Cognitive prostheses

This is a term I first learned from Clark Glamour and colleagues in Android Epistemology. Dermofit was a failed attempt to try and invent such a prosthesis.

Thinkers and thinking societies build tools that enhance their own thinking. When the speed of the positive feedback increases rapidly, we see a scientific and cultural revolution. When grit is put into the cogs or the base metals diluted, the opposite happens.

Last week I was giving a talk about tech, medicine and medical education, and for the life of me could not remember the following example, showing how key representation is to our intellectual toolbox. Worse, I knew it had an Edinburgh connection. Wikipedia has more.