 471.
Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7-19.
Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P. (1994). On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive science, 18(4), 513-549.
McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT press.
Miller, M. D. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World.
Preiss, D. D., & Sternberg, R. J. (2005). Technologies for working intelligence. RJ Sternberg, & DD Preiss, Intelligence and Technology: The Impact of Tools on the Nature and Development of Human Abilities. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 183-208.
