Recommended by Patricia Churchland during Episode 55 of the Brain Science Podcast.

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Product Description

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43351 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review

"Supersizing the Mind is an important book for cognitive-science theorists of all stripes.... Although traditional and radical theorists are likely to remain unconvinced, there can be no doubt that Supersizing the Mind will set the terms for many of the coming debates."--Evan Thompson, Times Literary Supplement
"...it offers original thinking in the philosophy of mind, and it is highly recommended for academic collections in that subject."--Library Journal
"In Supersizing the Mind, philosopher Andy Clark makes the compelling argument that the mind extends beyond the body to include the tools, symbols and other artefacts we deploy to engage the world.... Supersizing the Mind is a treat to read. It is brimming with remarkable ideas, novel insights and amusing language."--Nature
"Supersizing the Mind is tantalizing in many respects, and Clark's ingenuity is always on display. Just as his earlier Being There launched many a research project, we expect that Supersizing the Mind will inspire a new generation of philosophers, psychologists, and artificial intelligence researchers to reconsider some basic assumptions about the mind."--Lawrence Shapiro and Shannon Spaulding, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"This is an important book; it provides compelling and empirically well-supported argument; it offers a survey of the state-of-play in contemporary cognitive science; it directs our attention to the most pressing foundational issue in the study of mind, that of how to reconcile the information-processing perspective with the growing recognition that action and the body, not to mention technology, have a crucial role in our mental lives."--Trends in Cognitive Sciences

About the Author

Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He is the author of several books including Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997) and Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and The Future Of Human Intelligence (OUP, 2003).

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Customer Reviews

good overview of where things stand right now, emphasizing "right now"
Andy Clark's unfortunately-titled Supersizing the Mind sounds at first like some sort of awful self-help book, like one of those "play Bach for baby in the womb" treatises.

But of course it is nothing like that. It is the latest of the prolific Clark's manifestos in support of what is more generally known as the Situated Cognition Movement [cf. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition], of which he is a founder. It is expansive and well-written.

Without wading into the detail (which, n.b., you will have to do if you read the book) this movement looks at the mind in the context of not only the brain but also the body and the environment in which the body wanders. It presents a strong contrast to computational models of the mind that are mostly about abstract representations and algorithms, i.e., Turing Machine implementations of intelligence.

I am sympathetic to Clark's approach and so did not read Supersizing the Mind as critically as I might have. If you are interested in understanding where some of the key arguments in modern cognitive science reside, I can recommend this book wholeheartedly. Clark does a clear and fair job of explaining both himself and his critics.

But it is important to remember that Supersizing the Mind represents a point in time. In five years the field will have moved on in terms of research and challenges to both old and new approaches to understanding intelligence. So get it while you can; otherwise wait for Clark's next.

Extend Your Mind: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know
One of the common failings of philosophy books is they try to do too much. Often the urge to prove everything is driven by the need to prove one's self, a justification of one's current philosophical position, sometimes of a whole career. "Supersizing the Mind" is not only an exception, it is an exceptional achievement in the breadth and depth of its scholarship and the concise quality of its exposition. Clark successfully makes the case for the Extended Mind -- and defends it equally well against its critics. He achieves this in little more than two hundred pages. A writer with less ability and more ego might have imposed (literally) the gravitas of a thousand pages to parade the extent of his erudition. If I have any criticism, it's that Clark writes too well to bury his insights beneath a mountain of references. The book contains so many enjoyable sentences, I wish he would produce another work filled with more of these and fewer endnotes. I suspect there is an audience for such a non-academic paper; perhaps a long Wired article. It would advance the popular case for the Extended Mind. Meanwhile, read "Supersizing the Mind." The quality of Clark's writing alone makes it worthwhile.

A Relevant lecture
It is general and deep in contents at the same time. Very interesting even for the specialist in this matter