Welcome everybody. I'm really glad you all can be with us here today. I'm Lisa Guernsey. I'm a Senior Fellow and Strategic Advisor for the Education Policy Program at New America and one of the co-founders of the Learning Sciences Exchange, which you'll hear about more in a minute, but we're a relatively new fellowship program at New America in partnership with child development experts Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Roberta Galankoff and the Jacobs Foundation. So we are really happy to be able to bring you this book talk today. This is being held and hosted in partnership between the Learning Sciences Exchange as well as the National Fellows Program and Future Tents, which is a partnership of Arizona State University, New America and Slate. And our honored guest today, Annie Murphy-Paul, is currently a Fellow for our Learning Sciences Exchange. And several years back, she was also a National Fellow and a Future Tents Fellow. So we are feeling fortunate three times over today to be able to get to know Annie throughout these years and to be able to help spotlight her new book today and have this really fascinating conversation with her. The extended mind in this book comes at the perfect time as our pandemic produced habits have led many of us. I know that this is happening for me to be just kind of sitting on our laptops for hours, typing or zooming away and it turns out that's probably not so good for helping us become better thinkers. So Annie's book uses findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology to help show us a different way. And then, you'll be, I'm learning a ton myself. I'm not there near the end of this. I'm so excited to hear more from Annie today. So our talk as well features Nick Thompson, who is the CEO of The Atlantic. He will interview Annie about what she's learned and why it matters. And we'll probably chat for about 35 to 40 minutes or so and then perhaps turn to audience questions. But we encourage you to put questions in whenever they come to you. And Nick will be taking those questions and emitting them into the conversation. We'll also be keeping the conversation going online via Twitter at hashtag extended mind. So now let me just go ahead and introduce you to Annie and to Nicholas Thompson. As I mentioned before, Annie is currently an LSX fellow in our 2020 22 cohort. And she was a 2014 National Fellow and Future Tense Fellow at New America. She's an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Scientific American Slate, Time Magazine, and many other publications. And in addition to her newest book that we'll be talking about today, she's also the author of Origins, How the Nine Months Before Birth Shapes the Rest of Our Lives, and the Cult of Personality, how personality tests are leading us to miseducate our children, mismanage our companies and misunderstand ourselves. Annie has spoken to audiences around the world about learning and cognition. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 2.6 million times by 2.6 million people. She's a graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and serves as a lecturer at Yale University and a senior advisor at the Yale University Purview Center for Teaching and Learning. And also I am very, I feel very honored to consider Annie just a great friend and mentor to me as well. So I'm just so thrilled, Annie, that you can be here with us today. It's just fantastic. So I'll introduce Nick and then I'll let the two of you take this away. Nicholas Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic and a former editor-in-chief of Wired. He is a former contributor for CBS News and co-founder of The Out of Us, the National Magazine Award, winning publication and multimedia content management system that was sold to WordPress in 2018. He was also a national fellow at New America and has also served as editor of NewYorker.com and as senior editor at Wired. And I just found this out today. Nick is also a competitive runner. And in 2019, he was ranked as one of the top 20 master's marathoners in the world and holds the national master's record for the 50K. I think I got that right, Nick. I know you guys might talk a little bit about the moment. So I'm just really thrilled to have you with us. And I'm going to turn it over to you now to take it from here. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lisa. And I forget if I want to start by saying that this book is great. I enjoyed every bit of it. It's fascinating. It's interesting. It's fun to read. I learned a lot from it. I figured out new ways to talk to my kids. And it also is very useful because I gesticulate wildly and have my entire life. And this is the first time there's been a real scientific justification for the crazy stuff I do with my hands, which normally drives people crazy. So thank you, Annie, for all of that.  I'm so glad that the book could do that for you. You're quite kind. Let's begin just by explaining the inspiration for the book and the general argument. Let's let everybody have the basic framework for why you wrote this fabulous book and the brief version of what it says. Yeah, so I have been writing about learning and cognition, covering research on learning and cognition for about 10 or 15 years now. And as one does when you're immersed in research, you keep finding interesting threads, collecting them, you know, for rainy day. And I was doing this and feeling that there were a bunch of interesting research areas that were connected. But I couldn't quite see how they connected. I'm talking about bodies of research like in body cognition, the idea that we think with our bodies, situated cognition, the idea that where we are affects how we think, and socially distributed cognition, the idea that we don't just think with our own individual minds, we think with the minds of other people. And it wasn't until I read an article written by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, that was published in 1998 called The Extended Mind, that all these pieces came together for me. And the I was arrested by the very first line of that article, which said, where does the mind stop, and the rest of the world begin? And you know, that would seem to have an obvious answer that the mind stops at the skull. It's contiguous with the brain. But Clark and Chalmers were saying, no, that's not the case. Thinking is spread across the body, across our surroundings, across the minds of other people, our relationships with other people. And we need to radically expand and change our notion of where thinking happens, how thinking happens. And this to me was the big idea that brought all these pieces together for me in a way that I knew that that was the book that I wanted to write. Okay, wonderful, very concise and clear. Let's go to the next obvious question, which is thinking extends beyond explain how thinking extends to the bookshelf behind you, maybe the vase behind you and also to your hands. Yes, well, starting with the bookshelf, you know, a professor that I was communicating with on Twitter told me and this relates to what Lisa was saying about how, in a sense, the pandemic was like this vast natural experiment where we all became as philosophers like to say brains in vats, you know, we were cut off from a lot of the mental extensions that usually aid our thinking. And so this professor was saying to me that he was not able to go into his office because of COVID and he realized that his books that surround him in his office and the way that they're arranged constitute an extension of his mind and without his books there, you know, arranged in a certain pattern that he was able to access while sitting there, he couldn't think as well. So that to me was a beautiful example of how we use space as a mental extension. And then to talk to address your point, Nick, about gestures and I gesture a lot too. So I too was very happy to read this line of research about how, you know, we have constructed a very brain bound society in the sense that we do believe and act as if all thinking happens up here in our heads. But in and you know, congruent with that brain bound approach, we treat hand gestures as kind of a clumsy accompaniment to our our thinking and our speech. But in fact, our gestures are part of the thinking process. They're an integral part of the thinking process. And our gestures are actually often one or two steps ahead of where we are in terms of formulating a thought in our heads and having the words to to put to that thought so that it's often the case that our most advanced, our newest, our sharpest kind of ideas about an idea or an explanation show up first in our hands and then we can kind of read off that self created information to inform our emerging verbal explanation of what we're trying to say. So we really want to be gesturing and encouraging our kids to gesture as much as possible. I'm sorry if this next question sounds like I'm like stoned in a dorm room. But if the idea is that sometimes our thoughts begin with our gestures and then go to our brain, what causes the gesture if not the brain? Well, yeah, I want to be clear that I'm not saying that the brain is not involved or that the brain is not central to thinking.  I like to propose a different kind of metaphor. I have a couple of metaphors because I think they are so important. One would be the brain as orchestra conductor. It's like the central actor, but it's not doing it all itself. The brain is bringing in external resources to to support and augment its own abilities or the the metaphor that I developed in the book is of a magpie, which is a bird that sort of famously plucks bits and pieces from its environment and weaves that we use those pieces into its nest. And I see that as a as a fruitful metaphor for the brain and thinking in that what's available around us outside the brain are that's really the raw materials of thinking. And so the quality of those materials and our access to those materials turns out to be really important to how well we can think, which is is a whole realm that we don't contemplate at all when we think that the brain is is where it all happens and that intelligence is a kind of lump of stuff that's located up here rather than a dynamic process of assembly that's happening all the time in real time. I was very pleased from that book to have the image that my brain is a magpie picking up trash on the street and making something beautiful out of it. So one of the things that must be very interesting about writing a book about how we think and how we learn and how we organize our thoughts is that you then are taking what you're learning and put it into the process of writing the book. You have a wonderful section in the book on Robert Carroll and the way he uses spatial memory to help organize his thoughts, his plot lines explain how you took what you were learning as you wrote the book to actually organize the extended mind. Yes, yes. Well, I say in the book, I write in the book that I don't think I could have written this book without applying the lessons that I learned from the research that I gather for this book because it is it's a cross disciplinary book. It draws on a whole lot of research, many, many, many studies. And I don't think I would have been able to pull that all together in a coherent way if I hadn't used my own extended mind. And so in every chapter, you know, and there are three sections to the book, thinking with the body, thinking with spaces, thinking with relationships. Every one of those resources became important to me as I was writing the book. I mean, I'll just give you a couple of examples. One is that I started to add some physical movement and activity to to every day, which, you know, it's very easy to to leave out if you feel like you need to get work done. But what I came to understand was that my work, my thinking would actually be enhanced and I would actually make more progress if I stopped and took some time to, in my case, take a bike ride. I really love biking.  And I always like to say that a bicycle is a good bicycle for for the mind, because it was always when I got on my bike after a day of being immersed in these studies and thinking about them and analyzing them, that it would all kind of come together. And then the only problem was remembering, remembering my insights, you know, until I could get back to the computer. But then that second section about thinking with spaces, I did reorganize my home office to reflect, to reflect some of the research that I had gathered and write about in the book, in particular, the stuff about filling the space where you work and where you learn with cues of identity and cues of belonging that remind you who you are in that space, what you're doing there. I put up some of some clips of my previous work. I have my LSX Learning Sciences Exchange mug, you know, that's one of my cues of identity. And I also made a lot of use of something I write about in the book in a chapter called thinking with the space of ideas, a technique called cognitive offloading, which just means that it's really helpful to get all that stuff in your head out onto physical space, whether that is a multi monitor computer setup or a whiteboard or my own favorite tool, which is a bunch of Post-it notes, because you know, the brain evolved not to sort of sit still and think about abstract ideas, but to do things like manipulate physical objects and navigate through three dimensional landscapes. So when we can turn ideas and information into something more like objects or something more like a landscape, then we can use all of those embodied resources.  And it's so big that he can actually sort of walk along it. He can lean in and lean out. And when he does that, when any of us do that, we're using our embodied resources that are remain dormant when we're just sitting there sitting still and keeping all that information inside our heads.  But the work that I did, the research that I did on socially distributed cognition convinced me that sort of running one's ideas through the minds of other people, creating these cognitive loops where you're passing information through the body, through physical space, through the minds of other people. That's how that's how ideas get improved and get elaborated and enriched, elaborated upon and enriched. So largely with the help of my fellowships, New America, actually, that's been a really fantastic source of mentors and peers that I've collaborated with over the years now. But how is that different? I mean, I don't think anybody would argue that if you have a good idea, you should discuss it with friends and pressure tested and see if they can improve it. How is what you're saying about how ideas spread different from the conventional idea that it's good to talk to people about your hypotheses and test them? Yeah, well, I would I would bring up how we conventionally arrange education in our country, you know, we with with kids with elementary school students, high school students, we tend to think of social life and intellectual life or academic life as separate and actually as kind of opposed. So when our kids go to school, it's often the case that they're expected to set their social brains, their social beings aside and focus on the work, you know, and then, you know, maybe at lunch or maybe at recess, kids can indulge that social piece of themselves. But the fact is that humans are fundamentally social creatures were social all the time, you know, not just not just around the lunch table and teenagers in particular are exquisitely attuned to the social world. And that's what their brains are sort of wired to be thinking about. So I think, you know, it's it's actually it is a quite unconventional idea to propose that we should really be not excluding social life from the classroom, but bringing it in through social activities like storytelling and arguing in debate and teaching other people and not to say not at all to say that teachers aren't already doing this, but we do have this assumption that social life is something sort of frivolous and anti intellectual and, you know, academic life and intellectual life is over here. And what I'm proposing based on the research is that we should be leveraging kids, social natures, students and workers, social natures in the service of learning and working and thinking rather than treating them as if they're separate domains. Makes sense. Well, my 11 year old came back from his first day at school last week, I asked him what his favorite thing he did. And he said recess and I kind of rolled my eyes, but actually clearly I should have been supporting him. Let me ask you a little bit about running because it's something that I think about a lot and care about a lot. And I ran a race yesterday and there were two parts of your book that I thought connected to it in interesting ways. So first, the race begins. And I go out in a pack of 10 people and we're, you know, we're kind of bunched together. You're very much in stride that the people mention each other because you don't want to step on their feet or clip them. Exactly the same pace. And I'd always learned that the reason you do that is for what wind resistance, right, both stopping the wind in front of you and if there are people behind you pushing wind into your back. And then secondly, because if you know that the group is running the right pace, you don't have to stress, right? So it gives you one less thing to think about. But you argue in the book that there's a third reason to do that, which is that when humans synchronize their activities, they're actually more efficient. Is that a proper way to read it? You know, I had never thought about synchronous movement as applied to a running race because in that case, you guys are competitors, right? You're not seeking necessarily to think together. But when I so when I write about synchronous movement in the book in a chapter called thinking with groups, the idea there is to look at how synchronous movement has been used by institutions like the military and like churches and all kinds of human groups that have figured out a way essentially to hack our our natural instinct for moving together and thereby sort of extending our own identity to include the group so that when we move together and this in the same way at the same time, it's it's a trigger for us to think that we are in some way like the people that we're with, we tend to feel more positively about them, we cooperate with them more, we're more generous and pro-social with people that we've with people that we've moved in synchrony with.  But among people who are not competing but who need to work together, beginning a session by in some way moving in synchrony and that could be even taking a walk together because people tend to fall into synchronous movement when they walk together or even something like sharing a meal because there's a kind of informal synchrony that happens when people are engaging and in eating together. But I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, Nick, if you if your feelings about your fellow runners, if they feel affected by that early stage where you're all running together. I think they do. I mean, because every race you run, there's both an element where you're competing against them, but there's also an element where you're competing against yourself, right? You're interested in your time. And then secondly, to a certain degree, each group is competing against each group, right? So I was out in a pack and then there's a pack behind us. And it's in the interest of everybody in that front pack of 10 to be 10 seconds ahead of the second pack or 12 seconds or 14 seconds. So there is an aligned interest, even though at the end when the race spreads out, you're very much competing directly against each other. So you switch from cooperative to competitive, I think, during the race. But one more running question. OK, so here's the other thing that I was super interested in, which is so when you're running, the relationship between the body and the brain is very interesting. When you're running at a slow pace, as you point out in the book, and as Daniel Kahneman has written about, or when you're walking, when you're in a relaxed pace, you could be more creative, right? Raise up mental resources. But there's a certain pace where you sort of lose the ability to be creative, right? And so you begin to focus more inwards. And for me, sometimes I start to focus on like in a race, not just a dog, but like where is the pain coming from? Is it coming from my knee? Is it my stomach, right? And trying to, at a certain point, you. The only thing you can think about is what hurts and where it hurts, right? And I'm not clear there. What is the brain and what is the body? Right? Is it the body sending the signal to the brain? The line gets really close.  You write of it in some ways as like a void. And there is nothing happening in your mind. Really, you're just kind of trying to propel yourself forward. What exactly is the relationship between the body and the brain at that point in a race when you're at total exhaustion? Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting to hear you describe it as a real runner.  And that that's a reference to the fact that hypo means low or diminished and frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that, you know, controls things like making judgments, making analyses, kind of setting limits. And so when you're exerting your body to such a degree that the brain can't really do anything except manage the effort of the physical activity that you're undertaking, that dials down the activity of the prefrontal cortex and that can produce a state that scientists liken to dreaming or like a drug trip where that, you know, the usually ever present kind of monitor, hall monitor who's like kind of keeping everything in its place is absent temporarily or dialed down. And so those ideas and thoughts can sort of mingle together in new ways. And so some some runners have reported and it's been shown in laboratory experiments that people tend to have more create creative and unusual ideas and associations when they're exerting themselves to a really great degree like that, which is not is actually the opposite of the effect that is seen when people are engaging in moderate exercise, which tends to improve executive functioning. This is why teachers know that students after they've gone to recess and they've had they've kind of gotten all their energy out, they come back to class better able to focus. So it's kind of these two poles and physical activity of different kinds produces different kinds of mental state. So what should one be getting out of extreme physical exertion like what does what do you expect will happen to someone's mind after about 30 minutes of pushing oneself to the limit or you know if you're I don't know hiking Everest multiple days. Well, it's interesting you mentioned multiple days because there's there's a slightly different strand of research that shows that three days spent engaged in physical exertion, especially in the outdoors tends to promote greater creativity and part of that is just being away from our devices, you know, which tend to channel our thoughts and distract us in ways that that are not good for creativity. But you know, the the idea is that when you're engaged in that kind of really extreme physical exertion that you will come up with ideas and associations that would not be available to your to your mind as it as it would be operating while sitting at your desk.  Does that happen? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, the most I I don't know. I wrote my wedding speech while running. And I've you know, the best essay I've ever written the core idea came while I was running. So absolutely. Yeah. But not when I'm running hard when I'm running easily. When I'm running hard, I have the amount of useful thoughts is zero. But well, you know, the cognitive scientists see on see on Bilak has suggested that. And this is, you know, this is her speculation, but that the reason why ask professional athletes when they're interviewed right when they come off the field often, you know, don't sound as as articulate or as thoughtful as they might at another moment is because they're they're cognitive resources have been completely absorbed in this incredibly demanding effort of marshaling all their all their resources to to manage their physical activity. I will go rewatch the famous Kevin Garnett 2007 NBA Finals interview, which is one of the greatest interviews I've ever seen with that in mind. Let me ask you about devices. So you have this wonderful part in your book where we all know devices distract, but you write about how part of the problem might be that they're like they're sleek, right? And they're yeah. And I was wondering, you know, when they don't they don't resemble the sticks that we play with or the things that can normally trigger creativity, if you were to design a phone, right?  What would you do? And you don't say about revenue. You just have to worry about creative. You're going to make a creativity phone. Oh, wow. Well, I have a couple thoughts on that because, you know, the part of the book that you were originally referring to there was the part about the value of fidgeting and these kind of, you know, we've been talking about physical movement and how it affects our thinking. But there's also an interesting strand of research about how kind of micro movements of fidgeting actually can enhance our thinking as well because they're a very fine grained way of modulating our arousal up or down or changing our physical state. It's a kind of play, you know, can create a state of mind that's more expansive, more open to new ideas, which again, you know, fidgeting is often something that's looked down upon or disparaged in our society. And I think it's something that we should be promoting and encouraging. But there's a wonderful researcher named Catherine Isbister at the University of Santa Cruz who actually studies fidgeting and in particular fidget objects. And she's put out a call for people who fidget to send her photographs of their favorite fidget objects. And she has a Tumblr account with just pictures of people's favorite fidget objects. And what really struck her about people's favorite fidget objects was that they were sort of the opposite of these sleek, you know, metal and glass and plastic devices that we spend all our time working on. They often had a lot of texture. They were often things drawn from nature, stones or small sticks, as you were saying. And they often made sounds or they had particular, you know, tactile qualities. And Catherine was speculating that these she calls fidgeting embodied self-regulation. So in other words, we're regulating our mind and its operation through the activity of our of our bodies and that she thought that people reach for fidget objects because they they're reminding themselves that they're more than just a brain, that they have a body, that they have a whole range of senses that don't get engaged by our our machines. And so she's working on developing a whole range of fidget objects that could stimulate different kinds of mental states. So that would be one thing I might suggest to Tim Cook would be, you know, is there some way that the the iPhone could could produce not this same state of always just gluing yourself to Twitter or whatever or your email or whatever is on your phone. But but, you know, bring in the whole body, the whole self. I can't quite imagine what that would look like, but I'm sure the geniuses that Apple could probably figure it out. Well, yeah, yeah. Keep going. Keep going. The other the other piece I was thinking about, I actually originally thought you were going towards this idea that I propose in the book called extended technology, like we extend our minds. Our technology could be extended to our our technology is kind of designed around around the same model that we apply to our brains. This very brain bound model that, you know, we're supposed to use our technology by sitting still, not interacting with other people, you know, not moving our bodies, not be even being aware of having a body or the sensations that were that are rising in our bodies all the time. But our technology doesn't have to be that way. We could extend our technology. We could bring the movement sensations, sensations of the body into the use of technology. We could bring our physical surroundings into our use of technology and we could bring in person interactions with other people into our use of technology. And those would all be ways that I think we could really enrich our use of technology and not restrict it to this very brain bound kind of model. Well, in fact, you one of the questions I had a number of times are reading your book is what are the consequences of designing artificial intelligence the way we do, right? So artificial intelligence in many ways is based on neural networks. Let's try to understand how the brain works, right? Let's try to understand the different way that neural levels work inside the brain. And let's build our computers that do that or let's build software inside the computers that does that. What does it mean that AI is being built that way and not based on what you would consider a more accurate model of how the brain works? Yes, such an interesting question. And this has been something I've been thinking a lot about. There's this incredibly interesting work by Antonio Demasio, the neuroscientist and a colleague, Kingston Mann, that's proposes that, you know, AI researchers in developing artificial intelligence, this is me and not them, I think that they were partially motivated by this brain bound mode and created artificial intelligence as a kind of idealized human intelligence with all our messy parts and engineered out, you know, all the parts that were sort of ashamed or embarrassed about like our feelings, our bodies, our vulnerability. But it turns out, and this is Antonio Demasio and Kingston Mann's work, that's the wellspring of a lot of our intelligence. And so when we engineer that out of artificial intelligence, we end up with a kind of intelligence that is very brittle. It's not transferable to new situations. It doesn't know how to handle unexpected situations. We have computers that are really good at playing chess, but that are really terrible at interacting with other people or making their way through a three-dimensional landscape. You know, all these things that toddlers can do so brilliantly, our robots can't yet do. And that's because we left out a big part of who we are, which is the fact that we are embodied creatures embedded in physical surroundings who are also embedded in the social network of other human beings. And so Demasio and Mann are saying, if we want to develop truly intelligent robots, truly intelligent AI, we need to engineer back in all these human qualities, including vulnerability, and maybe even including the ability to feel pain, which I think is so fascinating and so really touching in a way and tells us something about ourselves as well as AI and robotics. So maybe we're listening to you there. Maybe one consequence is actually as we think about how the world will work, it will be much longer until computers can do some of the tasks that we humans do because their intelligence in many ways will outstretch us, but in many ways, it won't map as well onto ours. Right. I think it's possible that, you know, AI will develop a different kind of intelligence. And the one that we humans can only marvel at, I mean, they can process so many pieces of information at such high speed, they can remember, they have memory that far surpasses ours. But for a lot of the things that we want robots to do, ultimately, like interact with us and help us, they need to in some ways probably be more like us. And that means being vulnerable, feeling pain, feeling, having an internally regulated system. That means that that robots care, whether they're hurt or whether they're in some sense feeling pain or pleasure. These are the motivations that that prompt us to make intelligent choices. And without that, robots are kind of, they're kind of dumb, you know? So I think that that's such an amazing insight into where human intelligence really comes from. That makes a lot of sense. I'm glad, though, that robots can't feel pain because as we talk, I think my Roomba is like clanging around the kitchen and the poor thing was like, hurt every time it banged into the dish. You can really feel bad. You feel horrible. I actually have to leave this interview and go home right now and turn off the Roomba. Let's move to audience questions because there's a ton of them and they're wonderful. So here's one from Anonymous. What does your research show about best enhancing the extended mind for babies and older people? Can you suggest an exercise or activity for these two groups? I don't know whether a baby or an old person wrote that, but what would you suggest that they do? So interesting. Well, you know, in some ways, we're doing a lot of the right things already with babies in the sense that we understand that they learn through touching, through moving, through interacting with other people, through, you know, making their way often clumsily through a physical environment. It's that we we try to take all those things away progressively as as people get older. It seems OK to us that kindergartners use manipulatives to learn math, for example. But the idea is that as you get older and more mature, you put those things away and you start to do things, you know, more and more in your head. And I think that's a misconception. It's a misconception about what expertise is and what experts do, because it turns out that real experts are those who are who know how to use their bodies, use faith, use the minds of other people. That's the cornerstone of their expertise. And so it's it's a misconception we have about expertise that they do it all in their in their heads. So as for older people, that's a super interesting question. I'm not sure that you know, what's coming to mind is for me. And this is this is in terms of older people who suffer from memory problems and dementia. Daniel Dennett has written about the philosopher Daniel Dennett has written about how peoples, older peoples, physical setting acts as their extended mind. They know where things are. They they they they're their physical surrounding structure, their thinking in a way that allows them to sort of overachieve. It allows them to do more than their the state of their brains would normally allow. And that's why when older people are moved into new a new setting and new surrounding, they often show really rapid cognitive decline. It's nothing has happened to their brains. It's that their mental extension of of where they live and how they've arranged their space has been taken away. So I think when we when we think about mental extensions in that way, it brings up some ethical issues actually to like is is moving an older person who is able to think with his or her surroundings is moving that person akin to inflicting a kind of injury on them. But I think that that's just one example of how incorporating the the the theory of the extended mind into the way we think about thinking can really change our perspective. Makes a lot of sense. OK, let me ask a question that's kind of a combination of two questions, one from Wayne Boatwright and one from another person, which is Wayne rights is a clubhouse addict. I wonder if that platform is a form of emergent sense making. You consider the digital realm as eating or interfering with our mind. And there's sort of a follow up question that's related to that, which is. You talked about the platforms as distracting us, right? As pulling us away, right? When we're thinking we go into Facebook or Twitter and we're not really letting our mind expand. We're not going outside. But on the other hand, we're communicating with a ton of people, which is true. Do. How do you think about these platforms, whether it's clubhouse or Twitter? Yes, yes. I mean, I. I have a very strong bias based on what I've read in the research towards in person interaction. And that's because there are such a richness of cues of signals of just simply the presence of another person changes the way our own our own minds and bodies work. And so, of course, we're all using these platforms, like the one we're on right now and email and Twitter to communicate with with many more people than we could in an ordinary. A day, you know, in a day without without access to those tools. But there there is. We do pay a price in terms of a diminished kind of quality of interaction. I just read a study the other day that suggested that found that we attribute less mind to images of people as opposed to people that we see in the flesh. We don't see them as quite as as full human beings. And so as hard as the pandemic has made it to be in person with people and as as easy as it is to communicate with people on these platforms online, I think we have to keep in mind always the price we're paying in terms of the richness of our interactions when we don't see people in the flesh. All right. So then I need some advice, right? So I'm here. I'm at the Atlantic's offices and if you look out to the side, you can see nothing. Well, that's right. Yes. So I've got like five people here and I've got like 60 desks outside my office. How should I be running this joint at this moment of the Delta virus? Well, Nick, I know that you were telling me before this started that you guys are building some new offices. And I wonder if you have fewer people coming in and that seems that seems like it will be the case for many organizations going forward. Could you take some of that space and build some enclosed offices and not have it all open plan as that office that you just showed us seem to be? Well, after reading your book, I definitely don't want open offices. My God, open offices are the Satan in this book. If I read it correctly, they are. They are. Yes, I write in the book about how open offices are really antithetical to getting serious, complex, cognitive work done because human beings are wired to be distracted by novelty, by sudden movement, by especially by social interactions, all of the things that go on in an open office. And we we can't. This is an example of the biological brain's limitations. We can't prevent ourselves from being distracted in that way. And so we need to off load the job of protecting our attention and our focus to walls, you know, to enclosed offices, or at least have those available for when people need to be doing that kind of work. Because, you know, I write in the book about this very interesting idea of intermittent collaboration, that it's not great to be on your own all the time. It's also not great to be into interacting with with other people all the time. What we need is the kind of oscillation between those two states. And so I think the challenge for us is we sort of reinvent the workplace going as we return post pandemic might be to create spaces in which intermittent collaboration is supported. You got you can lead the way at the Atlantic. Nick, we are going to well, when we move into our new offices, we will we will have exactly that. All right, I'm going to combine three questions into one because they're all good. So are psychedelics influential? Are drugs in general beneficial? Cannabis, etc. And did you look at anything related to cosmic consciousness, the field of oneness that those who meditate are trying to achieve? It is interesting that that this topic or this book draws those kinds of questions because I certainly don't address any of that. Maybe it's that kind of psychedelic cover that is that is inviting those questions. I honestly. You know, I think there's an interesting argument to be made for psychedelic drugs as a mental extension as as in a way, it's a combination of of. You know, something you do to your body and then sort of in a way, a different way that you look at at space and maybe other people. I don't know. I like the idea of drugs as a mental extension, certainly something that allows your brain to operate in a different way from how it does normally. But that I think I'll stop there because I have not done any research on this in particular. OK, well, here's a here's a good one that I'm super interested in. This is from Michael. If the goal is to maximize think right think, is it better to do one a day run?  Love that question. And assuming you're working at home, so you don't need to shower five times, because they are right. I find useful the framework that I sent that I set out in the book, which it which is low intensity movement, you know, working at a standing desk or a treadmill desk or allowing yourself to fidget and that that and doing that kind of those kinds of micro movements as a way of keeping yourself alert and engaged. And then the moderate kind of moderate intensity, physical activity that allows us to to sharpen our faculties and improve our executive functioning, which might be a brisk walk around the block, you know, when you're taking a break from your work. And then finally, that third category that you and I were talking about, Nick, where you exercise so vigorously that the prefrontal cortex kind of goes offline a little bit, and you get that the benefit of that creative associative thinking, which might mean the more intensive run in the afternoon. If you can work physical activity into all the all, you know, as much as possible into all the spaces of your days, I think that that that research suggested that will improve cognition in different ways. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's go to a question from Jane L. Pollan, who's asking, what are the implications for learning in and through the arts? So we've talked a lot about learning different kinds of things, but what if I'm trying to become a great painter? Maybe talk a little bit about your Jackson Pollock story. Yes, yeah, good idea. So one of the most gratifying things about writing a book is that you don't know until it goes out until it's out in the world who will respond to it. And one thing I found is that artists, people who are in the arts, have responded very positively to this book. I think because artists have always used all these outside the brain resources, they've always thought with their bodies, with spaces, with in conjunction with other people. And so, you know, lots of artists have said to me, you're just giving me the research to support what I already believe in what I already do. So I think there is a very tight connection there between the extended mind and the arts. The Jackson Pollock story that Nick was referring to is, it tells the story of how he was at a low point in his personal and professional life. He was living in downtown New York City and happened to visit some friends out on Long Island, the South Fork of Long Island, and really was stunned and surprised by how it influenced his state of mind. And within a week or two, he and Lee Krasner had made arrangements to move out there. And when he, when Jackson Pollock was in New York City, he was working at an easel on these very intricately patterned kind of designs. It was when he went out to Springs Long Island and was working in this converted barn that was full of light and views of the surrounding area, which was very undeveloped and lots of natural beauty. That's when he began his famous, his series of famous drip paintings, which, you know, it's a little too complicated to get into here, but it turns out that those patterns that he made with the drip painting have a quality, a complexity that is very similar to the kind of patterns that are found in nature. He was almost, he seemed to have been almost absorbing the kind, the path, the way information is patterned in nature and transcribing that onto the canvas, which I just think is so incredible that he became almost this conduit or this channel for nature and the way it affects us. And he captured that in an abstract form on in his paintings. Wonderful. I should also add that the most creative person I know really well, the guy who was my best friend, some childhood wonderful free jazz musician, is an obsessive fidgeter whole life. Interesting, interesting. I have a good question from Lisa, actually. The metaphor of the brain as a muscle has been used in education as a way to help students see that if they work their brains, then they can become better thinkers.  But you said that's not so helpful as a metaphor, right? Could there be a place still for the muscle metaphor or as better to go with the magpie? I love this question because Lisa has I think she and I have debated this before maybe on Twitter. I know that the muscle metaphor is really meaningful to a lot of people and has really given a lot of teachers and a lot of students hope that, you know, it really effectively does challenge the dogma that intelligence is fixed and what you've got is what you've got and that's it. The problem that I have with the with the brain as muscle metaphor is that it is very brain bound. It suggests that, you know, everything that matters happens up here and it suggests that your best tack for getting smarter is to just keep working that your brain like it's a muscle until it gets stronger. And I think that that again, there's some positive upsides to that message. It also can leave students with a kind of paucity of choices if they're they're working their brain and it's not working that can if they're not succeeding at their at their at the task in front of them. The all that all that the growth mindset has to give is to say we'll keep trying keep working harder. Whereas in my view, the extended mind really opens it up and offers students and anyone struggling with an intellectual or cognitive problem, all these options, you know, to bring in movement of the body to bring to take a break and go outside and have that change your mental state to engage in a social activity that will extend your thinking. So, you know, I'm in and I'm an admirer of Carol Dweck. I'm an admirer of her work on the growth mindset. But I think to me, the extended mind offers students and others a whole bunch of new options and choices. And that's really what I appreciate about it. All right, well, you guys can go back to arguing about it on Twitter, basically complete and you can go for a walk outside and not respond. All right, question from the education policy team. What are the implications of this approach for equity, for ensuring that kids who have the least get more and better educational opportunities? That's an interesting part of the book and I'd love to hear your answer. Yes, I'm so glad that that question has come up because it's a very important part of the story to me and one that I kind of really only got to touch on in the book. I talk about something I call extension inequality and that's meant to refer to the idea that, you know, once we break out of this idea that everything that makes us intelligent is up here and actually, you know, the raw materials for intelligent thinking are out here are largely out here in the sense of the freedom to move one's body, access to green spaces, access to well designed, well maintained school facilities, access to mentors and peers who can really, you know, extend our thinking, then we have to confront the fact that those outside the brain resources are in no way equitably distributed in our society. And yet, we keep assessing and evaluating and distributing rewards based on the idea that all that matters is up here. And so the implications for equity for me to me would mean taking a look at the inequitable distribution of mental extensions and addressing that and including that in the way that we evaluate how well people are able to think and not assuming that it's all internal and innate. So that's an excellent answer. Okay, a few more questions. We have about five minutes remaining. A question from those of us with children at home. Is there any good news in this book about the kind of thinking patterns or creativity that come from having kids around? Is it good if you're utterly sleep deprived or zoom bomb you in penguin costumes? I see. I thought the question was going to be about, you know, what, how can children benefit from being at home and being remotely schooled? But the question is, is there any up? Is there any good news for us adults to have our kids running around as we're trying to work? Man, I say this as a mom who is really happy that her kids are back in school every day. You know, I do, of course, I write in the book about the value of interaction with other people. But that's the tough one because I also write about how important it is to have that quiet and protected time to do our thinking. And that's what it's so hard to come by when there are when there are children around. I'm not really sure how to answer that one, except to say that I hope every kid who wants to be and needs to be back in school can can do that soon. Well, that leads to this question here from R.B. What do you think the impact of many of us being physically separated from our workspaces and colleagues are so long will be? How long will it take to recover? That's interesting. You know, I I tend to think that what we need to do now is not recover in the sense of going back to the way it was, but take this disruption, this enormous disruption in our work lives as an opportunity to rethink how we arrange our workspaces. You know, I think, for example, that the kind of hybrid arrangement that is emerging where people work several days at home and several days in the office, that could really be a good way to support this intermittent collaboration that I'm talking about where you have time at home alone if your kids are in school to be thinking on your own. And then you go in and use the the very consciously and intentionally use the workplace as as the space where you interact and have those those conversations that lead to new ideas and where you have the in person gatherings where you can generate this sense of the group mind. This is another thing that I write about in the book is you know, scientists research a property they call entitivity, which means like how much does a group think of itself as an entity? But I prefer another word that they sometimes use called groupiness. Like, how do you create and facilitate a sense of groupiness among members of a team? And that's very hard to do digitally. I think that that, you know, workplaces need to become the place where groupiness happen happens. And then perhaps home could be the place where we do our intense more isolated kinds of thinking. And that's groupiness with a Y, not an IE, which is a very unfortunate work. Yeah, that's another book. All right, one minute left. Question from anonymous. Which scientists inspire you? Oh, so interesting. Well, I'll mention the scientists that I write about in the book, which is Carl Weeman. He's a physicist who has won the Nobel Prize and he's also a professor of education at Stanford.  And a key part of how he's doing that is bringing in social interaction because he realized that when his graduate students came to his lab, they were like just slightly improved versions of undergraduates. But within a year or two, they were like full fledged physicists, like his colleagues, his almost like his peers. And the reason was not their academic work. The reason that the way that that happened was their social interaction with each other. And so he's trying to bring that social interaction into teaching students how to think like scientists. So I admire him for that. That is a great, wonderful answer. Well, thank you, Annie. Thank you, New America. Everybody who asked all of your great questions. Everybody, please go read this book, talk to other people about it and just stipulate wildly while you do so. Thank you for the wonderful conversation. Thank you, Nick. Thanks so much.


Coming up on this edition of Able Den On Air, Washington County Mental Health Services, Mary Moulton, the Executive Director, all that and much more. Plus, May is Mental Health Month, all that and much more when Able Den On Air starts right now. Welcome to this edition of Able Den On Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the definitely able. I'm Lauren Seiler. I'm Irene Seiler. And on this edition of Able Den On Air, May is Mental Health Month. We would like to welcome Mary Moulton, Executive Director of Washington County Mental Health Services, former commissioner, a whole lot of things. Mom, mom, yeah. And she's the big cheese of Vermont. Welcome to Able Den On Air. Thank you so much, Lauren. Welcome to Big Cheese. Thank you. We're in the cheese capital of the world. Well, Wisconsin is the cheese capital. Well, I don't know. That's the variable. It's the dairy, the dairy. We won't go there. Yeah. Anyway, what is the missions and goals of Washington County Mental Health Services? Well, primarily Lawrence to serve. So to serve those in our community who are in need of mental health services, who are in need of services if they have a developmental disability, if they have a substance use disorder. Anyone who is having a difficulty in their life that feels as if they need some help for it. And that's our main message. There's a lot of trauma that people experience in their lives. And for example, what exactly do you mean? Since this is Mental Health Month, and we're gonna deal with a lot of different things, what is trauma and the mental health definition of it? So trauma is unique to the individual.  I and you and it was traumatic to you. That is how you define it. And I would never tell you that wasn't traumatic.  And it's something you might need to seek support for over time and helps to form your thought process as you go forward. So a significantly hard thing that happens in life that causes us to have some physical or mental reaction that we have to work through. That can be the base of that can sometimes be a traumatic event, like say abuse as a child, for example. Or a post-traumatic stress disorder. Absolutely. For our best. Well, a trace center or more or something. Absolutely. Now May is Mental Health Month. Explain what that is and how Washington County Mental Health is working to help. Well, I think, you know, I'm really glad to know we have a Mental Health Awareness Month because Mental Health hasn't always been the thing we pay attention to most. We pay attention to our health. We think about whether hopefully we're eating right. How are we feeling? We're taking care of our heart. We're watching our blood pressure. We've got all those reminders.  How are you feeling today? It's not a natural conversation. So it's good to bring that up because mental health is health. And we aren't just a body. We are a mind and a body and a spirit. And so we have to absolutely take care of all those parts of ourselves. So Mental Health Awareness is one way to be talking about that. And we're doing it by coming on your show, for example. Talking about it. Having people realize that if they're having any kind of difficulties, they should talk to a friend. Give us a call. Find out where they could get some help if they've been experiencing depression or anxiety. Now, the history of... What is some of the history of how you came into the field? Tell us a little bit about that. Sure. Well, Washington County Mental Health has been around longer than I have, which is good. I'm not that old. It's been around for 50 years. I've worked at Washington County for 28 years, and I started working as an emergency services screener on a mobile crisis team. And that's about a 24-7 hotline that we have available in our community for people to call anytime they might feel the need to reach out, ask a question about themselves or their family. And we have people that answer that line. I was a screener. That means that I answered the line. I gave people support. I worked to plug them into services, maybe some therapy, maybe seeing if they needed a case manager, someone who could help them with housing, perhaps, or a job, depending on how severe their needs were. And then getting a call where you might have to go out with a police officer. Someone might be, you know... There's been some scary stuff I've had yet. Sure, yeah. So wherever you go, you go to where you're called when your emergency services clinician. So it might be to a home. It might be to a police station. It might be to a nursing home, to talk to an elderly person who's having difficulty, to someone who's having suicidal thoughts. And it's always confidential. Always confidential. Yes, absolutely. Yep. The exchanges that happen in mental health have the same cloak of privacy as do health. Again, it is health. So, you know, exchanges that happen between therapists, clinicians, or anyone who works in Washington County mental health is private. Explain some of the programs. Well, do you, Washington County mental health runs a suicide prevention program or part of the program? Explain some of that within Washington County mental health. Well, certainly our 24-7 hotline is all about that. So, you know, from just maybe exploring a small problem to if you're feeling suicidal. Or if you have a friend who's feeling suicidal and you just wanna call and ask what you might do, you can do that.  We work to link people in at the right time to the services that they need. So suicide prevention is something we really wanna work on because as I'm sure you know we have a, we actually have a high rate of suicide in the state of Vermont. And- The highest or? No, we are not highest, we are not highest. But we are among the highest. So in, you know, top 10 states and I for rates of suicide per 100,000. And so that's an area where we do need to work. Even though we have great access to mental health, I think what we have as a challenge is that I was speaking about which is to have people feel comfortable to come in and kind of lose that stigma to say, I'm having a hard time, you know, I need to come in and talk to someone and see what kind of help there is.  You know, people might be afraid of a person with a mental challenges, why or why not?  There are people who are experiencing, say a crisis and have a mental illness and at that time they might have a time where they're escalated and their behavior might become violent, but that happens with anyone who's in a tough situation. So across the board, we wanna kind of diminish that notion. But, you know, I think the reason people don't come forward is just historically. We have not made it a normal thing to do that and we need to normalize mental health. It is a part of our health and I'm really happy to say that in Vermont, our medical community is seeing that. They're beginning to talk about how to incorporate mental health supports even in their doctor's offices. So, you know, we evolved as community mental health centers over time in Vermont when the state hospital emptied out and we began to develop services. What state hospital was that? So that was Vermont State Hospital and we really have been working on this since the 70s and we call it de-institutionalization. And so, you know, the idea is to have people living in their communities and, you know, being part of. In 1964, 63, 64, President Kennedy signed into law the Mental Retardation Mental Health Act, Mental Care Act to get more services or to have more services for people who are mentally retarded and or, you know, mentally or physically challenged. Explaining how that has changed over the years. Do we need to work on more stabilization, de-institutionalization, et cetera? So a lot has evolved since that time and, you know, including our language on that and we just did a 50 year history because Washington County Mental Health is 50 years old. Really showing graphically how that's changed and indeed we used the terminology as you just pointed out, Lawrence, mental retardation and we don't utilize that terminology anymore. We say a person has a developmental or an intellectual disability so that's one thing. If we look way back, we used terminology to describe people with mental illness that was what we would call derogatory these days, right?   So, you know, we keep evolving as time goes on and our programs evolve. Back when that happened, money came to the communities and the idea was to empty, to bring people out of hospitals and Vermont did a little better than some. There was, well, yeah. A little. In New York, there was Willowbrook. Yes. There was Creedmore, Bellevue Hospital and others. Now, in terms of, and then we're gonna split questions. In terms of staff, right? Is there a high turnover with people in the mental health field or people who especially need certain states? Yes, certain states, no. Is there a high turnover with your agency? Why, and then the second part to this is why is it that sometimes people don't wanna work in the field of disabilities or special needs. Are they scared to? Well, you know, I think people who come into our field are really passionate. So, my staff, I am very fortunate at Washington County Mental Health. I'll put them in, I'll ask you a question. Yeah, no, it's a good question. And so there's wonderful passion. The pay doesn't equate to that in other areas that in healthcare, for example. So that's one reason that we have turnover to your question. Yes, we do. Our turnover has gotten better. The legislature in Vermont saw fit to help us last year with an increase that brought our staff up to $14 an hour and we were able to push the scale up a little bit. So with that, we went at Washington County, for example, from a 19% turnover rate, which is high if you talk about the private sector to a 16%. So one of the factors are dollars. I think that, you know, it's a real good question, you ask, because I don't think of, certainly people who come into work at Washington County Mental Health or other community mental health centers throughout the state know what the work is. So they come there knowing. Are they scared, though? I don't find that to be the case. There are certainly, I think what our job is to give proper training so that people know that folks that are having, if you're working with children in a school, for example, and we have that, that kids in schools act out, we know that. They do that in the public school system. They do that in our school system where we have a specialized school for a small group of kids. Oh, you do have a specialized school. Yeah, and we also have staff that work in all the schools in Washington County providing supports to kids. So, you know, our goal is to make sure they stay in their school system. And they can experience some kind of high episodes. You wanna ask a couple of questions? Go ahead. Anger management. Yeah. Someone has anger management. I have to work at that all the time now. Now, do people in the mental health, how does your program deal with that? Do they deal with that daily? For people who we're helping? Yeah, like with anger. Anger management. We have anger management. We have groups that assist people with anger management. There's a crossover, certainly, with corrections. Corrections might refer some folks to us with anger management. So it's generally a group management session that happens where you have peer supports and I just wanna give a shout out to peer supports across the board because that means that people with that experience. I mentor people and peer. Exactly. Exactly. So the anger management model that we have used at Washington County is that kind of support.  You know, behavior maybe. That wouldn't have the same effect if I happen to call out that behavior. So we certainly do offer that, Arlene, and also help in therapy one-on-one with people who are having a difficult time with their anger. I think someone got raped. Gufford, do you help with that? If a woman got raped? Yes. So that might start in an emergency room. And you know, the emergency room has specially trained staff for that through nursing and examination. And sometimes we are in... If Washington County has to be... Sometimes we're involved. Sometimes we're involved for some supports, you know, for a person who has been victimized by rape.  Yeah, yeah. Well, we're all normal. And we're all, you know, we're normal people. We just might learn differently, but it might hit someone differently. Yes, because of trauma. That brings us right back to the trauma.  And that is, in addition to the wonderful supports we have through our domestic violence support systems here in central Vermont, through Circle, for example, we might, though, because that emergency services team is available to the ER through the job I used to do, which was the screener. You know, we would be going out just to provide support. A screener does an assessment of a person who's having a mental health crisis. And that is a very wide range these days. So, the example we just talked about, which is, you know, just support knowing emotions that a person might go to and being able to help them to become and work through the moment to actually doing an assessment for someone who might be experiencing any kind of feeling to harm themselves or harm someone else. So, let's take a typical day, right? Your typical day. Yeah. You're the executive director. Knowing the fact that you've worked for 28 years, now there's pros and cons to a job. Bad work, best moments, worst moments. How can you change that within your position or so on? Well, you know, I think the best laid foundation I had was as a screener because I learned a skill set of working with people in really difficult times.  You want to work with them through that moment. You're building a skill set actually to help just work with people. And then you have to interface with other providers to try to get them the help that they need, which is another level. So, you know, I think the hardest times, certainly and most humbling times, are sitting with folks. I used to do sudden death notification and a really hard piece of work. I've worked in hospitals. So, that's one of the hardest pieces, I think, is to tell someone that kind of bad news and be with them and present in the moment. I have a deal with it, yeah.  So, or being at an accident scene. So, that kind of work I found humbles you and helps you put your feet on the ground. And so, while those were really hard moments, they were the greatest teaching moments and I never forget that. I never forget the work, the hard work every day that the people who work for our organization do in helping others. It really is service. It goes back to that mission and yes, we get paid for it. But, you know, I think- It's not all about the pays sometimes. It isn't. It's knowing at the end of the day that, you know, you're reminded how hard people's lives are sometimes and that you can be a part of maybe trying to help. When you can step into someone's shoes, example, someone doesn't know a person with mental illness or someone with autism or on the spectrum, step into that- That's right. Into their shoes and then get to know them. That's right. Yeah, yeah. And that's very hard for any of us to do and I have tremendous respect for people with those challenges every day. And so, you know, how do I translate that to what I do now and the good and the bad is- The good and the bad, the ugly. Is, you know, whether you're trying to fight for more dollars for the system, the community system that assists people the way that we do through outreach, whether it is working with our hospitals and medical now providers to bring more information on mental health to them and to try to integrate systems so that we're not paying more for our citizens of Vermont but that we're using services that are really, really professional services as we have at Washington County Mental Health and trying to bring those in more and integrate into healthcare. That's one of our great challenges. Last one, one question. Have you gone to high schools in case like teenagers need counseling? Yes, so we have a whole children's division that works with kids in high schools.  We have a course called Mental Health First Aid which you might talk about, so we talk about first aid. We think about physical care. Again, we have a mental health first aid course. Yeah, if someone wants to take that course. Yes, they can do so. We have it available. Yes, can you explain a little bit about it? We give it to groups. There's one called Youth Mental Health First Aid and so that might be teaching children or teaching teachers, for example, about signs that they might be looking for that someone's having a mental health issue, an emotional issue. Would you teach advocates? How do we respond to that? We would absolutely teach advocates. We teach groups of lawyers. We teach, you know, people from our community, just generally people who come to us or call us because they've got a group from a church that wants to learn more. So we do Youth Mental Health First Aid and Adult Mental Health First Aid. Is it a free course? Free course. In some cases, we ask for the provision of the materials to be purchased, which is just partial book charges. But other than that, we provide that service. Okay, now how long has that been going on? We've been doing that now in Vermont for probably the past five years and at Washington County for the past three or four. And in Vermont, we have trained over 2,000 people in Mental Health First Aid. Do you get a certificate at the end? Yes, you get your certificate at the end and it's an eight hour course currently. So we're even able to split it up because it's hard sometimes for someone to come together for an eight hour day, so we'll do a four and four, you know? Now, Washington County Mental Health has been around for a long time. Yes. Let's go back. Back in the 1970s, was it evolving? Yes. Explain past, some present, some future. Who created Washington County Mental Health? Yeah, so again, I think it was, you know, as you talked about those acts that came about, there was a move and that is that late 60s when Washington County Mental Health evolved. It had a different name at the time, Winooski, something. I can't quite even remember what it was, but shortly thereafter changed its name. So it started with helping people to come out of the state hospital over in Waterbury. There were over a thousand people there hiring actually through a grant that was creating the emergency services team, bringing people on out, creating case managers, then moving along toward adult services, giving therapy, so we hired therapists. The progression came over time and Roger Strauss was our first executive director. We've only had three executive directors at Washington County and the third one. And Paul Dupre. Roger Strauss, Paul Dupre. I've heard of Paul Dupre. Yeah, and then myself, I'm on my fifth year. So. How many years are you allowed to be? There's until you're retired or they throw you out, but you know, both Roger and Paul worked through a number of years until they decided upon retirement. They were excellent executive directors who continued to grow through the need. And I think that's what we do at Washington County is recognize where the gaps in our community are and then really try to work to fight for dollars so that we can develop the programming, whether it be for adults, children, families, our developmental services division came along back then too. We closed Brandon Training School. In the early 90s, we took the last person out of the Brandon Training School. Was it similar to a Willowbrook type of? It was specifically for people with developmental disabilities. So. Now was it like atrocities and different things? You know, I mean through the years, there were all of, I'm sure, those reports, but no, Brandon Training School, you know, again, we have evolved and I'm sure there were practices back then as there were at the state hospital, which we would call atrocities these days. There were certainly episodes reported of abuse, but there were- I'm not asking a bad question. Right, no, there were those thought practices that would be helpful, like putting people into ice baths. We would never think to do such a thing these days. But that, so that, you know, these were closed institutions. Really what we recognized is the need to get people into our community and have them have more healthy, holistic, integrated lives. And on the developmental- To be more independent. Yes, for people with developmental disabilities, I think, you know, really working very hard in Vermont, we have people who are working, you know, in our communities, they have jobs, not in a sheltered workshop. They have jobs in our businesses, in our community. And that is an advancement that actually we received an international award for in Vienna two years ago as a state in the state of Vermont, for being so progressive. The country of Vienna. The state, yes, Austria. Austria. Now, how, what are some future goals that Washington County Mental Health might have, or is having, because I understand that you're writing policies, so explain some of that. Well, you know, our future goals are to continue to find the needs in our community. I just had a wonderful panel we did last night in Plainfield, and I think it's to help our communities become more trauma-informed. It's to help people in our communities who feel like they're outside of the community to be more included. And the other part of that is for us to, again, integrate our services into healthcare services so that people see that mental health is actually health and taking care of oneself. So, you know, we've done this approach for years. We've done case management. We've done care coordination. These are things that now our healthcare partners are becoming much more aware of and that expenditures could be reduced. So I deal a lot now with the kind of the money side of the house, that's, I change that skill set from the street to, okay, how do I convince people to, you know, see the best practices and can we get paid for those? So my job is to continue to see that we might be able to grow our services as needed, integrating with health and community. And that's kind of the crux of it right now. Last question. During mental health awareness, what do they do it, explain, like, when how people, different mental health issues? So different, you know, we have 10 agencies throughout the state that do this work and people, you know, they recognize mental health awareness by getting out in the community, making special efforts to talk about it more. One thing we are doing this month, and I had one of these sessions last night, I was just mentioning out in Plainfield. We had a small group that gathered and we held forums last year in the community to talk about mental health crisis. What does that mean? How are our communities doing? What do we do to respond to that? That's raising awareness and just talking together. So we had a great group out there last night that gathered at the town hall. There was a nice circle of people. And we talked about, you know, the needs in school systems, getting upstream a little bit so that we can talk about healthy lives and including mental health and how we treat each other and how we stay healthy and do that before we get older and we've created bad habits. You know, making sure we have hobbies, making sure we have things that are healthy and of interest, making sure we explore whether we're happy. What is it that creates happiness?  You know, some people think that sounds kind of fru fru, you know? But it really, it's at the core of us to look and see. Or if someone needs, for example, if someone needs, they call it, oh, I'm taking a mental health day.  For myself. Yeah, that's great. Or for us, you know.  Think about where your life is, what's giving you some pleasure, how you give yourself some positive thing that's happening in your day, recognize it. Even if life is really, really hard, what is one thing today that you could do to go out, even if it's taking a walk down the sidewalk and feeling this kind of chilly air outside that we're having today, but a beautiful sunny day to say, this feels invigorating, this feels good, I'm doing this for me. Taking a deep breath with it and just being aware. That raises our spirits, and that's why I talk about mind, body, spirit, because it's how it raises our spirits to keep us more emotionally healthy. And physically, now. It pays off, otherwise your physical health goes into the dumper. Do you guys do anything, well, we're talking about mental health. Yeah. Do you have any physical exercise programs? We do. Or do you do anything for the physical body besides the mental health? Absolutely, absolutely. We have a place in Berry at 23 Summer Street, we call WellSpace. And that's a place where we invite people in, we have exercise there, we have classes, we have yoga classes. Cooking classes. Cooking classes, learning to have better nutrition. We do mindfulness if people find that that would be helpful. We also, in different programs, we do have wellness segments, so we help people if they'd like to track their blood pressure, if they'd like to stop smoking. And they'd like to. Well, you have a cessation program. Absolutely, we have tobacco cessation program throughout our entire agency, so. Now, from what I understand, that tobacco cessation program is only for clients of. Washington County. Washington County Mental Health. And staff. And staff. So explain a little bit about the tobacco cessation program. We've had that, we've been working on that for several years. We have a clinician in one of our programs, Bill Faggenauer, who works on that with one of our nurses, Rachel LaValley. And we do a screen with a person to find out what their habits are. And then we start plugging in supports, which are group supports, as well as individual supports.  What are those things that would be helpful with their habits? Recording those. And then celebrating when you have a success.  So we have people who've quit smoking, people who have some significant mental health issues they're dealing with every day. Because a lot of buildings are now smoke-free. Ours are all smoke-free, yeah. So, but say you have a lot of struggles emotionally and you're a smoker. It's really hard to give up a habit. So, yeah, people wanna do it. They know it's better for their health. So they try and then they go back, but that's okay with us. So you go back to smoking, you're gonna come back to the group, we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna try to, you know, if you're ready to stop again we're gonna support that and- Do you have an AA program? Back and forth. Alcoholics Anonymous or 12 Step type of thing? We don't sponsor that. AA is AA. So we support- Okay, I apologize. No, we support people going. And we absolutely let them know about that resource because it's so important. We also let them know about our recovery centers, the turning point over in Barrie. And we want, what I've learned through time, I think, is that it's different strokes for different folks and what might be helpful to you, Lawrence, might not be for me- One resource, yeah, exactly. Right, so I might really need talk therapy and talking to a therapist for 50 minutes might be helpful to me. For you it might be more helpful to do that yoga session and do some mindfulness. And what we find in talking to people- Alternatives to medication. Yep, yes, and those do assist with alternatives. So what we find is in asking people after all those things what helps, they let us know. Some might say, wow, the most successful thing to help me cope and to help me reduce my anxiety was mindfulness. Someone else might say, you know what's helped me for a long time over the last three months has been that I could speak to my therapist. Some might say, I did both those things at Washington County Mental Health. That's what helped me get to success so that I don't need that support anymore. So, you know, our mission is also to help people move on so that they can not need us. That's great. We're gonna ask you a couple more questions. Real quick, alternatives to medication. Yes. You know, it's one thing for a pharmacist to give you medication. Well, you mentioned some of them. Are you guys expanding on more alternatives to medication? Certainly, you know, we listen to what the people who come in to see us need. And we have psychiatry. Our doctors are there to prescribe medications to assist, but we have therapy, which we often, when we see a person come in, the first thought is not medication. The first thought might be you're having a traumatic event. Let's see if we can get you into this service to help first. But that medication piece is there, and for some people is essential, they feel to their well-being, so others would not find it helpful, or would be worried about side effects. So, you know, we just talk. It's a one-on-one experience. The other thing that we're gonna begin to examine is open dialogue. You know, that's another way for people who work for us to be thinking about talking with people who have mental illness and being accepting of where they are with their mind, which is really important. So, there are people who don't accept people. Absolutely. Sometimes with mental illness. And sometimes in accepting, it can help a person to accept their experience a little bit better. So, it's a combination. Again, different strokes for different folks. What are some misconceptions around people with mental illness or physical challenges that might be when they first meet them, in your opinion? That people with severe mental illness aren't smart. You know, that's a misconception. Absolutely incorrect. Or that they don't graduate college, which isn't true. Right, absolutely untrue. So, but I think whether we're talking and that people with developmental disabilities are limited and can't grow any further. That is totally untrue. We're watching people just absolutely blossom as we give them opportunity. So, I think one thing we need to remember is that in the course of a mental illness, people can work toward recovery. And we talk about recovery. Didn't used to. That's another one of those evolutionary things. You know, we used to put people in hospitals and that's where we thought they should be. We want to be very careful as we look at the problem of emergency room backups and the need for hospital beds that we don't overshoot, that we don't build too many hospital beds. That we don't build too many hospital beds. That we make sure that we continue to have the money within our communities to support the community services. This is the upstream piece. If we can do more here, we don't need higher levels of care. Yet, we might need a few more beds, but let's not build so many that we find ourselves back to a self-fulfilling, let's keep more beds full because we have. And another misconception, if I can put it, just because your relatives have had a mental challenge. That's a mean you're gonna. Exactly. So, explain a little bit about that misconception. So, we talk about mental illness now and we consider it a physiological, a physical illness that's working within the brain. And so, that's our challenge and that's why doctors think about medication. But that's also why alternative ideas come about because there's a certain way that we can work our minds and our bodies. We know we have great strengths we sometimes don't tap into. So, the mental illness piece is we talk about recovery and for people with developmental disabilities, we talk about, in both cases, we talk about self-determination. We shouldn't think that people cannot achieve because they certainly can and they do. And it's remarkable. And we simply need to give opportunity rather than making assumptions. Making assumptions is a bad thing. That's a mistake. Why is it a mistake really quick before we ask? Yeah, it's a mistake because we're forgetting that whole person. And we're forgetting that if we give children an opportunity to achieve, they will. If we give adults the opportunity, they will. The problem often is that our community and our society may not have, people may not have the money to be able to access some of the things that would give them more opportunity. So as a community, we're challenged more and more with expanding beyond ourselves to include others. Well, I would like to thank you for joining us on this edition of Abledon On Air. Thank you, Lawrence. I really appreciate it. For more information on Washington County Mental Health, you can log on to their website, www.wcmhs.org, or you can call their emergency number if you have an emergency. You can call their emergency number at<PHONE_NUMBER>. That's 229-0591. This has been Abledon On Air. I'm Lawrence Seiler. I'm Lawrence Seiler. See you next time.