- We use others all the time to aid our thinking and decision-making.
- Our cognitive processes depend critically on the cognitive process of the other people around us.
- Thinking together is humanity’s secret weapon—it is much more powerful than thinking alone.
When we see public figures—politicians, musicians, actors—in action, all we see is what they are doing in that moment. By this, I mean we see a politician giving a public speech—but we don’t see them chairing meetings, we don’t see them in policy discussions, we don’t see them making the thousand and one decisions or doing the thousand and one things they do every day.
So, we generalise from their public speaking or whatever other little slice of exposure to them we have, and we make inferences about their general cognitive abilities from this one narrow slice of their behaviour—but most of what they do day to day is hidden from us. Other public figures are the same: We see a guitarist performing a killer riff, but we don’t see the hours of toil in rehearsal needed to ensure that riff kills it.
Politicians have a particular problem: If they’re poor public speakers, then we might conclude they’re not very bright or not especially effective. We conclude, unfairly, that lack of verbal fluency = lack of cognitive fluency. But that’s not true—you can’t apply a heuristic like that to judge cognitive capacity in another person. Lack of verbal fluency in public speaking does not imply that you’ve got poor metacognitive capacities, for example.
And the inverse is not true either: Smooth, polished, public speaking does not mean you will chair meetings effectively and arrive at decisions efficiently and reasonably.
Using other people as “cognitive surfaces”
We treat cognition as something to be assessed individually. Take an IQ test, and it’s you and the test; take a memory test, and it’s you and the test. But this is not how we live our lives—especially when engaged in complex tasks, such as running organisations. We specialise, we share out, we apportion cognitive work. Effective heads of organisations are not expected to be the best at accounting, legal, IT, and all the rest of it. They appoint people to these positions and manage them. We do this all the time: We can’t remember stuff—well, there’s a book or a search engine or a person to do the job for us.
The notion that the brain uses the external environment—which can be other people—as a form of “cognitive surface” to bolster cognition aligns with the “extended mind” hypothesis (something I’ve discussed previously). This idea is that certain cognitive processes extend beyond the boundaries of the brain and body, reaching into the physical world. When collaborating with others to solve a complex problem, for instance, we are not merely engaging in social interaction; we are also leveraging the cognitive capacities of those individuals as extensions of our own minds.
In this context, other people become integral cognitive surfaces for us, analogous to how tools or devices contribute to our cognitive processes: We use others to provide the necessary memory and cognitive scaffolds for conducting our work.
And we have a mechanism for doing this that works exquisitely well—our astonishing conversational abilities.
Cognitive surfaces and thinking beyond the brain
The cognitive theorist Lawrence Barsalou suggests that
“The cognitive system utilizes the environment and the body as external informational structures that complement internal representations … internal representations of a situated character, implemented via simulations in the brain’s modal systems, making them well suited for interfacing with external structures.”
Translation: Our brain takes in information from the world around us and from our senses to help us understand things better. It creates mental pictures closely tied to the situation we’re in. These mental pictures are like simulations in different parts of the brain. This helps us work well with the world outside, almost like a perfect match.
Consider driving a car: As a driver navigates, their cognitive system processes the visual input of the traffic lights and road signs and incorporates feedback from the steering wheel and pedals. These external cues complement the driver’s internal mental model of the road, facilitating a smooth interaction with the dynamic environment. Our cognitive system seamlessly blends external and internal information to guide our actions effectively.
Cognitive surfaces and extended cognition
One argument for this idea is based on functional similarities between internal and external processes: If the external process performs the same function as an internal one and is integrated with the rest of our cognitive system, then it should be considered part of our cognition. For instance, if we use a notebook to store information that we would otherwise keep in our memory, then the notebook is functionally equivalent to our memory and should be counted as part of it.
I’m not certain I buy that entirely: We have to remember there is information we need in our notebooks in the first place. Maybe all that’s happening is that we store pointers to where the information is in our heads, as this is more efficient and occupies less neural real estate.
However, there can be very tight integration between our brains, bodies, and environment. When we engage in certain cognitive tasks, such as playing chess or navigating a maze, we form a dynamic system with the external elements involved: The level of explanation to explain the rules of chess is not obvious from the properties of its components—just the chess pieces. There are rules involved.
However, this is not a settled argument: Perhaps we can explain cognition better by keeping it inside the head.
The idea that the brain uses the external environment as a kind of “cognitive surface” to support cognition is a fascinating and provocative one. It challenges assumptions about where the mind ends and the world begins.
But this view struggles with explanations for mind-wandering and related phenomena, when you are decoupled from the environment, behaviourally blank, but engaged in furious mental activity…
References
O’Mara, SM (2023). Talking Heads: The New Science of How We Create Our Shared Worlds. PenguinRandomHouse – Bodley Head/Vintage. ISBN: 9781847926487