"Our brains are modestly larger than the brains of our nearest relatives (although not larger than the brains of some dolphins and whales), but this is almost certainly not the source of our greater intelligence. The primary source, I want to suggest, is our habit of offloading as much as possible of our cognitive tasks into the environment itself - extruding our minds (that is, our mental projects and activities) into the surrounding world, where a host of peripheral devices we construct can stores, process, and re-represent our meanings, streamlining, enhancing, and protecting the processes of transformation that are our thinking. This widespread practice of off-loading releases us from the limitations of our animal brains." -Dan Dennet, Kinds of Minds: toward an understanding of consciousness
Or as Don Norman puts it "The power of the unaided mind is greatly exaggerated. It is "things" that make us smart, the cognitive artifacts that allow human beings to overcome the limitations of human memory and conscious reasoning."
Can anyone point me to other well-known or lesser-known ideas on this theme?
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