Everyday Leverage

Written language helps to make the size of our brains appear larger than they are: it increases our memory in size and duration, and it helps us think more complicated thoughts because we can visualize more information at once in the short term, too.

Cooking helps our digestive system extract more nutrition from food: all kinds of cooking could be considered external pre-digestion. Fermentation, roasting, steaming, boiling – all of these techniques break down some of the more complicated, difficult to digest molecules and make them smaller. (And tastier, too! Tiny, tasty molecules. Mmmm...)

Sports (or Sport, apparently, if you’re British...) and play help our brains as well as our bodies develop and grow to be highly adaptable, responsive and attentive to the environment.

It’s weird to think of these things as technologies, but for the amount of leverage that can be gained from applying them they must be, right?