Hardware, Software, Wetware: Cognitive Science and Biohacking in the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This chapter begins by making the case for the importance of increasing awareness of contemporary cognitive science for the digital humanities, particularly for the cultural concerns of that field in its broad form. The digital humanities continually encounter new and ever-changing artefacts that affect users' cognition—devices such as e-readers, the internet and ubiquitous mobile computing—and any nuanced understanding of the use of these new objects must take account of their impacts on cognition. As public commentators increasingly argue against the deployment of new technologies with a scientistic language that draws on misunderstood or misappropriated findings from the cognitive sciences, it becomes vital that critics from within the digital humanities marshal the same material to more sophisticated ends. A second section explores how ‘transhumanism', the pursuit of the technological enhancement of the human body and mind, will similarly require developing this same path, calling for the acknowledgement of the embodied aspects of cognition and a recognition of how changes to embodiment, including the drawing of technological objects into both hard and soft assemblages with ourselves, results in subtle but significant changes to the ways in which we think through, with, and alongside our artefacts. The chapter, therefore, positions transhumanism at a nexus of the cognitive, medical and digital humanities, requiring evidence from each in order for its objects to be more fully understood. As we ask where studies of cognition might usefully fit into the humanities, I argue for further developing the conversation around digital devices, the specificities of their phenomenological effects, and their potential for establishing essential precedent for later developments that might radically change what it means for us to think.