Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, wrote up a case he called the “disembodied lady.”

Christina, an athletic young woman, tragically lost her sense of proprioception: her sense of where her body parts were, in relation to the rest of her body, and to the environment around her.

She could no longer sense where her arms and legs were, or how they moved.

Her graceful and powerful body no longer obeyed her without effort.

“She could hold nothing in her hands, and they ‘wandered’—unless she kept an eye on them. When she reached out for something, or tried to feed herself, her hands would miss, or overshoot wildly, as if some essential control or coordination was gone. (…) She can find no words for this state, and can only use analogies derived from other senses: ‘I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself ... it has no sense of itself—these are her own words.” (Sacks 1985, chapter 3)

With immense effort, Christina learned to use her eyes and her conscious mind to track her body positions and direct its movements.

She had to look for her arm, before she could use it.

The title of John McPhee’s book, A Sense of Where You Are, profiled basketball star Bill Bradley. I suspect a “sense of where you are” is enhanced in athletes.

Unfortunately Christina, who formerly rode horses and played hockey, never recovered her innate sense of her own body; her proprioception.

I’m not athletic, but I think of organizing my environment as increasing my proprioception.

Getting your physical environment organized extends your senses. It allows you to move with power and purpose, with minimal wasted effort, like an athlete.

In her book The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul discusses research on how we can use our bodies, our environments, and other people, quite literally, to help us think better:

“What if the directive to ‘use your head,’ ubiquitous though it may be, is misguided? [Research suggests] we’ve got it entirely backwards. (…) we use our brains entirely too much — to the detriment of our ability to think intelligently. What we need to do is think outside the brain. Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our own heads — the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of other people around us — drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.” (Paul 2021, Kindle location 162)

Architects and chefs have long understood the importance of arranging physical environments to extend our bodies and minds. A functional office building with well-designed spaces for thinking in solitude, and differently designed spaces for thinking with others, helps people create better. A chef’s mise-en-place, plans externalized in writing, and ingredients set out ahead of time, is the mental and physical extension that gets multiple dinners on multiple tables.

Organization is Hard Because Organization is Thinking

And thinking is hard.

At first, creating a proprioceptive environment for yourself — figuring out where to put things so that you can act, and training yourself to remember to return things to those strategic places — feels effortful.

Christina had to use her vision to look for her hand, and then direct it to grip a fork. Then she had to focus intently on her hand, to keep her hold on the fork.

If I don’t mentally assign a place to keep my keys, and physically put them there, I will instead flail around looking for them. Losing my keys, in a small sense, is like losing control of my hand. I can’t go anywhere until I regain them.

Arranging physical objects to operate as graceful extensions of your mind and body takes effort and practice, at first. It is a process of trial and error. Initially, it feels artificial; awkward.

If I am learning to put my keys in one place — the hook by the door — but I have to keep checking to make sure they are there, I haven’t yet incorporated them into my extended proprioception.

It’s when it becomes automatic — when I hang up my keys automatically, and never wonder where they are — that I have extended my body and mind to include my keys. I can reach for them without thinking.

At some point the organizing actions become habits.

The sensations of walking through the door prompt me to hang my car keys on the hook to my right. Hanging up my keys when I enter the house has become unconscious.

I have proprioception with my body: I know where my arms are. And once it is automatic for me to hang up my keys, I extend that sense of proprioception to my car keys. I do not have to look for them. Like my hand, they are just … there when I need them.

With practice, you can extend your sense of proprioception to tools in your physical environment: keys live here, wallet lives there, phone lives over there.

Boom. Automatic.

This in turn enables you to act with fluid freedom.

Freedom to Act is Freedom from Having to Look for Things

Living with flow, living with freedom, is partly about arranging your things so you don’t have to consciously think about where they are.

Freedom of action is freedom from having to interrupt yourself to search for something you need, to complete your action.

An organized environment extends your sense of proprioception.

When I have trained my body and my mind to extend their reach by putting my car keys on the hook as soon as I walk in the door, I no longer have to check for them, and I no longer have to stop everything to look for them.

When I always know where my keys are, I extend the powers of my body and my mind to take action in this world.

The arrow of my intention, in this organized environment, flies from my mind to the movement of my arm to the key hook, without a stop.

The more you make your environment into an extension of your mind, the less likely you are to get waylaid by distraction, by not being able to find what you need, in order to act.

When you embody your environment by putting your essential tools where you can find them without thinking, you remain at ease.

Your intentions cleanly translate into physical actions. You become more focused, more peaceful, more effective.

You can find your car keys without even thinking about it. They have, in a sense, become incorporated into the unconscious reach of your body and your mind.

And now you can head out the door, with more time and energy and focus, to make your ideas real in this world.

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References

Sacks, O. (1985) The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. New York: Summit Books.

Paul, A.M. (2021) The extended mind: the power of thinking outside the brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.