In The Extended Mind, author Annie Murphy Paul considers how to “think outside the brain.” Her thesis is that we have reached the limit of what our brains are capable of, necessitating that we must turn to other factors (colleagues, nature, design, etc.) to extend our thinking. For example, Paul discusses the tradeoff of a team’s “unstructured employee interaction”—what might seem like gossip resulting in a short-term, 1% work efficiency reduction—and a “threefold increase in group performance over the long term.”
