Outboard Brain

I love this business of having an outboard brain.  Just as having a calculator liberates you from being a shitty human spreadsheet and allows you to do real math, having the Internet liberates you from being a shitty human encyclopedia and allows you to do real synthetic thought.  Every interesting thing that crosses my transom, and there's a seemingly infinite number of them, I turn into a post that explains to strangers why it's interesting.  This is powerfully mnemonic, it joins a kind of super dense cloud of fragmentary ideas that kind of knock around in my subconscious and eventually two of them glom together and nucleate and turn into novels, or speeches, or essays.  It's wonderful to not have to bother yourself with the minutiae and be able to look at bigger, more synthetic questions

-- Cory Efram Doctorow (17 July 1971), Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author, Intelligence Squared, 1 July 2015