The Cognitive Prosthesis

[jason]

rb gave me this account on one condition... that I write about disability related things, and participate in the dw_accessibility team. When I met Ricky, we started talking about what I casually described as the cognitive prosthesis. By that I mean some artificial device used to replace a missing part of the body. For me, it is my brain that is missing. Or part of it anyway. Practically speaking I have a small 1cm peanut shaped hole in my brain somewhere behind the left eye, half way between my ear and the eye ball. When I write, I think of it as the place from which the muse inspires. Same goes for talking. Because when I've written or said something, I really only have a vague recollection of what has happened, and I certainly didn't really have much chance to plan it out in advance. Move fingers or open mouth, and brain disconnects until process completed.

For the past 21 years, I've been using computers to write and communicate. I don't know if I ever really communicated in a meaningful way before I got a computer, not that I do now. But at the age of 25 I walked into the Computer Assisted Writing Centre at York University (Toronto) and signed up for a workshop that would teach me how to write better. What I didn't realize is that it would do much more than that. The experience of interacting with computers and software lead me to a stange relationship with social communications technology, and they've become for me something I have recently started to call the cognitive prosthesis, and for me it represents a ongoing dialogue with tools and technologies, from my fountain pen to my laptops, that help me thing, help me remember, and allow me to communicate with the world in a way that I feel most comfortable... because I tend to be understood when I have access to these tools better than when I do not.

I want to explore the notion of the Cognitive Prosthesis and what it means for someone who literally uses Cognitive Prostheses as an extension of the brain, primarily in the context of interactions with neurotypicals. I'm not sure where it will lead, but I've wanted to do this for a while and as part of a way of interacting with the new affordances of dreamwidth, it seems like the thing to do.