>[!citation] >Paul, A. M. (2021). _The extended mind: The power of thinking outside the brain_. Mariner Books. > [!abstract] > Over many years of elementary school, high school, and even college and graduate school, we’re never explicitly taught to think outside the brain; we’re not shown how to employ our bodies and spaces and relationships in the service of intelligent thought. Yet this instruction is available if we know where to look; our teachers are the artists and scientists and authors who have figured out these methods for themselves, and the researchers who are, at last, making these methods the object of study. > >Our culture insists that the brain is the sole locus of thinking, a cordoned-off space where cognition happens, much like the workings of my laptop are sealed inside its aluminum case. This book argues otherwise: it holds that the mind is something more like the nest-building bird I spotted on my walk, plucking a bit of string here, a twig there, constructing a whole out of available parts.