Conversation is often understood as an exchange of thoughts between separate minds. But in genuine dialogue, new thoughts and understandings can emerge through the interaction itself. The idea of interthinking helps explain how conversation can become part of the thinking process, allowing us to develop thoughts and understanding together.
This has encouraged me to look more deeply into what Neil Mercer means by interthinking and into some of the thinking and research that support it. This post is not intended to prove that thinking somehow escapes from our heads. It asks whether our usual picture of thinking as an essentially individual activity is adequate.
Thinking through conversation
It is tempting to think of conversation as an exchange between two separate minds. I think something in my head and tell you. You think about what I have said, formulate a response in your head, and tell me. We pass thoughts backward and forwards.
Sometimes conversation is like that, but good dialogue can be something much more interesting.
When we are genuinely engaged in conversation, our thinking develops through the interaction itself. You say something that makes me see things differently. I respond, perhaps without quite knowing where my thought is going. Something in my response prompts another thought in you.
You question me, extend what I have said, or make an unexpected connection. That changes what I think next. Some of these thoughts did not exist before the conversation. They are not simply being retrieved from two separate minds and exchanged. They are being formed through the relationship between what one person says and how the other responds.
Discovering what we think
Think of a really good conversation where, at some point, you find yourself saying:
I’ve never thought about it like that before.
Or perhaps you start a sentence without knowing quite how you are going to finish it and discover the thought as you speak.
Sometimes something even more interesting happens. A new understanding emerges that neither person can really claim as their own. One thought has prompted another, which has changed the first and prompted something else.
This raises an intriguing question: whose thought is it?
Something similar can happen when several people think together. What emerges may not belong to any one individual but may have been created through the interaction between them.
Imagine a group creating a story together, with each person contributing just one sentence and deliberately building on the one before.
At the end, ask:
Who owns that story? Where did the story come from?
No single person created it. The story emerged from their interaction.
John’s point was that something similar can happen with our thinking. What emerges through the conversation may be something that no individual brought into the room.
Interthinking
This is what Neil Mercer
calls interthinking: using language to think collectively.
Mercer’s work with colleagues at Cambridge has explored how spoken language does more than communicate information. Language can also be used as a tool for reasoning, learning and thinking together.
It does not mean that our individual minds somehow merge. We remain separate people with our own experiences and perspectives, but our thinking is no longer independent. What one person thinks next is partly shaped by what another has just said, and their response in turn shapes what becomes possible next. The conversation itself has become part of the thinking process.
Perhaps the simplest test is to ask whether we have ever entered a conversation not knowing what we thought and discovered it through the conversation.
There is an even more intriguing question. Have we ever left a conversation with an understanding that neither person brought into the room?
If so, we were not simply exchanging thoughts. We were thinking together.
Others may accept that people can think together but ask why we need a new word for it. Why not simply call it thinking together?
And there is another objection: there is nothing new here. People have been talking, exchanging ideas and influencing one another’s thinking for thousands of years. Interthinking can sound as though a new or rather mysterious phenomenon has been discovered when it has not.
There is truth in all these objections. Interthinking does not require the existence of some mysterious collective mind, and the human activity it describes is certainly not new. But neither objection makes the term unnecessary.
Conversation is often understood as an exchange of thoughts that have already been formed. One person expresses an idea, another responds, and information passes between them. Interthinking draws attention to something more easily overlooked: the conversation itself may be part of the process by which thoughts are formed.
Something one person says changes what another thinks. That response changes what the first person thinks next. Ideas are questioned, extended, combined and reshaped. Through this interaction, thoughts and understandings may emerge that none of those involved would have reached in quite the same way alone.
Naming this process makes it easier to notice when it is happening and when it is not. It allows us to distinguish interthinking from related activities such as exchanging information, debating established positions, brainstorming possibilities and co-creating an outcome. It also gives us a way to ask why some conversations develop everyone’s thinking while others merely reinforce what each person already believes.
The important question then becomes: what makes some conversations so much better at developing our thinking than others?
A name does not prove that something exists as a separate or clearly bounded phenomenon. Nor does a new term make the underlying activity novel, profound or automatically valuable. The term must earn its place by helping us recognise, examine and discuss something that might otherwise remain blurred or hidden.
This is the value of interthinking. It gives conceptual shape to a familiar but easily overlooked human capability. It allows us to study the conditions that support it, examine what inhibits it and become more deliberate about thinking together.
We do not have to agree about precisely where thinking takes place, whether the phenomenon is new, or even whether we need a new word for thinking together, to recognise the value of learning how to do it better.
The social origins of thinking
The idea that thinking is fundamentally social is not new.
The psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued almost a century ago that many of our higher mental processes have social origins. Language first exists between people and is later internalised as part of our own thinking.
This raises an important point about language itself. We do not first learn to think entirely independently and then acquire language simply to communicate those thoughts to other people. Language becomes one of the principal means through which we think.
The words, concepts, distinctions and ways of framing the world that make much of our thinking possible have themselves been acquired through interaction with other people and through the culture into which we were born.
Even when thinking alone, therefore, our thinking is not entirely independent of others.
There is another intriguing aspect to this. Much of our private thinking is itself dialogic. We question ourselves. We consider alternatives. We anticipate objections. We imagine what another person might say. We sometimes conduct entire conversations in our heads.
Rupert Wegerif, Professor of Education at Cambridge, has explored this dialogic character of thinking in depth. From this perspective, dialogue is not simply a means of transferring ideas between people. The encounter with another voice opens up possibilities for seeing things differently, and something of that dialogic process continues even when we think alone.
This also helps explain why diversity of perspective matters. Different voices bring different experiences, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world into the conversation. The differences between them create possibilities for seeing something that none of us could see from our own position alone.
This makes the division between “thinking inside the head” and “conversation outside the head” rather less clear than it first appears.
None of this means that individual thought disappears or that our minds somehow merge. It suggests something more modest but important: individual thinking develops within a social and linguistic world, and conversation can become part of the process through which new thoughts are formed.
Nancy Kline and the quality of attention
There is another, much more experiential way of approaching the same question.
For many years, Nancy Kline
, author of Time to Think, has explored how the quality of another person’s attention affects our ability to think.
Her work on the Thinking Environment starts from a deceptively simple observation: how well we think can depend profoundly on how we are being listened to.
When someone gives us sustained attention without continually interrupting, advising, or preparing their own response, we often find ourselves thinking more deeply than we otherwise would.
This is important for interthinking. The listener does not necessarily contribute an idea. They may say almost nothing. Yet their presence and their attention can change the thinking that becomes possible.
In other words, another person can participate in the creation of our thinking without supplying the content of the thought. This makes it difficult to describe thinking as an entirely self-contained process occurring within an isolated individual.
What is happening between brains?
There is also some intriguing neuroscience emerging around social interaction.
Researchers can now record activity from two or more brains simultaneously as people interact. Studies of conversation, cooperation, joint attention and other shared activities have found evidence of interbrain synchrony: measurable relationships in which aspects of the neural activity of interacting people become temporally aligned.
One particularly interesting study found coupling between the brain activity of speakers and listeners during natural communication, with stronger coupling associated with better comprehension.
This does not prove interthinking. Interbrain synchrony does not mean that two brains somehow become one, nor does it demonstrate that thoughts exist independently between people.
But it does add to a broader picture emerging from social neuroscience. During interaction, what happens in one person’s brain can become systematically related to what happens in another’s. Attention, perception, prediction, language and behaviour are continually shaped by the interaction.
The neuroscience therefore gives us another reason to question the simple picture of two entirely self-contained brains merely transmitting finished thoughts to each other.
There is more on the research in Interbrain Synchrony, and on its wider relationship with conversation in Mirror Neurons, Interbrain Synchrony and Conversation.
Perhaps the wrong question
One objection to interthinking is straightforward:
Thinking happens in my head. Conversation may stimulate my thinking, but I am still the one doing the thinking.
There is clearly truth in this. We do not cease to be individual thinkers. But perhaps it frames the question the wrong way. There is no need to claim that some mysterious third mind is floating between two people. The more interesting question is:
Can thoughts emerge through interaction that neither participant could have produced in quite the same way alone?
If the answer is yes, something important is happening that the simple model of exchanging already-formed thoughts does not capture.
Interthinking is a useful name for that process.
Co-creation is about creating something together. We might co-create an idea, a plan, a piece of writing, a strategy, a decision or a shared understanding.
Interthinking is about thinking together. It describes what happens when our thinking develops through interaction with others. Something one person says changes what another thinks. Their response then changes the first person’s thinking, which in turn changes what becomes possible next. Through this continuing interaction, thoughts and understandings may emerge that nobody brought into the conversation fully formed.
The distinction becomes clearer when we consider that interthinking need not result in the creation of anything. A conversation may leave those involved with a richer understanding, a changed perspective, greater uncertainty, or simply better questions. There need be no agreement, decision, solution or tangible outcome. Indeed, sometimes the value lies in resisting the pressure to reach an outcome too quickly and remaining with the uncertainty for longer.
Equally, co-creation does not necessarily involve much interthinking. A group might divide a task between its members, contribute separate pieces to a document, vote between alternatives, or assemble individual contributions into a common output. Something has genuinely been co-created, but the participants may have done relatively little thinking together.
Of course, the two frequently overlap. Interthinking can lead to co-creation, and rich co-creation will often involve a great deal of interthinking. But they draw attention to different phenomena.
A simple way of expressing the distinction is:
Interthinking is thinking together. Co-creation is creating together.
The value of the word interthinking is that it names something co-creation does not quite capture: the way our thinking itself develops between us through conversation, whether or not we ultimately create anything.
Brainstorming is primarily a technique for generating possibilities. One person suggests an idea, another adds another, and the group builds a collection of ideas. There may be some building on each other’s contributions, but there need not be.
Interthinking is about developing our thinking through the interaction itself. Ideas are questioned, reshaped, extended, and sometimes transformed as the conversation develops. Two people might spend an hour exploring a single question and leave with an understanding that neither possessed at the start.
A simple distinction is that brainstorming asks, What ideas can we generate? Interthinking asks, What can we think together that we could not think alone?
Closing Reflection
We remain individual minds, but we are not isolated minds. Language, attention, difference and interaction shape what we are able to think.
Interthinking does not require us to believe in a collective mind. It asks us to recognise something both simpler and, perhaps, more profound: sometimes the thought that emerges from a conversation could not have existed without the conversation.
(Public Domain)Leadership as a practice of convening necessary conversations—ones that often go unsaid. Coaching that supports clarity, presence, and more thoughtful ways of working together.