E42: The offloaded brain, part 2: applications

Oddly Influenced

Suppose you believed that the ecological/embodied cognitive scientists of last episode had a better grasp on cognition than does our habitual position that the brain is a computer, passively perceiving the environment, then directing the body to perform steps in calculated plans. If so, technical practices like test-driven design, refactoring in response to "code smells," and the early-this-century fad for physical 3x5 cards might make more sense. I explain how. I also sketch how people might use such ideas when designing their workplace and workflow.

Books I drew upon

• Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997
• Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 2005

Also mentioned

• Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, 1998
• I mentioned a session of the Simple Design and Test conference.
• The sociology book I contributed to: The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, 2009, edited by Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik. My chapter, "A Manglish Way of Working: Agile Software Development", is inexplicably available without a paywall.
• The MIT AI Lab Jargon File
• I believe the original publication about CRC cards is Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham, "A laboratory for teaching object oriented thinking", 1989. I also believe the first book-type description was in Rebecca Wirfs-Brock et. al., Designing Object-Oriented Software, 1990.
• The idea of "flow" was first popularized in Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's 1990 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
• The idea of the hedgehog and the fox was popularized by Isaiah Berlin in his 1953 book The Hedgehog and the Fox (a wikipedia link).
• The original developer of the Pomodoro technique describes it here. There was a book about it, but Goodreads has been sufficiently enshittified that I can't find it. Perhaps you might be interested in Reduce PTSD and Depression Symptoms in 21 Days Using the Pomodoro Method instead? Because Goodreads prefers that.
• The Boy Who Cried World (wikipedia)

Credits

I was helped by Steve Doubleday, Ron Jeffries, and Ted M. Young.

I took the picture of Dawn in the tango close embrace.