The Cognitive Benefits of Actual *Things* to Think With
Suppose I asked you to play a game of chess with me.
You’re thinking about the black and white pieces on a checkered board. Knights. Pawns. The Queen. You can see it, right?
But what if I told you we’re going to scrap all that. No pieces, and no board. We’re going to play chess over SMS. Text messaging. I’ll text my move. You’ll text me your move. And so on.
At this point, unless you’ve got a crazy good ability to recall and envision lots of complicated information, you’re probably freaking out. ‘Chess, without the board? Are you kidding me?’ But I hold up these two ways of playing chess to point out something we take for granted: The pieces and the board. Think about what do they do for us, cognitively. These pieces on a board… they hold information for us, in a way that:
- supports reflection
- reveals patterns, and
- supports interactions
When we switch to the text message version of chess, we lose these superpowers.
The board. The pieces. These are, in terms of cognition, things we use to think with.
But, let’s keeping playing with our analogy…
What if I said, ‘you know what, let’s scrap the text messaging idea, and play chess just using our memory. We’ll stare at each other, maybe over Zoom, and play chess in our heads, keeping track of the moves and possibilities in our memory.’
At this point, we really start freaking out. At least with the SMS version, there was a record of the moves made. A record of information we can refer back to. This new face-to-face version of chess requires some serious concentration and recall of all that has been said.
We have:
- Chess, as it is normally played.
- Chess, over text message.
- Chess, played face to face with no external aids.
I present these three forms of chess to make this point:
When we bring information into the world, and then arrange that information in meaningful ways, we’re able to support more complex thinking.
With this chess analogy, you can see that giving form to ideas and manipulating those forms greatly enhances our cognitive abilities. This is how I view things like sticky notes and templates — they’re not a kitschy design thinking activity, they’re a way to think better. Visual thinking helps us think better. And think better, together.
This all makes sense when talking about a game of chess.
But I want you to think about…
- the last serious disagreement you got into
or…
- a big decision that you recently made
How did you handle these?
In my experience, most of these decisions and disagreements happen in very limiting ways — we debate and discuss, using only words. We think a lot — mulling things over “in our heads.” And we rely on what we can hold in memory.
And yet…
We freak out about playing chess from memory. So why are we okay making a difficult decision without using notes or a reaching for a useful framework?
When we bring information into the world, and then arrange that information in meaningful ways, we’re able to support more complex thinking.
When I talk about playful things to think with, I’m thinking about the cognitive benefits afforded to us when we use tools that give form to abstract ideas. Whether it’s a game board with pieces, or a framework with sticky notes, or cards on a table, the function is the same — to extend our limited thinking abilities.
