Hi Dd, thanks for the kind words.

Working on behaviour change with any of the 4E’s (embodied/extended/enactive/embedded) seems an alluring prospect, but it’s a good amount of work to conceive how it can be applied to behaviour change. It seems like there is a gap in the literature on how these theories can be applied.

I think your idea certainly has merit but I’d want to see more about it — it certainly sounds fascinating. I could see how our “ecological assembly” of cognitive resources could be structured in such a way to affect behaviour change. Some authors talk about how much of what we imbibe in our extended mind is sub-personal, that is, below the level of conscious, and it’s only other processes that make manifest these resources to consciousness as necessary. Language, for example, forms an important part of our extended mind, but much of it is backgrounded, ‘sculpting’ our attention in that it creates objects that we need to attend to. I wonder how well big data could model that?

Some books I’ve read that deal with the extended mind that may be applicable to what you’re discussing include:

Supersizing the Mind (good for a solid argument of the extended mind)

New Science of the Mind (addresses issues with the above, and talks about sub-personal processes)

The Promise of a Post-Cognitive Interaction (good broad scan of a lot of theories including embodied cognition. A good place to go to find resources to dig deeper).

Let me know how it goes!