Friends,
Did you know spiders can think with their webs? Scientists have been studying them for many years now as an example of “extended cognition,” the ability for some animals to project their own minds into their surroundings and use the environments around them to think. Of course, it’s an easy jump from spiders to humans:
In accounts of extended cognition, processes like checking a grocery list or rearranging Scrabble tiles in a tray are close enough to memory-retrieval or problem-solving tasks that happen entirely inside the brain that proponents argue they are actually part of a single, larger, “extended” mind.
The idea here is that we’re not just floating brains. That we can use external objects as extensions of our minds. And this is much more normal than it might seem (think of using a calculator or check out these Japanese students crunching huge numbers with an abacus). But what’s unique now—after decades of computers and increasingly sophisticated software and a global experiment called ✨ThE iNtErNeT✨—is the sheer quantity of how much thinking we’re “offloading.” So much so that we’re talking about building “second brains,” whether that’s through notetaking apps or emails or productivity systems or large language models or all sorts of new software.
Still, I worry we’re so excited about building second brains, we easily forget to tend the first one. My curiosity and concern comes from years of writing in my own notebooks. After decades of doing this—literal decades, I started as a high school freshman—I can tell you I don’t remember much off the top of my head. Or at least, I can’t recall or recite with as much depth or specificity as I’d like to. Although it’s become a critical part of my creative work and a habit of attention, notetaking (the original extended cognition) is simply not the same thing as actually remembering something for myself. Notetaking brings the idea to the door, but it doesn’t guarantee a house guest. A habit of attention is not necessarily a habit of memory.
One of my life goals is to be an old man reciting poems with a wry smile on my face. I want to confuse people. Delight them. But as I review the first five years of Still Life—over 200 poems, over 500k words—I struggle to remember the poems I found, let alone recite one. But who cares, just look it up, right? Just pull the book off the shelf, Just “Google it.”
Yeah…but what if I’m lost on a desert island without a library or phone or internet? Or what if the first five years of my newsletter disappears when Mailchimp buys Tinyletter and then shuts it down (true story, and I downloaded them, thankfully)? What if I’m with a friend who, if I could just remember that one poem, would be encouraged as they go through profound grief? What if it’s a bit weird that a few private companies have become gatekeepers of the sum total of human knowledge available online? What if instead of extending my mind I want to deepen my mind and chisel some things into neural stone that I can carry to my grave?
So no, I don’t always want to only “Google it,” and I don’t only want to write it down. I want to carry some things with me everywhere I go. Or, to return to the poet Li-Young Lee in his peach stand poem:
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days…
To take what we love inside—not carry it around only in a notebook or increasingly complex and unstable digital information environments. For better or worse, we’re extending cognition all the time, but what exactly are we extending into? And what are we leaving behind? And how does this dynamic shape what’s possible for our inner lives? No answers here, no diatribes. But I puzzle over this. Consider this equation:
[attention + memory = identity]
What we give our attention to, over time, shapes who we are. And we do have some agency here. We can decide for ourselves just how far we want to extend outside ourselves and just how much we want to keep inside too. So, this week as we extend ourselves into second brains, let’s take a beat to remember the first one: what’s do you want to carry into the cool shade of your own inner life?
Take care,
Michael
“pity this busy monster, manunkind” by e.e. cummings pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness — electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born — pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if — listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go
Flying Too Close to the Sun: Myths in Art from Classical to Contemporary
”yoga and meditation without ethics and wisdom are merely techniques for exercise…”
This MIT class on the “emerging future” looks fascinating
Cosmologyscape is pubic art project and website—and an invitation to dream.
Just seeing my pal Michael (Dechane) in the comments with this Michael is making me happy.
“What do you want to carry into the cool shade of your inner life?” What a generative question. Yes. More poems, more details about the ones I love (not just scribbled down but internalized).
A gorgeous return to that lovely moment in Li-Young Lee's poem.
I especially like your reflection here:
"Notetaking brings the idea to the door, but it doesn’t guarantee a house guest. A habit of attention is not necessarily a habit of memory."
This jibes with my experience of journaling, slow reading, and handwritten reflection — wonderful practices, but they don't help me remember even my favorite sonnet ... a poem, that, the more I read your post, the more I heard ringing out, in the wings of my (first!) mind:
"When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –"
— from Stafford's "You Reading This, Be Ready"
Thanks for the wonderful post and pause, Michael