Accompanied Thinking

Thinking is a mental labour. It is normal that when we are challenged with cognitive tasks, we make our brains work harder; we push the grey matter in our heads to further limits. We could make our brains’ toil lighter by thinking accompanied. Let the brain act like a moderator of a conversation. Instead of doing everything only in our brains, we can shift many a mental works onto the world around us. Technology has pitched in even without we realising it. Who remembers telephone numbers anymore? Our smart phones do it for us. Thus we unburden our brains and augment its capacity. Two best and productive ways to provide our brains accompaniment for thinking are physical tools and social interaction. The Times of India republished an article from The New York Times on this and called it thinking outside your brain.

As we live a fuller life when we live with others than in isolation; we think more fully when we think accompanied by others.

Physical tools help us move our mental contents out of our heads to the space of a sketchpad or whiteboard. Once they are there it allows us to inspect it with our senses. Converting a mental representation into shapes and lines on a page helps one to know what one already knows and what one not yet understands. This is also offloading mental burden and freeing and enhancing the brains thanking force.

Social interaction helps to augment our brains to other peoples’ brains. We are fundamentally social creatures. As we live a fuller life when we live with others than in isolation; we think more fully when we think accompanied by others. The minds of others can be appendages for our limited memory. Daniel Wegner, a psychologist, called this collective remembering as ‘transactive memory’. Transactive memory can effectively multiply the amount of information to which an individual has access. Thinking along with books and authors is an extension of thinking with others.

Thinking together

When we do our thinking alone we often attend to information that supports the beliefs that we already hold. This bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Vigorous social interaction, with an open mind, is the solution.

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