Extended Mind (Part 2)

Olivia Goldhill, Scientists Say Your Mind Isn't Confined to Your Brain or Even Your Body (Dec 24, 2016, available online)

No  doubt, the brain plays an incredibly important role. But our mind  cannot be confined to what’s inside our skull, or even our body,  according to a definition first put forward by Dan Siegel, a professor  of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of a recently  published book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.

He  first came up with the definition more than two decades ago, at a  meeting of 40 scientists across disciplines, including neuroscientists,  physicists, sociologists, and anthropologists. The aim was to come to an  understanding of the mind that would appeal to common ground and  satisfy those wrestling with the question across these fields.

After  much discussion, they decided that a key component of the mind is: “the  emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that  regulates energy and information flow within and among us.” 

Andy Clark Interview by Howard Rheingold (20 minute video)

Howard Rheingold interviews Andy Clark about extended mind theory.

You need university library access to get these articles from behind a paywall (or pay yourself), but this issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas on "early modern information overload" are priceless.

A couple  quotes from the abstracts: "This  article surveys some of the ways in which early modern scholars  responded to what they perceived as an overabundance of books. In  addition to owning more books and applying selective judgment as well as  renewed diligence to their reading and note-taking, scholars devised  shortcuts, sometimes based on medieval antecedents. These shortcuts  included the use of the alphabetical index, whether printed or handmade,  to read a book in parts, and the use of reference books, amanuenses,  abbreviations, or the cutting and pasting from printed or manuscript  sources to save time and effort in note-taking." and "Early Renaissance  naturalists worked to identify the plans described in ancient sources.  But during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, naturalists  instead began to describe and name plans unknown to the ancients. They  also divided nature much more finely, distinguishing species that their  predecessors had lumped together. As a result, they created an  information overload. Dictionaries of synonyms and local flora were  invented in the early seventeenth century as partial solutions to this  problem of information overload."