Cognitive Toolkit

January 17, 2011, 1:18 PM

What’s Missing From Our ‘Cognitive Toolkit’?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

¶This is your brain on words:

¶It’s clearly a pretty hard-wired system. But can we find ways to use what’s locked in our skulls to better effect? I’ll be writing more soon on that broad question, with a hint of my thoughts provided in a recent Tweet. Some variant on  noosphere is clearly nigh.

¶In the meantime, there’s a rich discussion of aspects of this question on Edge.org, a forum for all manner of minds, curated by the agent and intellectual impressario John Brockman. Once or twice a year since 1998, Edge has tossed provocative questions to variegated batches of scientists, writers, artists and innovators./.../