The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Literally Become Smarter with Annie Murphy Paul

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

I’m so excited to welcome Annie Murphy Paul to the podcast. Annie is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in publications like the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Time Magazine, among many others. She’s a graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has served as a lecturer and advisor at Yale, and her TED Talk on what we learn before we’re born has been viewed by more than 2.8 million people. Annie. Her latest book, The Extended Mind, is AMAZING, and dives deeper into all of the things we talk about on this episode. On this episode, we talk about:  why we’re setting students up to fail why you shouldn’t think of your brain as a muscle or a computer  a trick to completely change how you experience stress, sadness, and anxiety one easy way to instantly think faster a practice to help you figure out exactly when you should trust your gut the workout that’s been shown to produce really high levels of creativity  why you should lean into fidgeting  the secret to massively increasing your memory  the one thing we should do every day to recharge our brains how to set up your environment to make you think better a daily practice to “clean out” your mind so it can focus on important things and so much more!  We would LOVE to hear from you any thoughts, reactions, or takeaways you have as you’re listening, so definitely screenshot and tag me @lizmoody and Annie @anniemurphypaul on Instagram.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. Stock up on Healthy Convo Co decks now for the holidays at healthyconvo.co!  This episode is sponsored by Thrive Market. Go to thrivemarket.com/healthiertogether to join Thrive Market today and get $80 in free groceries. This episode is sponsored by Levels. Sign up at levels.link/HEALTHIERTOGETHER to receive an additional two free months of your Levels membership. This episode is sponsored by Wild Health. Go to wildhealth.com/liz or use code LIZ for 20% off.   This episode is sponsored by AG1 by Athletic Greens. Visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to effectively set healthy boundaries, getting tips for crafting our best possible wardrobes, or figuring out how to improve our concentration and strengthen our willpower. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives.

This episode will literally make you smarter. No, actually, it is all. all about how when we're thinking with just our brains, we're actually massively limiting our minds. And it has a ton of tricks on how to think outside of our brains to be more creative, better at problem-solving, a better communicator, and more. I am so excited to welcome Annie Murphy Paul to the podcast. Annie is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in publications like The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Time Magazine, among many others. She is a graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and she served as a lecture and advisor at Yale.

And her TED Talk on what we learned before we're born has been viewed by more than 2.8 million people. Her latest book, The Extended Mind, is amazing and dives deeper into all of the things that we talk about on this episode. And we are going to get into so much cool stuff, including why we're setting students up to fail, why you shouldn't think of your brain as a muscle or a computer, a trick to completely change how you experience stress, sadness, and anxiety. One easy way to instantly think faster. A practice to help you figure out exactly when you should trust your gut. This was so interesting. I've always wondered this as somebody who struggles with anxiety when something is anxiety and when something is intuition. And this was a technical, legitimate, very pragmatic practice

that you can use to differentiate between those things and know when you should trust your gut, which is so cool. We get into the workout that's been shown to produce really high levels of creativity, why you should lean into fidgeting, the secret to massively increasing your memory, the one thing we should all do daily to recharge our brains, how to set up your environment to make you think better, a daily practice to clean out your mind so it can focus on the things that matter, and so much more. Annie and I would both love to hear your thoughts as you're listening to the episode, so definitely screenshot and tag us both on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody and she is at Annie Murphy Paul.

If something really resonates with you from this conversation, please share it with a friend, a family member, a coworker, whomever so that we can all get smarter. And as Annie says, we can stop blaming ourselves for not getting the results that we want. The problem isn't us. It's just that we're literally not accessing our entire minds. As always, thank you so much for continuing to share the podcast and help me grow this wonderful community. I see you.

I appreciate you so, so much. Quickly before we go, I would be remiss to not urge you to grab your healthy ConvoCode decks ASAP so you can get them in your hands in time for holiday gifting. We launched three brand new games. We have our raunchier together game, which is R-rated, and it makes any dinner party or couples night in or bachelorette or group trip. Way more fun. We have our working together game, which is meant for everything from Zoom meetings to

mentorship sessions to happier happy hours. And we have our We're all in this together deck, which is so unique. It's a journaling prompt deck that is actually designed to change the direction of your life. It helps you create the life of your dreams. It is absolutely amazing. I highly recommend stocking up before they sell out. Just head to healthycombo.co to get your hands on them. Again, that is healthycombo.com.com. All right, let's get right into it with Annie Murphy Paul. Annie, I'm so happy to have you here today. I'm so excited to talk about all things expanding and enhancing the capacity of our mind. I'm happy to be here, Liz.

So let's just dive in. We think of thinking as happening largely, if not primarily in the brain, but you argue that that is not the case. So where then does thinking happen? It is a little bit of a wacky idea, and I should say it's not my idea. I borrowed it from philosophy. Two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, came up with the idea of what they called the extended mind. And they wrote about this in an article in a philosophy journal that appeared in 1998. And the very first line of that article really grabbed me, which doesn't often happen with a really technical or abstruse philosophy article, but their first line was, where does the mind end and the rest of the world begin? And that grabbed me because it would seem to have an obvious

or a conventional answer, which is, well, the mind stops at the skull, right? And, you know, everything else is outside the mind. But Clark and Chalmers were saying, no, actually, the mind extends beyond the skull into the gestures and sensations and movements of our bodies and into our physical surroundings and into our relationships with other people and into our tools and our devices. And their example, this was 1998, so like before the smartphone, but if you use a notebook to basically be your memory, your supplemental memory, because you write down things that otherwise you would forget, or if you work out a math problem in your notebook, or if you use a notebook to sort of brainstorm and write down ideas that might be different than the ones that you would come up

with in your own head, they were saying, why isn't that notebook part of your mind? Why can't you consider that conversation you have with a brilliant friend part of your mind? You know, if you would have ideas talking to them that you would never have on your own, what about when you go outside and you take a walk and you think different thoughts than when you, you know, you're, you know, you're sitting at your desk. Why do we assume that the only place thinking happens is in our brains is actually spread out across all these other settings? With all of that said, what do you think of as the limits of constraining the notion of thinking to your brain? Andy Clark, the philosopher that I mentioned, talks about how we're a very neurocentric society, a very brain-centric society. And you can

really see that in education, for example, where when we ask students to take tests, they're purposely not allowed to move around, not allowed to talk to their neighbor, not allowed to bring in the resources that they would actually use to solve a problem in the real world. And so what we're saying when we test students in that way is that the only thing that matters is what's in your head, like what is in that lump of stuff that's inside your skull, when really in the real world, we use all these outside the brain resources to solve problems And we might be able to think better. In fact, my book argues that we can think much better if we include all of those outside

the brain resources in our thinking and approach it as a question of how do we enhance those resources, enrich them, get better at using them, instead of thinking that it all has to happen inside the head. I love the part of the book, too, where you were like, we can blame ourselves and say, oh, we're not smart enough, but actually we're just not tapping into the full potential of what our mind can offer us. And part of the fact that we are a neurocentric or a brain-centric society is that we kind of fetishize the brain. We kind of like worship it in a way. And we keep hearing about how the brain is the most

complex object in the universe. It's so amazing. It's so incredible. And it is all those things. But that kind of talk also leads a lot of us to feel like, oh, God, I guess I got a bum one, you know, because my brain forgets things all the time. My brain doesn't understand things. Sometimes my brain has a hard time learning things sometimes. But what the theory of the extended mind says is that, no, actually, those are universal limitations of the human brain, of the fact that it evolved to do things that are very different from what we expect it to do today. And the way to close the gap between what we expect our brains to do and what the biological brain on its own is actually able to do is to bring in all these outside the brain resources and make the best use of those resources to kind of

create a combination system that is better than either one would be alone. And you don't think it's helpful, right, to think of the brain as the commonly heard metaphors, like your brain is a computer or your brain is a muscle and you need to exercise it and make it stronger. Yeah, those are two really common metaphors. The brain as computer metaphor, I think, is very pervasive. We run into it all the time. It's embedded in our language, like when we talk about our mental bandwidth or our memory. But the reason it's flawed is that, a brain is actually very different from a computer. Obviously, it's a biological organ. It's an evolved organ. It's embedded in a body. It's very sensitive to context. It's highly social. All of

these things that computers aren't. So when we equate our brains to computers, what we end up thinking is that our brain is kind of like a faulty computer. Like our brains are machines that just don't work quite as well as computers, which is really giving our brains a short shrift because our brains can do all kinds of amazing things. We just need to treat them differently than we treat a computer in the sense that for a computer, it's information in, process that information, information out, whereas we need to think about a whole range of things like the context in which we're thinking, the people that we're thinking with the way that our bodies feel when we're doing our thinking, all these things that don't come into play when we're equating the brain with a

computer. Like a computer's not going to work different if you have it in the bedroom or the living room or on the patio. Right. What's the problem with thinking of our brains as a muscle that you would want to strengthen? That really emerges out of what some of your listeners may know is the growth mindset. This idea that intelligence is something that we can grow and build by exercising our brain as if it's a muscle. And that's a very empowering method. It's one that a lot of us have benefited from, but I think it is limited in the sense that it again focuses on the brain. It's very neurocentric. It's saying exercise your brain to get smarter. It doesn't really have a lot to say about bring in outside the brain resources to get

smarter. So what that can leave us with is the sense that like to get this difficult or challenging problem solved, to get the work done, I just need to sit here and exercise my brain and work my brain until I'm exhausted, which is kind of a prescription for frustration when really we could be lightening the load on our brain by bringing. in resources from outside our heads. So let's talk about some of those outside resources. I would love to start with the body. What are some ways that we can move or otherwise use our physical body to expand our thinking powers? Well, you're doing one right now, Liz, which is gesturing or when you were

asking that question, you were moving your hands around, which is something that humans do naturally. And in fact, linguists think that gesture was probably our first language before we even were able, as a species to use spoken language to communicate, we probably communicated through gestures. And we still communicate through gestures. What's interesting from an extended mind point of view is that gesture is not just about communicating to other people. We're actually assisting and enhancing our own thinking with our gestures. There's these amazing experiments that show that our gestures are a few milliseconds ahead of our verbal expression and even our conscious thought in terms of what we're about to say. It shows up first in our hands and our gestures. And especially when we don't quite grasp something,

when we are just about to understand something or get something, it often shows up first in our gestures. And we can actually read off of our own gestures some information that will help us find the right words or locate the right concepts. So our hands often sort of know more than our conscious minds do, which is kind of mind-blowing to think about. Can we cheat that then? like if we want to sound smarter or if we want to think through a problem, can we just sit there and like gesture wildly? Yeah, actually, in educational psychology, there's a notion that we want to get students gesturing as much as possible. And one way to do that is to put them in front of an audience in front of the class and have them explain something. That's such a difficult thing to do

on the spur of the moment that we offload some of that mental work onto our hands. And it turns out that the more we gesture, the deeper our understanding of a concept. So I think that we can apply that to ourselves as workers and thinkers and creators. We want to allow ourselves to gesture as much as possible. A lot of times gesturing is looked down upon as something that's sort of goche or distracting. And there's an idea that you should be more controlled and you shouldn't be waving your hands around like crazy. But in fact, we want to give ourselves the freedom to gesture as freely as possible.

And then you talk about tuning. into your body as a really important way of expanding your powers of thought. Can you speak to that? That's a capacity that scientists call interoception. And that refers to the fact that just like we have sensors that collect information from the outside, we smell, we see, we hear through these sensors located on the outside of our body. On the inside of our body, we also have sensors that are picking up a constant flow of information from inside our bodies. And that's sending it up to our brains and there's so much stimuli, so much going on outside ourselves that's always grabbing for our attention that we often forget to tune in to that quieter, subtler flow of information

from inside, but it's always there and we can tune into it if we take the time. In the book, I recommend doing an exercise known as the Body Scan, which some of your listeners may have experienced if they've done mindfulness meditation. And that just means bringing open-minded, curious, non-judgmental attention to whatever's going on in your body. And I find if I do that just in an informal way, I don't have to be sitting on a meditation cushion or anything, but just tune in a couple of times a day to what's going on inside. The body actually carries a lot of information that is otherwise not really accessible to our conscious minds.

Those little signs and cues from inside the body tell us what to pay attention to, what to avoid what to approach. But all of that is a really rich source of information that we're overlooking if we're not in touch with what's going on inside our body. What do those cues look like? Like, are we talking about like tingly hands or like something happening in our stomach or what should we be actually looking out for? I report in the book about a study that looked at financial traders on a trading floor in London. And in that case, they were looking at the trader's abilities to sense when their hearts were beating. Some people are able to tune into their heartbeat and to know when their hearts are beating. Other people are sort of more distant from that and they don't have

an awareness of their hearts beating. But in this case, the scientists were using awareness of heartbeat as a kind of proxy for general awareness of what's going on inside one's body. And what they found was that financial traders with the longest tenure in the job and the most successful, the most profitable were those who were best able to tune into their bodies and to know when their hearts were beating. In that case, heartbeat was standing in as a kind of proxy for general bodily awareness, but those signals might be things like a tightness in your chest or butterflies in your stomach or shortness of breath. It's a very individual thing. And so each person has to kind of get to know what their own personal pattern of reactions is. If you have headaches, allergies,

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fancy hotel, but maybe even better. It's made travel actually worse for me, fair warning, because my own bed at home is like nicer than the nicest hotels. It just feels so good. I get so excited to get into it every single night. It's time to upgrade your sleep with Bowlin Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bolandbranch.com slash Liz Moody with code Liz Moody with code Liz Moody. That's Bullen Branch, B-O-L-L-L-B-L-B-Range.com slash Liz Moody. Use code Liz Moody to unlock 15% off, exclusions. apply. It's so interesting because I feel like we're taught societally to intentionally ignore those things. Like I'm somebody who has anxiety. I have a tightness in my chest often and I'm taught to dismiss

that, ignore it, work through it, push through it. And I think that makes the unlearning process of like, no, no, that matters. And that's actually a way of expanding your thinking and expanding your mind power a lot harder. You're absolutely right about those messages that we get from society, in terms of doing intellectual or academic or knowledge work. The idea is you have to power through all those bodily sensations you might be feeling. This is back to the brain as muscle metaphor, kind of push on through and ignore all those signals from your body when really those signals from your body are carrying so much information, so much knowledge, so much experience. And so we really have to kind of unlearn, as you say, what society has been teaching us all this time.

Is there a way of knowing when a sensation is something that you should listen to and give credence to and when it is anxiety or it is something that you should, in fact, push through and listen to the maybe more logical, conscious part of your mind? That's a great question because, in fact, with anxiety and with panic attacks in particular, it can be the case that paying too much attention to those interoceptive signals can send us into a kind of upward spiral of anxiety. I still don't think in that case going on the research that ignoring or suppressing or pushing aside those feelings is the right approach, though. That kind of curious, maybe slightly detached or observing kind of mode can be more helpful along with what is known as introceptive exposure therapy, which is basically exposing yourself to what you're afraid of in small doses, paying attention to what happens to your body, being in a situation where you can pull back if it gets too scary.

are too intense and learning over time that actually you can handle whatever that frightening thing is and those signals from your body are there to help you. They don't mean that disaster is imminent. I also love the idea that you talked about in the book of using an interoceptive journal to help with decision making. Can you share that? That idea, again, comes from the world of finance and investing because as you suggested earlier, Liz, it's not as if our interoceptive sensations, our intuitions more generally are always on target. They're not. They're just one more source of information that we want to be paying attention to. And so one way to track whether your introspective sensations are leading you in the right direction is to make a note of what you're

feeling when you're contemplating a certain decision or choice, you know, how you're feeling on the inside. And then go ahead and make that choice, whether it's picking a stock or making a decision at work. And then after you've recorded a number of incidents like that, you can go back and say, well, how did I feel when I made that decision that actually turned out really well? Or how was I feeling when I made that decision that actually was the wrong decision? And we can see how our body has been steering us through these different choices. I feel like intuition has been often positioned as like the opposite of science. It's been like dismissed as being like woo-woo or just not grounded in research. And you're saying, no,

the science actually supports leaning into and trusting our intuition? I think it's been a really interesting development within psychology that psychologists are now giving more respect to what they call the non-conscious mind. And so I'm not talking here about the Freudian unconscious where we repress all the stuff that we don't want to deal with. It's more referring to the fact that our conscious minds are really only a small part of all the mental operations that are going on because there's so much information that we're taking in as we go through our days that we couldn't possibly be aware of it all. And yet, on some level, our non-conscious minds are taking it in and noting patterns and making connections that we can make

use of. So then the question becomes, well, if our non-conscious minds are storing all this information, it's non-conscious. How do we get access to it? And the answer is, that's where the body comes in. I think of them as like a little tap on your shoulder or a little tug on your sleeve when you feel a little shiver of excitement or maybe it's fear or you feel that your hands are getting a little sweaty. You can pay attention to those physical manifestations or those physical embodiments of what you know on some deeper level, deeper than consciousness. And then you also talk about how we can manipulate those a little bit. I thought that the reappraising concept was fascinating. I love anything that's going to help me with my anxiety. I love anything

that's going to help me reframe stress. So can you talk to us about what re-appraising nervousness as excitement and stress as coping might look like? I love this too. And I have to say, I use this technique that we're going to be talking about. And it really has worked for me. The reappraisal takes off from the fact that all of our emotions are built from the basic building blocks of our physical sensation. So if you are about to get on a roller coaster, your heart might be pounding. Your palms might be sweating, you might have butterflies in your stomach, but you might feel exactly those same internal sensations, bodily sensations, but construct them into an entirely different emotion if, say, you're about to give a speech. And your body responds the same way. In both cases, it's sort of

preparing you to take on a challenge or a threat. But if we interpret our bodily sensations as, oh, my God, I'm so nervous, I'm so scared, this is not going to go well. This is going to be a total flop, then it can get into one of those anxiety spirals that we were talking about. Whereas if you tell yourself, if you reappraise that emotion, if you reinterpret it and say, I'm so excited, I am so excited to get out there and share my message with people, it sounds like it would be kind of a stretch if what you're really feeling is nervous. But in fact, because the bodily sensations are the same, it's actually pretty plausible. Because what doesn't work is if you were to say to yourself and many of us do this, calm down. Just calm down. It's not a big deal. Calm down. You know, but your body knows. Your body knows there's something going on. There's a big deal. There's a big event coming up. It's preparing you for that. If we can get down to that ground level and say, well, these are the things I'm feeling. That sounds a lot like excitement. You know, I'm really pretty psyched about this. And I've done this before giving talks. And you actually can kind of get into that mode of like, yeah, I'm really excited.

you know, it actually really works. And that works because excitement kind of maps with nervousness, right? Like the bodily sensations are similar. What other things map together? Like what other things can you kind of trick yourself in that same way? Well, I think the emotion of sadness can be a very painful emotion, obviously, but it can also be very poignant, you know. It can be filled with gratitude or filled with meaning or nostalgia.

Some of us seek out sad music on purpose because there's something beautiful about feeling sad. If we construe it in the sense of, wow, this thing is so meaningful to me. Maybe it's not in my life anymore, but I really enjoy thinking about it as opposed to turning it into something that's so dark and negative. Again, the bodily sensations might be the same, but the spin that you put on it is different. And then you talked about in the book, stress and coping kind of mapping together. Can you speak to that? Because I feel like I'm so stressed is something we all say and hear all day long every day. This is actually something that has also really become a part of the way that I approach stressful situations. If we're facing a stressful situation, we can think of it in one of two ways.

Either it's a threat or it's a challenge. And really what makes the difference between those two things, they could really even be this very same thing, the very same situation. It's a matter of whether we feel that we have the resources to meet that challenge. If we feel that we have the resources, internal and external, to meet that challenge, then it's actually activating. It's energizing. It's like, I can do this. I can cope with this or even I can surmount this. I can triumph over this. Whereas if we're feeling like we don't have the resources internal or external to take on this stressful situation, it starts to feel threatening. Like, I can't handle this. I'm not up to this. again, it's like the same situation, but appraised in a different way.

And if we can turn our attention to thinking, well, what are the resources I have to cope with this? I do have this knowledge or I have this kind of character strength or I have these external resources. I have these friends I can call on or I have this comfortable place that I can feel good that I'm here on my home turf. Or thinking in terms of augmenting and highlighting those resources can help you treat a stressor more. more like a challenge and less like a threat. And is a lot of this just about self-talk? Basically, it's the language you're using in your brain to think about these things.

Yeah. The word that psychologists use is reframing. Re-appraisal is another one. But I like the word reframing because it's like the situation is the same. You're just putting a different frame on it, but that can make an enormous difference. Sometimes the reframe can be taking a step back and feeling more distant from it. we can think about how will I think about this five years from now? And you can kind of see that actually it's not really that big a deal. Or you can try to reframe it as an opportunity for growth.

Like, you know what? This is really hard for me, but I think I'm going to come out of this a stronger person. So it can sound a little bit polyana-ish, but really the way we think about things has such a powerful impact on how they feel to us. So I encourage people to try reframing. Is it okay if you don't believe it? If you're like, I'm just excited about this speech. And then you're of this little voice your head. It's like, no, no, you're actually really scared, but you're like, I am just excited. Like, does it still work? Something I've learned from the psychology research is it can be helpful to take a two-step approach. First is acceptance. Because as you're suggesting, Liz, you really don't want to be trying to fool yourself or tell yourself some story that you really don't believe.

So you could say, you know, this is really hard. I'm really struggling. This is really a tough time for me and then say, but is there a way that I could sort of think about it in a different way so that it has a slightly different meaning for me? It's like you have to go through that acceptance step first before you jump to, oh, but really this is a great thing. That makes sense. So that's how we're interpreting what happens in our body differently. How can we change what we're actually doing with our body? I would love to talk about movement and how we can use movement to enhance the power of our thinking? In the extended mind, I talk about three different kinds of movement.

One is low intensity movement, which is just the kind of little movements that we might make if we're, say, working at a standing desk instead of sitting. Sitting is really so deadly. We know that it's not good for our health, but it's also not great for our thinking process is because sitting down and being very still sends a message to our brains that we're at rest, you know,

and how many of us have not sort of had moments where we kind of are nodding off, you know, in front of the computer because being at rest is really a diametrically opposed state to the kind of alert and energized state that we want to be in to do our best thinking. So it actually helps to move even just a little bit as you're trying to do your thinking. I like to pace when I'm talking on the phone, for example. I feel like I think better or when I'm trying to work out a problem. And then there's medium intensity movement, which might be a really brisk walk that gets the blood pumping, gets the blood flowing to the brain. There's also a really interesting effect whereby our brain understands things through metaphors. And if you think about

what metaphors we use when we're not making progress, we talk about, I'm stuck, I'm in a rut. We have these metaphors that suggest kind of stasis and not moving, whereas when things are going well, we say, I'm on a roll, you know, the ideas are flowing. So if we can move our bodies in a way that invokes a metaphor that is associated in our minds with creativity or progress or new insight, new vistas, we start moving and the brain follows suit. If we can move our bodies and feel like we're making progress through the world, we're taking steps forward, we're seeing new things, that stimulates the creative mindset. And then finally, high intensity movement, which is not for everybody, but when people run at a very fast pace,

for a sustained amount of time. And people will talk about this who are serious runners or athletes. The brain is so consumed with the demands of that kind of high intensity exercise that basically the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that judges and criticizes

and also plans and does those sort of higher level mental activities, it dials down its activity because there's so much going on in terms of just controlling the body and its movements. And that is the state with the prefrontal cortex that is also shared by things like when we dream or when we're having a drug trip, you know, because that's when ideas and associations can kind of collide and combine in really creative ways. So it may be that if you need a creative inspiration, what you need to do is really just go out there and like really exhaust yourself to the point where you're not thinking in that very highly cerebral, judgmental kind of way. And that is a state of mind that can produce really high levels of creativity. Is there a threshold for that? Like, would any sort of high intensity workout be prescribed for this

type of creative thinking that we're trying to induce? It needs to be high intensity activity sustained over a significant period of time. In the book, I think I have the more exact kind of prescription that you're asking for. But it can't just be a brisk walk. It needs to be something where almost all your mental resources are devoted to just kind of keeping one foot going after the other. And that will put you in that state we're talking about. And then towards the point of the low intensity movement, is the research they're persuasive enough that you would say everybody should have a standing desk or a treadmill desk where they're doing the majority of their work?

Well, I don't like to be too prescriptive in the sense that people have to find out what works for them, you know, but certainly in the case of education, I think it's, kind of crazy that we expect kids who are naturally inclined to move and who need to move. I was going to say squirmie. They're naturally squirmy. Yeah, that we expect them to sit quietly at desks. One thing I write about in the extended mind is that it actually takes quite a lot of mental resources to inhibit the urge to move because what's natural to us is to always be kind of moving a little bit and all the more so for children. And so we actually have to devote some measure of mental bandwidth just to keeping ourselves still. Whereas if we have permission to move,

and this is why I'm a big fan of gesturing, but also fidgeting, which, you know, again, is something that for whatever reason our culture looks down upon. But when we fidget, it's actually this very finely modulated way of adjusting our own arousal level. If we fidget, it might keep us awake during a boring meeting, or if we're playing with some kind of object on our desk that might sort of put us in a more creative frame of mind. There's research on fidget objects in the book that I write about where some people have like a whole almost like array of fidget objects to induce different kinds of mental states. And I love that idea, almost like a wardrobe of fidget objects. And I would love to see us give ourselves more permission to fidget, to doodle, to gesture,

and not feel like those things are somehow anti-intellectual. They're actually enhancing our thinking. Do you have a standing desk or walking desk? I'll be honest. I actually like to write in my bed. I mean, I have a desk and I'm looking at it over there, but I very rarely use it. And this actually speaks to another thing that's covered in the book, which is the importance of place. And to me, a couch or a bed is like a really safe, supportive kind of space. Somehow when I'm at a desk, it feels like, okay, you're on the clock now.

Whereas if I'm on my bed or on a couch and my cat is next to me and I have my cup of tea, I'm like, I'm enjoying myself. Whatever I'm doing right now, this is just play. This is fun, you know. And so that's how writing happens for me. Bioindividuality. I love it. We'll get into place and environment in a second. But I would love to just touch on the role that movement plays in our memory.

Can you speak to that? One of my favorite experiments that I report on in the book is about acting. and how they remember just pages and pages of their script. And I think a lot of us have wondered, how do they do that? And in fact, research has shown that actors remember their lines with incredible accuracy, like 99% plus accuracy. And they often retain their memory of those lines for months and even years after a play has wrapped up. And researchers have looked into how is it that actors are able to do this? And it's not that they have super memories or that they're gifted in some way, it's that they always tie their memory of a line to a specific movement that

they're engaging in when they're acting it out on stage. And many actors told the researchers who were doing this work that they never try to learn their lines until a play has been blocked, meaning all the movements have been worked out. Because in their minds, the words that they say and the movements of their bodies become joined and unified. So it's almost like by moving, they evoke the words in their minds, and by saying the words, they know what movements to make. And I think we all could take a page from actors and remember that our body is this resource that we have with us all the time. It's very convenient. If we are ourselves preparing to give a speech, for example, we all practice our words in front of a mirror, many of us do when we have

a speech to give. But how about practicing your gestures as well? And building those into your speech just as much and being just as thoughtful about the gestures and the movements of your body as you are about how you say the words. You'll get like a double hit kind of, right? Because you'll get the thinking enhancement powers of the gesturing, but then you'll get the thinking enhancement powers of tying the gesture to the specific words and the memory enhancement that comes with that. Exactly. And you could even say you get a triple hit because research has shown that the communicative function of gesture makes it so that points that you make with a gesture are going to be be remembered much better by your audience than points that you make that don't have a gesture to go

along with them. Triple hit. Amazing. Let's talk about environment for a second. You mentioned that environment obviously has such a huge impact on our thinking. What are some ways that our environment is impacting how we're thinking? One of the most powerful environments that we have available to us for thinking is nature. And it makes sense when you think about how human beings evolved. You know, this world we live in now where we're inside buildings or inside our cars, 95% plus of the time. And that is a very unusual situation from an evolutionary point of view. We actually evolved, our species evolved outside. So it's the case that the kind of information that we find outside in terms of trees, clouds, greenery, all those kinds of stimuli are very easy for our minds to process. They take

very little effort for our brains to process. And for that reason, it's very soothing and relaxing to spend time outside. It's a very different kind of attention that we pay when we're outside, as opposed to the kind of attention we have to pay when we're reading little words on a piece of paper or focusing on our screens. That's a really hard-edged, intense kind of attention, whereas when we go outside, our attention is drawn here and drawn there, but in a very effortless kind of way. And everything is sort of interesting and pleasant, but not in a hard-edged or intense way. This branch of research is known as attention restoration theory, which has found that our attentional resources get drained by doing this kind of hard-edged, focused work that I'm talking

about that makes up most of our work if we are knowledge workers of one kind or another, whereas going outside actually replenishes our attentional resources. It's kind of like filling the tank, you know, and I find that we spend so much time thinking about how we direct our attention or how our attention is being distributed or distracted. So we think about the demands on our attention, but we don't really think about the supply side. Like, well, where am I refreshing and replenishing my attention? Where is that being renewed? And the easiest and most effective way to refill that attentional tank is to spend some time outside. How much nature are we talking about? Like, If we have a few trees on the side of our sidewalk in our neighborhood, is that cool?

Or do we need like a full-on park? Do we need a forest? It turns out, fortunately, that it doesn't have to be beautiful nature. There's an interesting line of research that shows that if you can get out into the wilderness, there's something special happens after about three days in the wilderness. And that's partly about that intense exposure to nature. And it's probably also about getting away from your devices, which I think we kind of have to go into the wilderness to do, basically. But the benefits of attention restoration can come from just taking a walk around your block, even if you live on a city block, or even looking out the window. I have a

big tree that's right outside my own window. And there's a term in the research known as soft fascination. And I always think of that when my mind is just sort of wandering as I look at the leaves, because there's a really soft, kind of diffuse kind of attention that is evoked by nature. And that can even be the view outside of a window. And is there a minimum amount of time we need to experience nature to have these effects? Like I know that you talked about micro restorative experiences, which I think is a really interesting concept. Yeah. And that research suggested that some of the benefits of attention restoration happen just after 40 seconds of looking out the window and taking that break. I mean, it is a dose-dependent effect, so the more the better. But if all you have time for is to

take a moment to look outside and just sort of let your attention soften that way, I think that can make a difference into itself. And then there were a few other things I feel like that you talked about that enhanced the nature experience. Like I feel like taking your smartphone kind of ruined it. Was that right? Yeah. All those benefits of attention restoration that we've been talking about are basically eliminated if you bring your device out with you. So leave that behind when you go outside. Is there anything else we should be doing to enhance the benefits of this nature walk or nature experience? Well, we were talking a moment ago, Liz, about getting a sort of triple threat from our gestures. And something a lot of us did during the pandemic would start taking walks with friends outside because that was the only way we could meet up with people.

And when you think about it, you're getting three benefits right there. You're outside. You're getting physical movement. And we haven't talked about this yet, but you're also getting the social benefits of mind extension with us. other people. So that's like just a really great way to spend your time. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological

foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes, every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here is the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in

more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement mitopure does. It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondrial increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this,

and urolithin A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopear gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. I'm genuinely confused how master class gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly, like the cooking

class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest, this is like a use case I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I'll just watch it for entertainment when I want to do something that's far more interesting than scrolling. Christina Aguilera taught me to sing. Shan Boudrum's Art of Mastering Confidence and Sex appeal class. It's 10 out of 10. There's menopause classes with leading doctors. There's script writing with Mindy Kaling. Literally, you name it, they're on masterclass. And it is such a good way to get off your phone, but have something that's like not quite as long or hard to get into as a TV show or a movie and it just keeps you entertained and interested. And you are learning. There are over 200 classes from the

world's best, all for just $10 a month when billed annually. And you get unlimited access to every class on the platform so you can learn at your own pace whenever you want on your phone, your computer, or even in audio mode like a podcast. If you're looking to stop scrolling and start consuming entertaining content that makes you feel excited and helps you learn, Masterclass is it. And the best part, every membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can start learning risk-free. Right now our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. It's so interesting because it kind of flips what we think of as productivity on its head.

Like instead of kind of cityed and trying to noodle through a problem, actually you should close your computer, get away from your device, take a walk, and that will get you to the place you want to go faster. Absolutely. And I think there's really compelling research on what psychologists call incubation, which is the fact that, again, back to this idea of the non-conscious mind, even when we're not consciously thinking about a problem, our non-conscious mind will continue to puzzle on it, but you need to do something different. You're not giving your non-conscious mind a chance to, as you say, noodle on a problem if you're maintaining this really rigid focus. This is exactly why most people will tell you that they get good ideas in the shower or when they're taking a walk or taking a bike ride because that's what's known as the default network and the brain takes over and we get these more free flowing associative kind of thoughts. And that's where a lot of our best ideas are going to come.

Is there anything we can do to make our indoor environments more conducive to thinking since like you said, we have to spend 95% of our time inside? Absolutely. I really love the research on what's known as evoccurts. objects. And when researchers talk about that, they mean that material objects really can hold a lot of meaning for us. And if we strategically or very thoughtfully and intentionally place those objects in the area where we do our thinking, they can really prime us with the role that we want to be playing. And evocative objects come in two different kinds. One is cues of identity, like cues of who you are, who you want to be, who you're aspiring to be, maybe a reminder of yourself as an artist or a creator, and then also cues of belonging, which are reminders of

valued groups to which you belong. So if you can surround yourself with reminders that you belong to a group of musicians or an international kind of coalition of some kind, those things will put you in the right frame of mind to do a different kind of thinking than if you were in a sterile environment that didn't hold that kind of meaning for you. I love that. I think that's really beautiful, which leads us right to community. Community, you mentioned, is such a huge important thing for our thinking, not just for pleasure or joy, but literally for making our mind function at its top capacity. So can you speak to how we can optimize our human interactions to expand and enhance our thinking?

We live in such an individualistic culture. And again, we kind of have this idea, this neurocentric idea that ideas come from individual brains. When really, If you look at any good idea, it was the product of social interactions and, as you say, community interactions. So then the question becomes how do we intentionally structure our interactions with people in order to extend our minds? And in my book, I talk about there's experts, there's the ways that we learn from masters and teachers.

There's peers. So the kinds of interactions we have with people who are at our own level. And then there's thinking with groups, which takes on its own. kind of quality when a group of people becomes not just an assemblage of individuals, but actually starts thinking and acting as an entity. And so I talk in the book about ways to create that feeling of groupiness. And I think we've all had a sense of groupiness, a sense that like, wow, we're all kind of on the same page and firing at the same time. And we've also had the opposite feeling of a group that never kind of coheres or comes together. So again, we're not

necessarily used to thinking in terms of thinking with other people because we have this very individualistic culture that says individual geniuses or individual creators are the ones who generate the ideas that make our world run. What are some of the ways that we can shift our thinking when we are with other people to get away from that idea that individuals are all that matters? One concept I really love is transactive memory, which refers to the fact that. that no one person can know everything, especially in our world where knowledge is so specialized these days. But if you know who knows the information that you're looking for, then you've effectively expanded your own memory in a sense. Like you've sort of reached out and grabbed

their expertise and made it your own because you know who to go to. When we're working in a group, it's really important to have an accurate and an updated sense of what everybody in the group knows because then you've multiplied the group's access to information by however many people are in the group. And research has shown that groups in healthcare, like doctors who are working together, when they have a very robust, transactive memory system, meaning that they all know exactly what the others' areas of expertise are, patients actually do better because nothing's falling through the cracks. The people who are the best suited to do a certain task get pulled into that task because everyone knows what their area of expertise is. So again, we're getting away from the idea that one

person has to know or be able to do everything. And instead, what's important to know is how to access the resources that are outside of your brain. My husband and I joke about that all the time because I'm like, oh, you've specialized in these things. So I don't need to know about them anymore. And I've specialized in these things. And you can access that when you need to. And I've always been like, does that mean we're codependent? Like, is that a bad thing? But you're saying, No, it's science supported. It is absolutely science supported. And you might find it interesting to know that the psychologist who came up with the idea

of transactive memory, Daniel Wagner, it actually emerged first out of his experience of getting married. He got married to another psychologist. So you can imagine they probably talked about this stuff at home. But they started noticing like Dan was in charge of the car stuff while Tony, his wife, remembered the family birthdays or whatever, not to make it like a total traditional gender breakdown, but each person in the partnership took control or was in charge of a certain area. And that was actually a very efficient way of dividing up the mental labor.

Thank you for the permission giving. I really appreciate it. I'm curious to know out of all of these different studies and research you've conducted and little tips and tricks and techniques that you've learned, what has been the most sticky in your own life? Like, what do you find yourself going to on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis? There's one. that we haven't really talked about yet, which is this idea of cognitive offloading. And that is the idea that we have, again, the brain-centric kind of neurocentric society that we live in, fetishizes the brain and really we celebrate people who do things in their heads, like memory champions who can remember things without writing them down or chess grandmasters who can plan out many games

all inside their head. And we valorize that. But in fact, the most efficient and most effective way to deal with information and ideas is often to get it out of our heads and onto physical space, whether that's a big whiteboard or a multi-monitor setup so that you have multiple screens or my own favorite, and this is how it shows up in my own life, I'm a profligate post-it note user, and I particularly like Post-it notes because you get the benefit not only of cognitive offloading in the sense of I'm getting all the information, all those ideas. out of my head. But then we can actually manipulate those ideas as if they're physical objects, which again is the kind of thing that our brains really evolved to do, and move them around

and use the embodied resources of being able to physically navigate what is basically a landscape of ideas on the wall in a way that improves our thinking so much more than if it were all just locked up in our head and sort of inert there without the ability to, first of all, get that sort of distance from our ideas, but also that ability to move and change and dynamically work with all those ideas. So I always tell people and I tell my own kids and I tell my students when I teach that you want to get your ideas out of your head and don't try to do it all in your head. Yeah, I use notion obsessively, which I don't get the embodied moving stuff around. But I do think there's so much mental energy also wasted on, oh, I'll remember that later. I'll remember that

later and getting rid of that mental waste freeze up so much extra mental space. Yeah, I think we can think of our devices that way too, that we want to offload to our devices as much to a platform like notion. As much as possible, the more mundane or more sort of memory based kind of tasks, and that frees up our human intelligence to do the higher level cognitive activities like imagining and planning and creatively putting things together because, for example, the way we delegate remembering phone numbers to our devices, you know, that's one fewer thing that we have to remember. We have to entrust to our brains.

And we want to be thinking in terms of freeing up our brains to do what only human brains can do. Is there any downside of that? Like I know my dad often lament that we don't know how to use maps anymore. and if my Google Maps went away, I wouldn't be able to get anywhere and he would be able to get there. Is there a negative side to that or is it all positive? I would say it's something that we want to be conscious of and intentional about because it is possible for our native abilities to atrophy when we don't use them all the time. And that's been shown with navigational abilities specifically.

So your dad is actually incorrect there. But I also see that idea turning up. Sometimes you'll hear people in education saying, like, well, kids don't need to learn facts anymore because they can just always Google it. But that's really a misconception. We actually have to have quite a lot of content knowledge committed to memory before we can be an expert or close to an expert in any kind of domain. Like I always compare it to if you were able to look up the meaning of a foreign language

word, one word at a time, if you were able to Google the French word for computer and string together a bunch of those words into a sentence, does that mean that you're fluent in French? No, actually, you have to have a whole bunch of vocabulary words, plus the structures of the grammar committed to memory in order to be fluent in a language. And the same is true for being an expert in any kind of domain. So it's a little bit nuanced.

It's like you want to offload so you can do these higher processing, but you also need to keep a certain amount of stuff in your brain to be able to formulate those higher level, higher processing thoughts. That is true. And that's why I think the concept of the extended mind is useful because it allows us to think really intentionally about these things. Otherwise, we're doing all of this. We extend our minds all the time, but we tend to do it haphazardly and without a lot of conscious planning or thought. Whereas if we're aware of the fact that we bring in external resources into our thinking, then we can be really thoughtful about how we do it and make sure that we're doing it as well as we can. What do you do when you're facing a problem or a challenge that you're trying to tackle in your workday? I'm really persuaded by the research on incubation. And anyone who owns a home or maintains a domestic space knows this. There's like a never-ending list of chores and duties around the house. And I often think of it as like doing double duty. I'll confront a difficult problem. I won't know exactly how to solve it. And this is an interesting research insight that I just recently came

across, be very explicit about posing the question to yourself. Say it to yourself or ask it as a question, pose it to yourself. How can I make this introduction flow into the first chapter or whatever it is that I'm working on? Set the problem to yourself in very clear and explicit terms. And then go wash the dishes or do the laundry or, as I say, there's always something to be done in that realm. And I always feel like I'm killing two birds with one's down here because I'm getting stuff done, but I also know that as I do this, my non-conscious mind is working away on that problem. And more often than not, I really am able to return to my writing work with some fresh kind of insight that I would not have gotten if I just stayed at my computer, like sort of pushing

through and not letting up. That's actually not the best way to treat our brains. Can you leave us with just one homework assignment, something that we can all start doing the second we stop listening to this podcast to extend our minds? One of my favorite concepts from the extended mind literature. And again, this is from the philosopher, Andy Clark. He talks about how we are intrinsically loopy creatures, that humans are loopy in the sense that our unique biological intelligence benefits from creating loops whereby we take ideas and information out of our heads and

loop it through, maybe through our bodies, through gesture and movement, or maybe through the environment when we go outside, or maybe through the mind of another person. And we all know how our thoughts and ideas can be enriched by talking to another person or even by printing it out and seeing it. I always print out like what I'm working on. And somehow it looks different when it's on paper than when it's on screen. And that doesn't make any sense from the brain as computer metaphor point of view,

but it's just how our quirky, idiosyncratic human intelligence works. So I would just suggest to listeners, think about creating those loops whenever you can, getting ideas and information out of your head and looping it through some other medium. And you'll find that it returns to you in a form that is enriched and augmented in some way that you might not be able to predict, but that you can only find out from sort of taking advantage of the outside world. Can you give one more example of that you said printing out something that you were looking out on a screen? Can you give a few more like loop examples that we could utilize? One way of creating a cognitive loop that I really love and I think is really underused is creating a three-dimensional model of the problem that we're trying to solve. And architects and designers know this, that there's something about creating a model that exists in space that changes the way we can think about it. Not only because we're cognitively offloading, we're getting out of our head, but then we can draw on those embodied resources.

we can go in close and look at it in fine detail. We can step back. We can move around it. We think of thinking outside the brain as almost like a childish thing. Like we're okay with kindergartners using manipulatives or rods and blocks to count with. But you really should set those aside as you get older and do that all in your head when really we adults should be taking a page from the kindergartners and working with the physical stuff of the world a lot more often than we do. And we're kind of drowning in symbols and images when really our brains evolved to move our bodies through space, navigate through three-dimensional landscapes, and manipulate material objects. And the more we can make our knowledge work resemble those kinds of

hands-on embodied activities, the better we'll be able to think. I love that. Well, can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your beautiful book, any other work that you're doing that you want to highlight anywhere people can find you on the internet. I have a website, Annie Murphypaul.com. I'm active on Twitter, although we'll see how long that lasts. My handle is at Annie Murphy Paul. I'll just say one more thing, Liz, which is that a lot of people have told me that they have enjoyed listening to my book and the audio book for whatever reason is far out selling the paperback and the hardback. And a lot of people have said to me, I actually kind of lived the message of your book by listening to your book while taking a walk outside. I've heard that from so

many people. So a kind of plug for the whole extended mind idea. I think a lot of us have discovered audiobooks and podcasts over the past few years. And I think it's a really wonderful way to get a whole lot of different kinds of stimulation going that enriched whatever the material is that's going into your ears. That's a great idea. I love the idea of embodying all of the practices in your book by going for a little walk with it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. This was absolutely wonderful. I'm such a fan and I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you, Liz. It's really been a pleasure to talk with you. Wow, that was a lot of actionable information. I am so curious to hear what you're going to try.

I'm literally already gesturing so much more since interviewing Annie. Obviously, it's yet another reason to prioritize getting outside and getting movement. And I love the stuff about setting up your environment. It was just so much interesting research. If you are new here, make sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss out on any future episodes. We have amazing ones coming up, including one that is packed to the brim with sleep tips and tricks and a very special series about the health effects of alcohol that I am so excited to share. So subscribe, subscribe, subscribe so you do not miss out on anything. Oh, and head to Healthyconvo.combo.com to get your hands on our three new conversation starting games,

Ron cheer together, working together, and we're all in this together, plus the original healthier Together Deck. They're all at healthycombo.combo.com. Okay, I love you and I will see you next week on the next episode of the healthier together podcast. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier. That's where Marley Spoon comes in. What I love about this company and what's different than all of the other companies out there that are doing like stuff in the same arena is that you can customize your choices based on the effort that you want to put in. So if you want them to send you ingredients, so you can make your

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so it helps skin function like healthier, younger looking skin. It is not masking the signs of aging. It's not targeting one thing. It is actually rolling the clock back at a cellular level. I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now and I love it so much. It feels amazing. It goes on really smoothly.

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And then again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger. One Skin has four peer-reviewed clinical studies in over 10,000 five-star reviews. The data backs everything up for a limited time. Get 15% off with code Liz at oneskin.co slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.co with code Liz.