Your mind is not entirely inside your head. When you think, your thought processes seamlessly merge with the cognitive tools you routinely use to accomplish things. From books and blackboards to digital maps and automobile dashboards, we have evolved a dizzying array of technologies to help us think and remember better. We don’t use these artifacts, though, the way you might use a shovel to dig a hole. Rather, they become integral components of our minds. When the fact that you’re reading a book fades from your conscious awareness the words on the page become tightly coupled to your thought processes. They trigger cascades of thought and emotion the same way native thoughts do. For a brief period, the book actually becomes a part of you.
This is the extended mind thesis, an idea first proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998. This theory states that when objects in the environment are causally coupled to internal thought processes in certain ways they become components of the mind itself. As Clark has pointed out, an address read off of a notepad is indistinguishable in use from an address retrieved from long term memory. The notepad doesn’t just assist your organic memory; it serves an identical function. It acts as a first class member of your cognitive system. Whether or not you’re fully persuaded by their argument, considering these augmentations as integral parts of a coupled organic/synthetic system is a useful exercise. Among other things, it draws attention to the interface: How do our thought processes connect to these artifacts, what role does each side play, and how does information flow across the boundary?
As a visualization researcher, I’ve found this to be a powerful perspective. Data visualizations don’t just statically inform us, our minds actively couple to them. We rapidly interrogate them with our eyes and interactively change their characteristics with keyboard and mouse to meet the shifting demands of our thoughts. But along the way I’ve also come to realize that the way we think with visualizations is just one manifestation of a larger phenomenon. If we could understand these processes better we might be able to engineer not only better data visualizations, but better cognitive tools in general. And maybe even become better thinkers in the process.
This site reflects my attempts to grapple with these questions and share some of what I’ve learned so far. I invite you along on my journey of discovery. I hope you find it an interesting and worthy part of your own extended mind: your exomind.
John Risch
January 2014
First, a word about one of the many things this site is not about, which is Artificial Intelligence (AI). An important and fascinating discipline, to be sure, and one that is advancing rapidly on many fronts. However, AI researchers are principally interested in replicating human though processes as fully independent systems. That’s not what this is about.
This site addresses a field that has sometimes been called Intelligence Augmentation (IA), but which I prefer to think of as Human-Information Interfaces (HIIs). That is to say, information technologies designed to augment, amplify, or otherwise improve our own native thought processes. AI can certainly play a role in this regard. For example, in the form of so-called “centaur” systems or as cognitive coprocessors. In other words, the use of AI technologies as adjuncts to human thought, not as independent problem solving entities. The focus here is on the human side of the equation.
Of course, the idea of using computers to augment human thought is not at all new. Notable antecedents include Licklider’s concepts of man-computer symbiosis, Englebart’s notions of intelligence amplification and Bush’s Memex. What is new is our rapidly improving understanding of how our minds work and the vast computational and information resources we now have at our fingertips. I believe the stage is set for major advances in human intelligence augmentation and I hope to both document and facilitate its progress.
Part personal journal, part experiment in Science 2.0, the goal of this site is to consolidate information and act as a sounding board for like-minded researchers and laygeeks. Because of my background I skew heavily towards the science and technology of information visualization. However, I have a wide variety of interests, ranging from ancient memory systems to the psychological effects of Zen rock gardens. I feel the pieces of the puzzle are hidden in many and diverse places, and you’ll see that diversity reflected in the material presented here. I hope you find it interesting, and please feel free to add your own comments to the discussion or to contact me directly at john@exo-mind.com.
My name is John Risch. I’m a visualization researcher with a strong interest in the psychology of data visualization. I’ve spent most of my career developing visualization tools for a variety of U.S. Government and commercial organizations. Along the way I somehow ending up an IEEE Visualization Pioneer. I’m also the former Chief Scientist for Data and Information Visualization at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I won several awards for my work there, including an R&D 100 Award for the Starlight information visualization software I developed with my colleagues John Pinto, Scott Dowson, Wes Hatley, Michelle Hart, and Bruce Rex. You can read about it in a paper of ours that was republished here. Starlight has been featured on national television, check it out below.
Since leaving PNNL I’ve been involved in a series of software startups; I’m now on my third (batting .500 so far). I’m currently CTO of Cohere Technology Group, a software engineering and professional services company founded in December of 2014. We’re based in Reston, Virginia with expertise in massive scale data engineering, management and analytics. I’m excited to be working with with an exceptional management and technical team on a number of exciting and challenging problems. Among other things, I get to work on visual interfaces for analyzing massive data sets. Imagine that.
Throughout my career I’ve maintained my focus on visualization technology, especially tools for visually analyzing abstract information such as the contents of large text collections. In the course of my work I’ve come to understand that our penchant for representing information graphically is motivated by deeply rooted cognitive and psychological processes: our intuition and reasoning systems, analogy and metaphor, mental models and simulations, long term and working memory. We seem to be driven to develop tools to augment our thinking, and those tools are largely graphical in nature. Why is that, and how does it all work? I spend a lot of time wondering about that. The answers may be within our grasp.