When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richa
rd Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself,
however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Super
sizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our
heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of
feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cr
oss the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's tho
ught are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of tho
ught and enlarge the boundaries of mind.
