Kinds of Minds

Kinds of Minds. Toward an understanding of consciousness by Daniel C. Dennett

Our brains are modestly larger than the brains of our nearest relatives (although not larger than the brains of some dolphins and whales), but this is almost certainly not the source of our greater intelligence. The primary source, I want to suggest, if our habit of off-loading as much as possible of our cognitive tasks into the environment itself -- extruding our minds (that is, our mental projects and activities) into the surrounding world, where a host of peripheral devices we construct can store, process, and re-represent our meanings, streamlining, enhancing, and protecting processes of transformation that are our thinking. The widespread practice of off-loading releases us from the limitations of our animal brains (pp.134-5)