thecounterforce: The Extended Learner

In his review of Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs, Leslie Marsh summarises Clark as follows:

The human mind is naturally disposed to develop and incorporate tools.
Humans have always been to a greater or lesser degree cyborgs.

The highly-charged word “cyborg” is here used in a positive way. Mind is not confined within the skull; cognition is an actively-coupled system in which mind and environment interact: “a coalition with the artefactual” (Leslie).

In the seminal article “The Extended Mind”, Clark and Chalmers use several examples to demonstrate their premise. For instance, when playing Scrabble we often re-arrange the tiles in order to help us to think of possible words we could play. Clark and Chalmers see this as an “extended cognitive process”. Moving the tiles around is part of the thinking process.

Clark and Chalmers suggest that “the biological brain has in fact evolved and matured in ways which factor in the reliable presence of a manipulable external environment”. If we accept this, then the rise of portable computing and the ubiquity of the internet is not to be resisted or feared. It should be welcomed as the next stage in the evolution of human intelligence.

Carl Zimmer’s article “How Google is Making us Smarter” re-states these ideas in a nicely radical way: “The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.” Or, more simply: “We all have minds that extend out into our environments”.

It’s important to stress that the mind is not just using the environment as a source of information. Zimmer uses the analogy of when we poke down a hole with a stick – our awareness is transferred to the end of the stick, it doesn’t stay fixed in our hands. When we use our extended minds we are creating feedback systems. Research has shown that when you teach monkeys to use a rake, it changes the behaviour of the neurons in the brain. Our minds are always eagerly searching for things with which to create these feedback loops. As Zimmer puts it, the human mind is: “constantly seeking to extend itself, to grab on to new tools it has never experienced before and merge with them”.

Some people seem to fear that new technologies are damaging our cognitive abilities. Zimmer points out that Socrates, “worried that writing would make people forgetful and unwise”. True, few people nowadays memorise whole epic poems, but surely the advantages that writing has given to human beings outweigh any such concerns.

Writing in 1998, Clark and Chalmers were hesitant to include the internet in the “extended mind”: “The Internet is likely to fail on multiple counts, unless I am unusually computer-reliant, facile with the technology and trusting”. I would argue that, by the standards of 1998, we are all, today, “unusually computer-reliant”. We, and even more so our students, are “facile with the technology”. As for the issue of reliability, this need not be a serious objection. Of course, students need to be able to judge the reliability of information gleaned from the internet, but this is a simple matter of teaching some research-skills. We cannot allow neo-Luddite wiki-haters to throw the baby out with the bath-water.

The Social Dimension

Clark and Chalmers posed another fascinating question: “What about socially extended cognition? Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers?” It barely needs pointing out that we are able to connect with each other far more than ever before: texting, Facebook, Twitter and other social applications allow us to constantly think together with others in a way that has never been possible at any point in human history. Marsh talks about “a kind of automatic pooling of knowledge and expertise”. It is no doubt the case that our students are rarely using these tools to help them explore the school curriculum. The challenge for us is to encourage students to use these things in a way that will enhance their (school-based) learning.

In 1973, Ivan Illich proposed the idea of “learning webs”: “The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern”. The internet and mobile computing now make this type of learning possible in a way that is truly revolutionary.

Our students are already using their electronically extended minds with an ease and flexibility that ought to astonish us. We need to rise to the challenge.

Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers - “The Extended Mind” (1998).

http://consc.net/papers/extended.html

Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society (1973).

Leslie Marsh - “Review of Natural-Born Cyborgs” (2005).

http://vidiowiki.com/media/paper/09pEekA5pgo8%20Clark.pdf

Carl Zimmer - “How Google is Making us Smarter” (2009).

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/15-how-google-is-making-us-smarter