#2 Principle of Cognitive Impartiality
The second principle states that our brain doesn’t care whether a piece of information is internal (stored in memory) or external (stored in the environment). It will access whichever source is more reliable, even at the cost of accuracy.
Some experiments suggest that, all else being equal, the brain actually prefers external sources, because they take no energy to maintain.
#1 Principle of Ecological Assembly
The first principle states that our minds are ecological control systems. We are natural-born environmental engineers. We achieve goals not by micromanaging every detail, but by relying on existing structures in the environment around us.
Consider what makes a fish an incredibly efficient swimming machine. The fish is not a good swimmer in isolation. It has evolved to adapt its swimming behaviors to the pools of kinetic energy found in its environment: swirls, eddies, vortices, currents, tides, waves, etc.
The reason this is environmental engineering, not just adaptation, is that it includes both external events (an unexpected swirl or rock in the river) and self-generated ones (a well-timed flap of the tail). It is the environment and the fish together that make up the swimming machine.
Self-engineering
What all these principles suggest is that it isn’t the quality or quantity of our knowledge that matters. Nor even our raw intellectual ability. All these pale in comparison to the problem-solving capabilities of our environment. The bottleneck on human performance is our context.
Think of a bartender preparing drinks. Taking a list of drink orders, she could easily remember who ordered what if she wanted to. Instead, she positions the glasses in the correct order on the bar, using their location in space to “remember” the orders. This lightweight offloading strategy is less error-prone, makes her actions more efficient, and allows her to dedicate thinking to other things.
Our brain “outsources” memory to the external environment, retrieving it back “just-in-time” only when needed. It will do this even when it takes substantial physical effort to do so.