I wrote a review a while back about a book on extended cognition, the idea that your mind isn’t fully contained in your skull, that tools and notes and the physical arrangement of things around you are doing real cognitive work, not just storing information for a brain that does all the actual thinking on its own. I said in that review it changed how I think about board games, which is true, but I undersold it, because the thing it actually changed how I think about is my job, and I’ve been sitting with that for a few months now trying to figure out how to say it without sounding like I’m reaching.
Here’s the plain version. I watch a wall of monitors for a living, and for years I thought of that wall as a passive readout, a window I looked through to check on a system that lived somewhere else, in the racks, in the cables, in the actual hardware. What I’ve started to notice, since reading that book, is that I don’t actually hold the state of the floor in my head at all, not really, I hold a much thinner model than I assumed, and the dashboard is doing the actual remembering. When an alert pattern shifts, I don’t consciously recall what normal looks like and compare it, I just see that something’s off, the way you’d notice a word misspelled in a sentence without consciously running through the dictionary. The knowing lives partly in me and partly in the arrangement of graphs on that wall, and pulling either one away breaks something that neither piece alone was actually holding.
It sounds obvious once you say it, maybe, but I spent four years assuming the skill was entirely mine, something I’d built and carried around, portable, independent of the specific tools in front of me. I’m less sure of that now. I’ve had the experience of sitting in front of an unfamiliar monitoring setup at another site, doing a training rotation last year, and feeling genuinely stupid for the first hour, slower, less capable, even though nothing about the actual underlying systems had changed, only the interface reading them out to me had. That’s not a coincidence, or if it is, it’s a very specific one. Some real portion of my competence, it turns out, isn’t in my head at all. It’s in the layout of that particular wall of screens, built up session by session over years, and I only get to borrow it back when I’m standing in front of the specific version I trained on.
I don’t know what to do with that, exactly, beyond notice it, the same unsatisfying place a lot of my personal essays land. But I’ve started paying more attention to how I set up my own tools now, at work and in games both, treating the arrangement itself as part of the thinking rather than just scaffolding around it. Small shift. Feels like a real one.