This is the fifth article in my series on working outside your brain. The series was inspired, in part, by Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. The book explores the ways we use the world around us to supplement our limited mental resources. Paul introduces four techniques we use to extend our thinking beyond the brain:

• Tools: The physical tools and digital technologies we develop to offload information, extend our sensory perceptions, and amplify our mental powers.

• The Body: The sensations that alert us to familiar patterns of events and experiences, and the gestures that help us express our ideas.

• Physical Space: The techniques we use to extend and organize our thinking in physical spaces, and the ways we use physical spaces to change the nature of our attention and refresh our mental energy.

• Social Interaction: The ways we use teams and social networks to overcome our biases, refine our thinking, extend our limited individual memory, and diversify the knowledge we bring to problem solving.

My first four articles primarily focused on how we use note-taking tools to capture, organize, link, and express our thoughts. But starting with the tools we use to offload information and externalize our thoughts perpetuates the myth that thinking begins and ends in the brain. It doesn’t. The body is the brain's partner in thought, especially in creative thought.

How the Brain Evolved to Serve the Body

As I noted in the first essay in this series, the written word has played an important role in the creation of our modern sense of self. Writing helps create the distance required for objective thought. But at the same time the written word is the way the brain expresses thought. The body has its own vernacular and vocabulary. The dominant role the written word has assumed in the development of culture (especially Western culture) has inflated our perception of the role the brain plays so significantly that we now equate the brain with the mind. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The burgeoning field of embodied cognition has demonstrated that the body—its sensations, gestures and movements—plays an integral role in the thought processes that we usually locate above the neck. The body is especially adept at alerting us to patterns of events and experience, patterns that are too complex to be held in the conscious mind. When a scenario we encountered before crops up again, the body gives us a nudge: communicating with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. Those who are attuned to such cues can use them to make more-informed decisions. 

—Annie Murphy Paul, “How to Think Outside Your Brain.” The New York Times, June 11, 2021.

Our brains are out of sync with our expectations. We expect our brains to react to the world around us, to perceive and accurately explain our experiences. But “our brains didn’t evolve for rationality,” the neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett explains. She adds:

They did not evolve for you to think or to perceive the world accurately. They didn’t even really evolve for you to see or hear or feel. Brains evolved to regulate a body so that it could move around the world efficiently.

—Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, as quoted in “Interoception: How We Understand Our Body’s Inner Sensations,” Association for Psychological Science website, September 25, 2019

The brain’s core task is regulating your body’s internal systems: anticipating the body’s needs and satisfying them on demand. This task (called allostasis) requires your brain to continually monitor the sensory input it's receiving from your body and integrate that input with your memories of similar past experiences. The demands of surviving in an often dangerous world shaped our brains into prediction engines optimized to construct models of the body in the world. “This predictive process is the way your brain navigates the world, guides your actions, and constructs your experiences,” Barrett explains.

The brain’s model-making and predictive process has a name: interoception. What we think of as our sense of “self,” of consciousness, is a consequence of interoception. Consciousness is our evolving sense of ourselves in the world around us, a concept that hangs on a latticework of sensory information from the body. Barrett again: “Your body is part of your mind, not in some gauzy mystical way, but in a very real biological way. … This means there is a piece of your body in every concept that you make…” The organ we call the brain is not the mind. The mind is the body, which encompasses the brain.

The Body and Creative Thinking

If you watch a painter at work, you’ll notice that every so often the artist steps away from the canvas to get some distance from the painting. Creativity is a continuous cycle of action and reflection. But the self creating a work isn’t always the same self that’s evaluating it.

We create from our whole self, using the body and the brain. The critical self is usually the brain alone in its analytical mode. When you’re thrashing, when you can’t decide if something you’ve done is good or bad, it’s not necessarily because you’re being indecisive. The analytical mode decouples you from your embodied self. You’re trying to judge your work with less than half of the information you had at your disposal when you created it. Because your body knows the feeling that you get when you experience work that excites and satisfies you, your body can help you judge your work. How? Through pattern recognition:

... when a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. (One psychologist has called this guide our “somatic rudder.”) Researchers have even captured the body in mid-nudge, as it alerts its inhabitant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have known she was looking for.

—Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Watch a painter assessing a work in progress more closely and you may see the artist use a brush or pencil to trace the movement of their eye through the painting, the same way a musician may mimic a conductor as they listen to a take, or a writer will read their work out loud to themselves to make sure it “sounds right.” They are engaging their bodies in their creative review and reflection, using their brain and senses to assess their progress in multiple dimensions.

The Body and the Stories You Tell Yourself

The desire to express our emotions, our feelings, is one of the reasons we create art. But most of us believe our physical emotional responses are generated by the brain as it analyzes what’s happening to us, determines the appropriate emotional response, then directs the body to cry, smile, or jump back in fear. Annie Murphy Paul writes:

In fact, the causal arrow points in the opposite direction. The body produces sensations, the body initiates actions—and only then does the mind assemble these pieces of evidence into the entity we call an emotion.

—Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Recent research confirms that our emotions are constructed from the signals we receive from the body’s interoceptive system and the beliefs we inherit from our family and culture on how those signals should be interpreted and expressed. This model of how we create and interpret emotions has two important implications: First, learning to listen to our body can enrich our emotional life. Second, because our emotional responses are in large part determined by our inherited beliefs on how to respond to sensations, we can reframe how we respond to specific sensations. We can change their meaning and, in the process, change the stories we tell ourselves about our relationship to the world around us. We can reappraise a sensation by relabeling it—for example, as Paul writes, “reappraise ‘nervousness’ as ‘excitement.’”

When I’m feeling lousy about my work and my inner critics are starting to run amok, it’s easy to succumb to doubt about the piece I’m working on and my skills. Like many other creatives, there’s a story I know by heart that begins with feelings of frustration and overwhelm, and always ends with the same refrain: “I’m not good enough.” If I check in with my body, I often find that I’m just tired, hungry, or in need of a break from my desk and computer. As Dr. Barrett puts it, “Sometimes you feel wretched for a purely physical reason. It’s not thoughts that are driving feelings, but feelings that are driving thoughts.”

Learning to Listen to the Body

Each of us has a unique relationship with our body. For example, some people are able to hear their heart beating, others not. Those who can hear their heart beating are necessarily more in touch with their bodies, they’re just wired differently than those who can’t. 

One way to improve the quality of your brain-to-body connection (interoceptive awareness) and access the non-conscious sensory information your brain is constantly collecting, is to practice mindfulness meditation. Guided meditations like the full body scan, can help you develop a greater awareness of your bodily sensations and feel more connected to your physical self. (Listen to meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 30-minute guided body scan meditation.) 

To get the most out of the body scan exercise, try to name as many of the sensations that come up as you can. Also, try to be as specific and precise as you can about the feelings you’re experiencing. Keep a journal so you can learn the vernacular and vocabulary of your body.

There’s much more on thinking with the body in Annie Murphy Paul’s excellent book and in other recent books on the topic, such as Barbara Tversky’s Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. As we learn more about how the body and brain work together to form our thoughts, emotions, and perspective, we’re redefining what it means to own our ideas: our embodied thoughts are uniquely ours, as inseparable from us as the mind is from the brain and the body.