Annie Murphy Paul: Embodied Cognition and Sensual Media

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome back to the FoST podcast. My guest today is a acclaimed science writer, Annie Murphy Paul whose newest book, The Extended Mind, was published this past summer to glowing reviews from the New York Times, which selected it as an editor’s choice and the Washington Post, which named it a best nonfiction book of 2021. The Extended Mind is not on its face a book about storytelling. It’s an argument for a new understanding of how we think beyond our brains using our bodies, the spaces we inhabit, and the people around us to augment our cognition. Though we’re all very accustomed to the idea of using our brains to think, in Annie’s words, much less attention has been paid to the ways in which people use the world to think. The gestures of the hands, the space of a sketchbook and the task of teaching someone else.

Charlie Melcher:

So the book isn’t explicitly about storytelling, but when I read The Extended Mind, I immediately thought everyone who cares about immersive storytelling should read this. It gave me an understanding of how we make sense of the world through our bodies and our environments, and helps to explain why audiences are so moved by performances like Punchdrunk Sleep No More and spaces like Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return. If there’s a case for immersive storytelling, it’s that we’re inside an embodied experience. And in The Extended Mind, Annie provides deep insight into why that type of experience can be so powerful and memorable. It’s my great pleasure to welcome her to the FoST podcast. Annie Murphy Paul, I am so delighted to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast. Thank you for being here.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Oh, thank you, Charlie. It’s my pleasure.

Charlie Melcher:

Your book, The Extended Mind, I could not put it down. I felt that you had written it almost for me specifically.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Well, maybe I did.

Charlie Melcher:

I think you did. You actually did, because as I read it, I felt for the first time someone was explaining to me what I had for years felt in my gut, that is that the future of storytelling is something that was going to be embodied. It was going to be multi-sensoral. It was going to be social. Like all of these things that I understand intuitively about where storytelling is headed, all of a sudden made total sense. You had turned on the lights and I had understood for the first time really the science behind why all of that is true. So, you start the book with this quote. It’s actually a funny quote from the comedian, Emo Philips. And it’s, I used to think that the brain was the most powerful organ in my body and then I realized who was telling me this.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Right. Right, right, right. Yeah. We’re all listening to the brain too much, I think, to the brain sing its own praises.

Charlie Melcher:

So, what is the truth that that joke reveals?

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yeah. So I included that line in the book because it sums up so much of the point that I was trying to make, which is that we are a very neuro-centric culture. We’re a very brain bound culture, meaning we focus so much of our attention and our effort on the brain when it comes to thinking, when it comes to creating. And the brain for all its amazing astonishing capacities, and I’m not here to put down the brain, it is central to thinking. It is a very key part of the thinking process, obviously. For all of its amazing capacities, it’s also a very limited organ, a very specific organ. It’s a biological organ that evolved to do jobs, to carry out tasks that are very different from what we… from the jobs we expected to do today in our modern world, in our world full of information and knowledge and abstract concepts.

Annie Murphy Paul:

And so the brain evolved to do things like sense and move the body and navigate through three dimensional landscapes and connect with other people in person. And those are still the things that the brain does the best, that it does effortlessly without bearing a lot of cognitive load. And those, the things that it does somewhat naturally, those are things that children learn to do without even being directly instructed. But as I say, so many of the things that we expect our brains to do today are not… don’t fall into those categories.

Annie Murphy Paul:

So, in order to attempt them, to accomplish them, the brain needs help. It needs to augment its basic biological capacities with outside the brain resources. So when Emo Philip says, I used to think the brain was the most amazing organ in my body, and then I realized he was telling me this, it’s like, it’s a little bit unfortunate that it’s the brain that leads the way because the brain is always going to focus on itself in a way when really we would benefit from broadening our perspective out beyond the brain and looking at things like the body, like our physical surroundings, like our social relationships and drawing as much intelligence from those things as we can.

Charlie Melcher:

So one of the things you also talk about in the book is learning to be conscious of the signals of our own bodies. This idea of interoception. Can you explain what that is?

Annie Murphy Paul:

Sure. Yeah. Interception, which is not a word I had encountered before I started this research, describes basically what most of us non-scientists would call gut feelings; the knowledge or the wisdom that we possess, but that doesn’t seem to originate from the conscious mind, rather it arises from the body. And so what’s amazing is that we have this continual constant flow of internal sensations that our body is always supplying us about how we are. It’s this internal gauge of how things are going and whether our systems are in balance or not. And yet we’re so focused on the outside world and all the many distractions and stimuli that are out there, that we often forget to tune into this constant internal flow of sensations.

Annie Murphy Paul:

And so interoception, the ability to attune to our interoceptive signals and cues is actually is really on a spectrum. Some people are very attuned to those internal signals. They can tell when their heart is beating, for example, and other people seem to be almost deaf and blind to these internal sensations, but it is a capacity that we can cultivate deliberately and intentionally through things like mindfulness meditation practices.

Charlie Melcher:

Now, why is it important that we become more in-tuned with those signals?

Annie Murphy Paul:

Well, the culture would tell you that in order to get your mental work done, your cognitive work done, you need to push aside and quash those internal signals and just power through and get it done. Right. But as we’re going through our daily lives, we’re taking in so much information, much more than our conscious minds could possibly process or store on that conscious level, but we are taking it in and we are storing it on this non-conscious level. And then the way we get access to that treasure trove of stored experience and expertise is through the body. The body, those internal signals, that’s the body tapping us on the shoulder or tugging us on the sleeve and saying, pay attention. You’ve been in this situation before.

Annie Murphy Paul:

This is how the body is reacting and preparing you to take on this challenge or address this situation. And so if we’re not attuned to those internal signals, then we’re missing out on this vast repository of information and wisdom that we actually do possess. But if we’re not in tune with our bodies, then we’re not in touch with that wisdom.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s such a fascinating idea, that the sensors in our bodies and there are so many of them, right? The number of nerves and the… what you can hear, and all this that you’re not conscious of, like that your body’s absorbing all this data about the outside world all the time. And yet our conscious mind can only take a small amount of that in, right? So we’re tuning out 99% of all the things going on in the world and yet somehow all that information is being recorded in our bodies. Our bodies are tracking it, but we’re just not conscious of it.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yes.

Charlie Melcher:

I was also fascinated by your saying that people who are more [interoceptive 00:09:34] or are aware of the interoceptive signals, feel emotions more powerfully. Why is that?

Annie Murphy Paul:

So, emotions as the work of the neuroscientist, Lisa Feldman Barrett, has recently demonstrated, emotions are things that we construct, our brains construct out of really the basic raw material of our… those bodily sensations. So if you think about it, an emotion like nervousness or fear, it has certain physiological sensations associated with it. Your palms might be sweating, your heart might be beating. You might have butterflies in your stomach.

Annie Murphy Paul:

We take those building blocks from our… of our bodily sensations and we construct an emotion out of them, which means that when we choose to, we can actually get in on the ground floor of that construction of emotion and play an active role in deciding what kind of emotion we want to construct on the basis of our physical sensations. But those people who are most attentive to and in tune with their internal sensations, they’re going to feel their emotions more intensely because emotions are really the raw material of our emotions are those physiological sensations.

Charlie Melcher:

And again, I think this is a crucial insight for us storytellers, because what are we trying to do as storytellers? We are trying to create emotional impact or an experience to the person or our audience. If we understand better how those emotions are built, if we understand it better literally in our own bodies, wouldn’t we be better equipped to be able to tell stories in a way that would elicit those stronger emotions?

Annie Murphy Paul:

That’s an interesting idea. I’m thinking of the technique that psychologists call affect labeling, which is in becoming more attuned to our interoception. We’re paying that non-judgmental, open-minded, accepting attention to our internal signals, but then there’s another step beyond that, which is actually labeling what we’re feeling. Even just on that very basic level of I’m feeling a tightness in my chest or I’m feeling butterflies in my stomach, and that seems to reduce physiological arousal.

Annie Murphy Paul:

It makes us less anxious, but I wonder if that could be part of a process of storytelling also being in constant touch with what’s going in one’s body, and also being very aware of what other people are feeling. There’s other research that suggests that people who are more interoceptively attuned are more empathetic to other people. They’re using their body as a conduit to understand what other people’s bodies and minds are feeling, so that-

Charlie Melcher:

How does that work?

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yeah. It’s an amazing process. So when we’re talking to someone face to face, we tend to unconsciously and subtly and automatically mimic their facial expressions, their posture, their gesture. We’re then reading off our own bodies, the feeling that that produces in us. And so naturally, people who are more interoceptively attuned are going to be better able to make that connection and feel that emotion, that their body is communicating to them from the other person.

Charlie Melcher:

There’s an expression in my world, which is that virtual reality is the empathy machine. This is a phrase that became popular some years ago because it was supposed to let you see in VR; you can see from the perspective of someone else in theory. But what you’re saying to us of course is that it’s our bodies that are the empathy machine.

Annie Murphy Paul:

The original [crosstalk 00:13:33]. Yeah. Yeah. Our biology was there way before virtual reality got there.

Charlie Melcher:

So, how does one develop a greater [attuness 00:13:46] or skill of reading interoceptive signals?

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yeah, so there’s really interesting research that suggests that when people are feeling rejected or awkward or socially ilities, they tend to focus a lot on the other person probably in an effort to make it right and figure out what the other person is thinking. And it’s an unfortunate tendency because we’re then directing attention away from our own internal sensations, which have so much to tell us about that connection and what’s going on with that connection.

Annie Murphy Paul:

So ultimately you want to do, when you’re communicating with someone, and maybe this is true for communicating with an audience, as well as with one-on-one, is to oscillate between tuning into your internal world, seeing what’s going on in there and then tuning back into the granular expressions and all those rich signals that you’re getting from the other person, which by the way, I think is such an argument in favor of seeing people in person. There’s so much more you can pick up that way than from a screen.

Charlie Melcher:

So I, again, am a big believer in this idea of embodied cognition is the term that you use in the book. There’s an old Chinese proverb, which I thought of as I was reading the book, which is I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Interesting. Yeah, there’s a lot of wisdom encapsulated in that saying that I think psychological science is only recently confirmed that people have known on some level for many years.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah. And you also quoted this idea that says, that when people use movement when they’re learning to help remember, that they retain like 76% of the material, versus those who are just deliberately trying to memorize might only be recalling 37% of that material. Why is physical activity so important in terms of affecting the brain and our thinking and our creativity?

Annie Murphy Paul:

The research findings are that when we engage in brisk physical activity, and then we return to our cognitive work, our mental work, we are better able to control our attention and our focus. And the more that we can incorporate physical activity into the classroom and also into our workday, the better our minds will operate. And I think, I keep returning to this theme, but to me it’s such a useful way of thinking about it. We evolved to carry out activities that were both cognitively challenging and physically challenging at the same time.

Annie Murphy Paul:

If you think about something like foraging or something like hunting, these are things that are incredibly physically demanding, but also really mentally demanding at the same time. And those two things in our human evolution were intricately intertwined. It’s not like we separated them. And we’re like, now, here, I’m going to work my brain really hard, and then later I’m going to work my body really hard, which is how what we do now, and there’s no wonder that that doesn’t really work very well.

Charlie Melcher:

And I can’t help but think about this applying just as equally to the experience of being in an audience, right, where you’re asking people who are going to experience a… extreme story, like a beautiful story. And what do you say? Whether that’s a theatrical one or musical, a concert, you say, sit in these rows for two hours, don’t move, don’t talk.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Don’t even cough.

Charlie Melcher:

Don’t cough. Just sit there and use your brain to absorb this. And I think that that’s just as wrong as it is for the student. This idea that the best way to experience a story is actually to be engaged with it.

Annie Murphy Paul:

So interesting. That is right. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we’re expected to stay still and quiet as we work or as we learn, but I’ve never thought about how we are expected to stay still and quiet as we take in a performance or hear a story, but you’re right.

Charlie Melcher:

So another thing I loved was your discussion about gesture and how important gesture is. Can you tell us why that’s important?

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yeah. Yeah, again, there’s this assumption in our culture that mind and body are separate and that mind is this superior stuff, rational cerebral and the body is this irrational, ungovernable, grubby animal thing that we want to try to forget about as much as possible. And by that same token, we tend to have a dismissive attitude towards gesture as if it’s just so much hand waving, that accompanies the real… where the real action is, which is our verbal speech. We elevate the verbal elements of our expression. And so it was so fascinating to me to learn that in fact gesture is not some clumsy add on or tag along to verbal speech. It’s actually often a few steps ahead of where we are in terms of our verbal expression, and that our most cutting edge, advanced, our newest ideas, they often show up first in our hands before we’re really able to put words to what we’re thinking.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Our hands are capturing some aspect of it. And we actually then read off our own self-created meaning that we’re creating with our hands and that informs our verbal account. It can prime the right words to come to mind such that when people are prevented from gesturing, they actually speak less fluently and they think less effectively. They’re less able to solve problems. And so actually our hands are, they’re not only an integral part of the thinking process, they’re actually a step or two ahead of where our words are.

Charlie Melcher:

And of course, gesture is our first language, right? It is fundamental. We gesture before we can speak.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yes, which recapitulates perhaps the history of our species, which is that linguists believe people, our forebears; our ancient forebears gestured to communicate with each other long before they used words. And then we see that again with every baby born into the world is that they gesture and they communicate with their loved ones with gesture long before they can say a word. And that stays with us. It’s not as if, okay, then we learn words and we don’t need gesture anymore. Gesture remains this incredibly integral, but also and of expression, but it’s also its own channel. Its own channel that rests alongside the verbal channel. We just pay much more attention to the verbal channel.

Charlie Melcher:

This is all one of the reasons why I just love immersive theater. I’m a body, I’m exploring a unique space. I’m doing it with other people. I have agency. I have the power of my instincts and emotions that are running through my entire body. It’s what I call living stories. I’m living the story, I’m not passively listening to the story. You talked about this… Or I wouldn’t say you talked about it, but we all have this idea that innovation, that creativity strikes the solo brilliant person sitting there at his or her desk or in their lab, they’re there alone. And they’re up late at night and Eureka strikes and their brain has solved this big problem. And the world has been moved forward through a series of these strokes of genius from a single person. And you suggest that’s not really how creativity and big ideas come. It’s more of a social experience, right? It’s-

Annie Murphy Paul:

For sure. For one thing that model that we really valorize, you see that elevated and valorized everywhere you turn really puts such an emphasis on originality as if the most important thing is to come up with something first, or be the only one who’s doing something when so much of human creativity and creation is about building on other people’s contributions. And historically one of the most effective ways of doing that was through imitation and emulating the masters who have gone before you. And that’s fallen out of favor in particular in classrooms and in the workplace because as I say, we’re so obsessed with originality. We have so many fears about plagiarism and copying, and there’s a real stigma to the idea that you would be an imitator rather than an innovator. But that again is really cutting us off from this very effective way that humans learn from each other, or learn how to do things that are difficult and complicated.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Rather than trying to do it on our own, we emulate and imitate the example of someone who knows much more than we do. And it was once the case that education was based on imitation and emulation. And I think it would be worthwhile to bring that back a structured process of imitating and emulating until the novice has gotten to a level where they can introduce their own spin or their own take. But that there’s no reason to think that any novice or learner should be able to do that from the beginning.

Charlie Melcher:

You talk about it just not being a solitary act like this idea that we’re social beings and there’s a social brain, right? That evolves.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yeah. This book turned out to be almost as much of a book of social criticism as it did of a book of science writing, because it just had to take on so many of what I see as our misinformed and misbegotten assumptions about human nature. And one of those myths is that intellectual or mental life is separate from, and in some way, opposed to social life. As if those two things are separate and need to be separate for us to do good work. But human beings are so fundamentally social. So much of our intelligence comes from being social. And so really we should be thinking in terms of harnessing those powerful social brains in the service of learning and working, and creating and weaving social activity much as possible into our days.

Charlie Melcher:

I was surprised to read that you consider the act of telling stories to be one that has a very positive benefit for the teller, just like teaching in a classroom. You talked about that one of the best ways to learn is to teach. Similarly, a great way to learn is by telling stories. Are you suggesting that telling more frequent stories and being a better storyteller is actually a way to increase one’s own intelligence?

Annie Murphy Paul:

I think it might, because like teaching another person, the process of storytelling initiates all these cognitive processes that don’t get engaged if we’re not teaching, not telling a story. interStories are incredibly effective vehicles for communicating information. They hit this sweet spot, psychologists call them psychologically privileged, stories are psychologically privileged kinds of information because we pay more attention to stories. We understand them better. We remember them better. We’re more likely to act on stories than other kinds of information, because the way they package information is just perfectly tuned to the way the human mind works.

Annie Murphy Paul:

They include just enough information, but not too much. They’re structured in ways that grab our attention and keep our attention and have implications for how we should act. So stories, they’re always the best way to communicate information, and yet again, this is another piece of social criticism, I think we think of stories as frivolous sometimes, or as childlike or something that we put aside to focus on the serious transmission of information. We should always be looking to put information in the form of story.

Charlie Melcher:

God bless, hallelujah!

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yeah. I thought you’d agree with that.

Charlie Melcher:

Future of StoryTelling. We do not think they are frivolous.

Annie Murphy Paul:

No, no, no, not you guys. No.

Charlie Melcher:

So where does this leave you? What is your recommendation for people having done this research, having written this beautiful and brilliant book, what is your recommendation for people if they do want to be able to use their brains more effectively in the ways that they’re meant to be used, the way that they evolutionarily developed, what are your recommendations for us?

Annie Murphy Paul:

Yeah, well, I would first of all say to keep those limitations of the brain in mind. I think that we’re a bit misled by our culture, which is always telling us how amazing and astonishing and extraordinary the brain is. And it is all those things, but it is also this, as we’ve been saying, very limited, very idiosyncratic organ that needs help to do the things that we ask it to do in our world. And I would also urge a kind of reorientation that I think has been implicit in what we’ve been talking about, Charlie, which is to work with the brain as it is instead of constantly expecting the brain to be something that it isn’t, a computer, or a muscle, and to instead treat it as this quirky idiosyncratic organ that it is and conform our practices and our activities to what the brain is good at.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the most important lessons I take from the book is that our thoughts are not happening in isolation in our brain. They are being absolutely formalized and influenced by everything happening around us, whether that’s around us in the rest of our body or around us in our social interactions or around us in our physical spaces, that if we want to change our mind, we need to be open to changing all of those things. If we want to have greater thoughts and share amazing stories then we should fill our lives with rich materials and brilliant people and go on just a great meandering walk out in nature. And that’s one of the things Annie, that I really thank you for, because I’ve been doing a lot more walks with no direction in mind, not linear and realizing that that’s how my brain is happiest. Evolutionarily I evolved from walking in the woods.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Right, right, right. Yeah. I think that’s so important. And I’m glad you brought that up. That if it is the case that our thinking is assembled from the raw materials of our world, then the best way to improve and enhance our thinking is to make sure we have access to the richest and most varied kinds of raw materials as possible. And that doesn’t mean sitting in a room, staring at a screen. It means as you say, getting out into nature, it means having these rich face to face interactions, it means being fully engaged and involved with the life of our body. And all those things are going to feed into our intelligence in a way that just working, working, working the brain could never do.

Charlie Melcher:

I, few years ago, coined this expression sensual media, which I used to mean media that is multi-sensoral, embodied, immersive, participatory, social, personalized. What I’ve been putting forth as my personal theory about the Future of StoryTelling is exactly the message of your book, which is to enjoy the sensory experience of being alive.

Annie Murphy Paul:

And how did we ever get away from that is the question. Sensual media, which I love that phrase, suggests that the media that we’ve gotten accustomed to has somehow left that out, which was it’s such an enormous oversight. Media should always have been sensual. But I’m glad that we’re realizing that and getting back to our roots in a sense.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, this has been just a total delight and I thank you so much for the time today and for the research and writing that you did to make that book. And I really encourage everyone to go out and read the extended mind. It’s literally changed my life. So thank you, Annie.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Thank you, Charlie. It’s really been a pleasure. Thank you.

Charlie Melcher:

My warm thanks to Annie Murphy Paul, for joining me on the podcast today. You can find a link to purchase the extended mind, learn about Annie’s other work and view a full transcript of today’s conversation by visiting the link in this episode’s description. Thank you for listening to the FoST podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, we’d really appreciate if you’d share with a friend or colleague who might enjoy it too. FoST also produces a monthly newsletter that’s filled with valuable information for storytellers of all kinds. You can subscribe for free by visiting our website at fost.org, where you’ll also find a wealth of other great resources. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher media, in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure. I hope we’ll see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on.