Supersizing the Mind

This is one of those books where the central idea is genuinely great and I wish it had been about a hundred pages shorter. Clark’s whole pitch is that cognition isn’t necessarily confined to the brain, that a notebook or a whiteboard or, now, a phone, can be functioning as part of your actual thinking process rather than just a tool your brain uses. Once I had that framing in my head I started noticing it everywhere, my own habit of keeping a running spreadsheet instead of trusting memory suddenly looked less like a quirk and more like exactly the kind of extended cognition he’s describing.

Where it lost me some was the amount of space spent arguing with other academics who apparently don’t buy the Extended view. I get that’s how the genre works, you have to address the skeptics, but as somebody reading this outside any class or program, I found myself skimming those sections waiting to get back to the actual argument. It’s not badly written exactly, it’s just clearly written for a room I wasn’t standing in.

Still, potent stuff, and I can see why it keeps getting referenced elsewhere. If you’re the type who already externalizes half your memory into apps and lists, this book will just put language to something you were already doing without a name for it.

Three stars, would’ve been higher with a sharper edit.