A revelatory and timely look at how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever It’s undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding “yes.” In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But, as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what is good of the old. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future. “Powerful and rigorously thought out … Smarter Than You Think is excellent and necessary in its entirety, covering everything from the promise of artificial intelligence to how technology is changing our ambient awareness.” — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings   “[A] lucid and distinctly hopeful study of the ways in which modern tools are changing how we read, think, write, and act.” — The New Yorker   “A well-framed celebration of how the digital world will make us bigger, rather than diminish us.” — Kirkus   “[A] judicious and insightful book on machine intelligence.” — Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review   “[An] entertaining and well-researched celebration of modern communication.” — O Magazine "We should be grateful to have such a clear-eyed and lucid interpreter of our changing technological culture as Clive Thompson. Smarter Than You Think is an important, insightful book about who we are, and who we are becoming." —Joshua Foer, New York Times bestselling author of Moonwalking with Einstein   "Almost without noticing it, the Internet has become our intellectual exoskeleton. Rather than just observing this evolution, Clive Thompson takes us to the people, places and technologies driving it, bringing deep reporting, storytelling and analysis to one of the most profound shifts in human history." — Chris Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Makers , Free , and The Long Tail   "There's good news in this dazzling book: Technology is not the enemy.  Smarter Than You Think reports on how the digital world has helped individuals harness a powerful, collaborative intelligence—becoming better problem-solvers and more creative human beings." —Jane McGonigal, PhD, Author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World   "Thompson declares a winner in the cognitive fight between human and computers: both together. Smarter Than You Think is an eye-opening exploration of the ways computers think better with humans attached, and vice-versa." —Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus   Clive Thompson  is a contributor for the  New York Times Magazine and  Wired . He also writes for  Fast Company  and appears regularly on many NPR programs, CNN, Fox News, and NY1, among other news outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. The “extended mind” theory of cognition argues that the reason humans are so intellectually dominant is that we’ve always outsourced bits of cognition, using tools to scaffold our thinking into ever-more-rarefied realms. Printed books amplified our memory. Inexpensive paper and reliable pens made it possible to externalize our thoughts quickly. Studies show that our eyes zip around the page while performing long division on paper, using the handwritten digits as a form of prosthetic short-term memory. “These resources enable us to pursue manipulations and juxtapositions of ideas and data that would quickly baffle the unaugmented brain,” as Andy Clark, a philosopher of the extended mind, writes. Granted, it can be unsettling to realize how much thinking already happens outside our skulls. Culturally, we revere the Rodin ideal—the belief that genius breakthroughs come from our gray matter alone. The physicist Richard Feynman once got into an argument about this with the historian Charles Weiner. Feynman understood the extended mind; he knew that writing his equations and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought. But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.” No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his thinking process. They were his thinking process: “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said. “Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?” Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about. The printed word helped make our thought linear and abstract and vastly increased our artificial memory. Newspapers shrank the wo