Mind Through Matter

Cognition – the ability to detect, record, and assimilate salient features of environments – is a fundamental feature of all biological agents. It enables organisms to move from a perpetually reactive state to one that is  predictive, it decreases surprise and novelty, and its products reduce the demands of physiological and psychological homeostasis. Utilizing the various apparati available to organisms, types of cognition abound throughout the tree of life. Bacteria pursue nutrients using chemotaxis, plants track sunlight with  phototropism, birds determine location via dead-reckoning, and primates infer intent through mind-reading. As life has unfolded through evolutionary time, cognition too has diversified to service the ultimate organismic demands of survival and reproduction. 

Like other animals, human cognition emerges from the reciprocal interaction between us and our constructed niches. Although the general contours of human cognition are shaped by our species’ wide inheritance of singular plasticity, a capacity for symbolism paired with a unique ability to accumulate culture, much of cognition is informed and developed by stimuli from our constructed niches. The brain at birth is neither a tabula rasa nor a filled slate but comes together through interaction and commingling with the world – nature and nurture. As environments morph, the material artifacts that engage our senses change, the symbolic constructs that structure cognition transform, and the shape of cognition also shifts. Technological solutions are neither only products of cognition, nor just external props and aids, but adaptations that inform, transform, limit, and ultimately determine human cognition. 

Much discussion (here and here) has been had on the limitations of human cognition, the biases that make cognition error-prone in mismatched modern environments. Errors caused by “stone-aged minds” evolved for cognition in the stone ages. Errors that predispose us towards fast and frugal decision making, superficial pattern matching, retrospective explanations, and the drive to retain cognitive coherence in the face of conflicting information. These evolved dispositions no doubt play a role in our cognitive errors, but our cognition is not a relic but a dynamic process that continually changes in tandem with and in response to the technologies. A cursory glance at human history will show a trail of cognitive capacities – reading, writing, arithmetic – to complement our technologies – cuneiform tablets, paper, and books.  In reality, the unaided human mind has always been a nonentity. From notched baboon bones and cave murals to computers and calculators, material artifacts have always been a key component of the cognitive loop. They enabled cognition by allowing us to offload key cognitive capacities such as perception, memory, attention, and learning. Then, the question becomes what role do modern technologies play in contemporary errors of cognition? How much or in what contemporary domains can we attribute cognitive errors to technologies? Cognitive scaffolds that are either not “fit for purpose” or not “fit for mind.” Artifacts that are mismatched to the cognitive needs of contemporary niches (next essay). 

Cognition is universal in the biological world. At all levels of organization and every unit of analysis – from the single celled to the multicellular, from the individual to the collective – biological agents cognize. For humans, our symbolic constructs and our material artifacts have always played a pivotal role in cognition. They have always been part of the loop. Language enabled abstraction and concept manipulation, but the phonetic alphabet and writing supercharged it by making them simultaneously more permanent and malleable. Paper externalized memory, distributing cognitive load onto the world, and the map and the book effectively replaced the territory. Now digital representations are the loci of attention, and the analog verges on neglect (future essay).

Readings:

The Design of Everyday Things

Supersizing the Mind