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Your Computer Really is a Part of You

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An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.

The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn't superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they're just one thing, said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. The tool isn't separate from you. Its part of you.

Chemeros experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heideggers fundamental concepts: that people dont notice familiar, functional tools, but instead see through them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn't think of ones fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.

This idea, called ready-to-hand, has influenced artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, but without being directly tested.

In the new study, Chemero tracked the hand movements of people using a mouse to guide a cursor during a series of motor tests. Part way through the tests, the cursor lagged behind the mouse. After a few seconds, it worked again. When Chemero's team analyzed how people moved the mouse, they found profound differences between patterns produced during mouse function and malfunction.

When the mouse worked, hand motions followed a mathematical form known as one over frequency, or pink noise. Its a pattern that pops up repeatedly in the natural world, from universal electromagnetic wave fluctuations to tidal flows to DNA sequences. Scientists dont fully understand pink noise, but there's evidence that our cognitive and physiological processes are naturally attuned to it. But when Chemero's mouse malfunctioned, the pink noise vanished.

According to Chemero, that's because the people had fused with their computer tools.

The thing that does the thinking is bigger than your biological body, he said. You're so tightly coupled to the tools you use that they're literally part of you as a thinking, behaving thing.

Asked whether computer malfunction say, the iPhone's notorious keyboard lag could thusly be viewed as a discontinuity in our selves, Chemero said, Yes, that's exactly what it is.

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