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How Your Desk Helps You Think

If you love working from home, it’s because of the “extended mind”

Clive Thompson
Forge

A year and a half into remote work, a cultural divide has emerged: Most people either love it or hate it.

A recent survey by the New York Times found 31% of people want to stay home permanently, while 45% want to get back to the office, full-time. (The remainder want a blend of the two).

What gives? Why are people having such radically different experiences? It’s a complex question, obviously, because there are a ton of variables here, such as whether you have kids at home, how much room you’ve got, and your demographic.

But there’s one other intriguing possibility:

Maybe it’s about how our brains outsource our thinking to our environments.

If you prefer working from home, it might be because you’ve been able to create a better cognitive environment than you had at work. If you’re desperate to get back to the office, you may have discovered home is a terrible space in which to think.

I thought of this while reading Annie Murphy Paul’s new book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. She talks about the field known as “situated cognition” — how we use the objects and buildings around us as tools for thought.

Responses (2)

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You make a good point that surveys that show that most people wants to work from home might actually mean that most people don’t like their work environment and commute. It is rarely good to solve the wrong problem.

This is clearly a dispute that the breeders should lose. If the office is only better for people who made the awful decision to bring more life into this overcrowded world, they should be the ones sacrificed. Or they can have their office while reasonable people get to keep their desk in their own space.