Spongy Brains and Material Memories

Sutton, John

doi:10.1057/9780230593022_2

Cited by 36 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…A fuller prehistory of (and for) EM would incorporate that story into a larger narrative of the modern "invention of autonomy" (Schneewind 1997, pp. 3-11) and the correlative purifying "depsychologizing" of artifacts (Latour 1993;Jones and Stallybrass 2000;Sutton 2007). …”

Section: Conclusion: a Note On Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process

Sutton¹

2010

The Extended Mind

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1 Exograms, Interdisciplinarity, and the Cognitive life of Things The Extended Mind HypothesisOn the extended mind hypothesis (EM),l many of our cognitive states and processes are hybrids, unevenly distributed across biological and nonbiological realms (Clark 1997;Clark and Chalmers 1998). In certain circumstances, things-artifacts, media, or technologies-can have a cognitive life, with histories often as idiosyncratic as those of the embodied brains with which they couple (Sutton 2002a(Sutton , 2008. The realm of the mental can spread across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains. My independent aims in this chapter are: first, to describe two compatible but distinct movements or "waves" within the EM literature, arguing for the priority of the second wave (and gesturing briefly toward a third); and, second, to defend and illustrate the interdisciplinary implications of EM as best understood, specifically for historical disciplines, by sketching two case studies.EM, an offshoot of mainstream functionalist information-processing cognitive science, has been focused in particular on our abilities to hook up with what Merlin Donald calls "exograms" or external symbols, by analogy with the brain's memory traces or "engrams" (Donald 1991, pp. 308-333; 2001, pp. 305-315).2 These abilities allow us to create and support cognitive profiles quite unlike those of creatures restricted to the brain's biological memories or engrams alone. Among other typical features, Donald pOints out that exograms last longer than engrams, have greater capacity, are more easily transmissible across media and context, and can be retrieved and manipulated by a greater variety of means (1991, pp. 315-316): so our skilled use of such crafted aids changes both the locus of memory in general and the role of our biological 190 J. Sutton memory within the new larger systems (see also Rowlands 1999, pp. 129-147).As I'll argue, it's important not to overstate the differences between internal and external traces: the version of EM I'm developing here, following in particular in Andy Clark's wake, is aimed precisely at investigating a wide range of possibilities on these and other dimensions of variation. I distinguish two versions or "waves" of EM, differentiated partly by the way these dimensions are characterized. These waves are not ultimately incompatible, but they are distinct strands in the EM literature and within Clark's own work: as we'll see, he acknowledged "a potential tension" between them as long ago as 1998 (Clark 1998, p. 99; see section 4 below). Before introducing the two waves, let me reiterate the key commitment they share, tweaked and applied differently in each case. External symbol systems and other "cognitive artifacts" are not always simply commodities, for the use and profit of the active mind: rather, in certain circumstances, along with the brain and body that interact with them, they are (part of) the mind. For Clark, "it is our basic human nature to annex, exploit and incorporate n...

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Section: Conclusion: a Note On Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process

Sutton¹

2010

The Extended Mind

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275

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“…Francis Yates's The Art of Memory is still the standard reference book in this area, although more recently John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble have been exploring the relations between concepts of memory in the Renaissance and current theories of distributed cognition, particularly with reference to acting and worshipping practices. 18 Yates describes the shaping of knowledge through the memory arts, whereby by attaching a sequence of information to a sequence of architectural features or places, one could then recall the information by again visualizing these features. 19 The memory arts were viewed as supplementing the leakiness of the biological memory.…”

Section: Renaissance Textuality and Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending the Renaissance Mind: ‘Look What Thy Memory Cannot Contain’

Anderson

2016

The Cognitive Humanities

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“…But equally, historical cognitive science (Sutton 2006b) can confirm the contingent and multiple nature of possible extended cognitive physiologies: if we are cyborgs by nature, we have never been "bound and restricted by the biological skinbag, … the ancient fortress of skin and skull" (Clark 2003: 4-5;compare Latour 1993). So history needs to take its place alongside ethnography and developmental psychology as a key testing-ground for the whole framework (Tribble 2005;Sutton forthcoming b). This attention to detail about the properties of exograms and other external resources stops our investigations of inner-outer relations relying on either an assumption of parity or a sharp dichotomy between fluid biology and stable culture: as Hutchins argued, "it is not that some content is copied from the outside world into some internal storage medium … what used to look like internalization now appears as a gradual propagation of organized functional properties across a set of malleable media" (1995: 312).…”

Section: Dimensions Of Distribution and Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed cognition

Sutton

2006

P&C

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Synthesizing the domains of investigation highlighted in current research in distributed cognition and related fields, this paper offers an initial taxonomy of the overlapping types of resources which typically contribute to distributed or extended cognitive systems. It then outlines a number of key dimensions on which to analyse both the resulting integrated systems and the components which coalesce into more or less tightly coupled interaction over the course of their formation and renegotiation.

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Spongy Brains and Material Memories

Cited by 36 publications

References 13 publications

Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process

Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process

Extending the Renaissance Mind: ‘Look What Thy Memory Cannot Contain’

Distributed cognition

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