Education and the Extended Mind

June 09, 2020

Colleges have begun announcing their plans to reopen this fall after months of remote education. Many will be pursuing a hybrid model, with a mix of remote and in-person classes, followed by a gradual return to normalcy if the pandemic permits. But some have been driven by this mandatory experiment to rethink education more fundamentally. Just as companies have been forced to clarify their workflows, educators and students have begun to consider what services college concretely provides and what role the classroom can play in it. What is lost when the classroom goes online?

One fear many professors have is that cheating will run rampant when testing goes remote. Some preempt this by simply making tests open book or open note. If all testing took this form, though, a crucial premise of modern education would be challenged: namely, that students need to remember information, not just understand it. Granted, memorization and understanding can't be separated fully, but it's worth reflecting on whether this premise applies in the work environment for which students are ostensibly being prepared. Knowledge work is, for all intents and purposes, open-book: jobs don't have prohibitions against googling a fact or statistic. Coders frequently consult online repositories like Github to address common challenges. What knowledge-workers do retain comes from concrete, just-in-time problem-solving, not abstract, just-in-case study.

That doesn't mean superficial web-surfing counts as an education. Sheer volume of information consumed does not amount to learning. As Nicholas Carr notes, "to truly know something, you have to weave it into your neural circuitry, and then you have to repeatedly retrieve it from memory and put it to fresh use." Relying too heavily on a service like Google to answer all of one's questions can prevent this process. Carr cites a study in which "just knowing that information will be available in a database appears to reduce the likelihood that our brains will make the effort required to form memories." Invoking the work of cognitive scientist Andy Clark, Carr contrasts our surface-level engagement with digital representations to the rich, embodied cognition for which we evolved:
 

"One of the great ironies of our time is that even as scientists discover more about the essential roles that physical action and sensory perception play in the development of our thoughts, memories, and skills, we’re spending less time acting in the world and more time living and working through the abstract medium of the computer screen. We’re disembodying ourselves, imposing sensory constraints on our existence."

But embodiment is not necessarily opposed to the way we outsource our cognition to digital tools. Indeed, one of the core premises of embodied cognition is that thinking does not happen purely inside the head. It spills out into our environment; we "use the world as its own best model." Clark even authored a famous paper with the philosopher David Chalmers titled "The Extended Mind," in which he argued that digital tools like the iPhone are literally part of our minds, prosthetic but nevertheless entangled with our cognitive functioning. 

Tiago Forte, a digital productivity expert, has embraced Clark's ideas as a crucial paradigm shift for modern knowledge work. He offers an online course called "Building a Second Brain," in which he teaches students to build up their own database of digital notes and thereby free up cognitive power for creative synthesis. Second Brainers prioritize information throughput over memorization. Then, they can call upon their notes opportunistically as new projects demand it instead of having to rely on a shaky memory.

Beneath this method is a fundamentally different view of our relationship to information than that found in the modern university. Forte cites the writer Venkatesh Rao's distinction between two paradigms: containers and streams. In a world where information is stored in finite containers like books, we relate to it "in what behavioral psychologists call 'functionally fixed' ways: people, ideas, and things have fixed, single meanings." But today, information comes in streams: "open, non-hierarchical flow[s] of real-time information from multiple overlapping networks." Any attempt to "finish" reading Twitter is hopeless; we'll never get the bottom of the newsfeed. To adapt, we have to reconsider how we see ourselves, and what it means for us to learn. As the world rapidly changes, so too does the meaning of everything we've learned. We are not atomized individuals but nodes in a network, defined by the unique intersections at which we sit. Educators may want to take note of Forte's conclusion: "the best way to surf the stream...is to become part of the stream."