“What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” Steve Jobs I’m currently doing some teaching in psychology, but for students in a more technical subject (media and computing). It’s a lot of work, but also fun (the good kind of stress, at least at the moment). And it touches an issue that I important to me — combing psychology and technology. After all, if a computer is a bicycle for the human mind as Steve Jobs put it (see quotation above), then the students should have a practical understanding of the human mind. After all, if you don’t understand how the mind works, how can you build a system that supports it? It’s like building a bicycle without knowing anything about human anatomy. Yet you better make sure the cyclist can reach the pedals, can work the steering, sits comfortably, and doesn’t accidentally drive over a cliff. Thinking about the relationship between technology and psychology, I’m reminded not only of Steve Jobs analogy, but also of a passage in Crichton’s “The Lost World”. One of Crichton’s characters, Jack Thorne, puts the [...]
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