We can extend our minds with the social interactions we have with other people.

So often, we assume that real thinking—serious thinking—is done alone, bent over a book or a notepad. But in fact, humans think best when they are interacting with others. Social activities like debating, storytelling, and teaching activate mental processes that remain

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That is to say, our social groups, tools, situations, and, more broadly, environment have always served as a cognitive extension, networking our individual minds, allowing them to spill into each other and share processing tasks as a group. It’s as though our brains are aware of their own biohardware limitations. They naturally seek to form rings... See more

To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively. A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s. It prefers the sound of... See more