Thinking outside the box

Edmund

I‘m used to live in a box - my home. I‘m working in a box - my office. I travel in a box - my car. My thinking is connected with a slip box - my Zettelkasten. And I love all my boxes.

Sometimes I feel the need to think outside the box. Is it possible from within a box?

Questions:

• What are your preferred places for thinking?
• If your are outside, do you think inside the box?
• If you get paid for thinking, where did you earn your money? Inside or outside?

Will

@Edmund said:
Sometimes I feel the need to think outside the box. Is it possible from within a box?

If by "box" you mean home, office, car, or slip box, then yes, although getting inside a slip box might be a bit cramped. The thesis in The Extended Mind by Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers on JSTOR and The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul ask a more interesting question. 'Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" The summary of their agreement is a careful and effective extra-neural extension is about putting ourselves in a state or environment that is best for the task in front of us by "creating cognitively congenial situations" and "by embedding extensions in our everyday environments." ¹

Some thinking is best done in a box, and some is best left for someone else with more time on their hands.

@Edmund said:
Questions:

• What are your preferred places for thinking?

These days, in my home office.

• If you are outside, do you think inside the box?

No, I think. I'm not sure, I'd have to go outside and think about it, and it is dark now. I'll have to wait until tomorrow.

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1. Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. ↩︎

Edmund

@Will said:
The summary of their agreement … is about putting ourselves in a state or environment that is best for the task in front of us …

Thank you for supporting me playing my serious game of rearranging and connecting phrases and metaphors by adding your valuable ideas.

I started with:

• Thinking outside - going outside for a walk (1)
• Thinking outside the box - being creative (e.g. by visual thinking)

and now the next step forward:

• Thinking Outside the Brain (2)

So it‘s time for reading Paul‘s book. Maybe my brain is also some kind of box ;-)

In parallel I will start a self-experiment. Why not taking fleeting notes while walking?

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(1) All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. — Friedrich Nietzsche
(2) Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. 

GeoEng51

@Edmund said:

(1) All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I can tell you, from many years of experience and thousands of miles of walking, that many very difficult issues are solved by walking and talking with a friend or colleague.