Carl Zimmer, in Discover Magazine:

The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

The mind is a store of knowledge you can dip into, an external repository of information.

The US Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover. The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.

The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies.

There’s no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections.

From the archive, Marshall McLuhan:

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”

McLuhan again:

In operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed.

Jeff Leeds, in conversation with Sasha Frere-Jones:

I think the message and the medium are much more intertwined than they were ten years ago.

WSJ, in 2007:

If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorstep of a Marshall McLuhan-meets-Milton Friedman world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren't the only empires at risk.

Howard Rheingold:

I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that "critical thinking" is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority.

Eric McLuhan:

The new media won't fit into the classroom. It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.

How Google Is Making Us Smarter