More excerpts from "Things that Make Us Smart"
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993
©Donald A. Norman; reprinted with permission of the author.

The Power of Representation

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated.  Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained.  But human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits.  The real powers come from devising external aids [writing, books, maps, charts, computers] that enhance cognitive abilities.  How have we increased memory, thought, and reasoning? By the invention of external aids: It is things that make us smart.
p. 43

Cognitive artifacts

The powers of cognition come from abstraction and representation: the ability to represent perceptions, experiences, and thought in some medium other than that in which they have occurred, abstracted away from irrelevant details.  This is the essence of intelligence, for if the representation and the processes are just right, then new experiences, insights, and creations can emerge.

The important point is that we can make marks or symbols that represent something else and then do our reasoning by using those marks.  People usually do this naturally: This is not some abstract, academic exercise.
p. 47

People use artifacts to reason about alternative courses of action.  ...  A good representation captures the essential elements of the event, deliberately leaving out the rest.  ...  The critical trick is to get the abstractions right, to represent the important aspects and not the unimportant.  This allows everyone to concentrate upon the essentials without distraction from irrelevancies.
p. 48-49

It is through metarepresentations that we generate new knowledge, finding consistencies and patterns in the representations that could not readily be noticed in the world.  These higher-order representations are very difficult for the unaided mind to discover.
p. 51

Computer Interfaces

(The design of computer interfaces) imposes special requirements on the designer, who must now be an expert in both the technology of the artifact and in human psychology...  Designers never had to think about these issues before: There are few people who can deal with the broad implications of this challenge.
p. 81

Tools for reflection must support the exploration of ideas.  They must make it easy to compare and evaluate, to explore alternatives.  ...  the tools must be invisible: They must not get in the way.

Many electronic decision aids tend to restrict the availability of information to small segments visible on the relatively limited display.  This makes it difficult to integrate disparate sources of information, difficult to explore and to make comparisons.
p. 26

Reflective thought requires the ability to store temporary results, to make inferences from stored knowledge, and to follow chains of reasoning backward and forward, sometimes backtracking when a promising line of thought proves to be unfruitful. 
p. 25

Optimal Flow -- a continual flow of focused concentration: absolute absorption in an activity.
p. 31

Reflective thought is the critical component of modern civilization: It is where new ideas come from.
p. 27

Donald A.  Norman was founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California San Diego; and Apple Fellow, Vice President of Research, Apple Computer.

	Page 1	Data Visualization Tools
	Page 2	The computer as an aid to the human thought process
	Page 3	A True Browsing Device
	Page 4	more excerpts from "Things that Make Us Smart"
	Page 5	US Patent #6,307,573 Illustrations and Excerpts

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