But cognitive tools transformed us from a band of surviving clans to a true civilization.

FORBES: Things That Make Us Smart

These cognitive tools are so essential to civilization, that we send our children to school for decades.

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Tenenbaum's research aims to define and describe these cognitive tools, and build mathematical models to imitate them.

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My approach to unraveling this mystery has been to probe the minds of both the vulnerable and the resilient with the traditional tools of cognitive psychology.

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So, good list, Forbes, but you left out the most important tools of all, the cognitive artifacts that have truly made us smart: writing and notational systems, objects of travel and information technology, which really picked up somewhere around the development of the telegraph, but could be argued to have developed earlier with the wide variety of signaling systems.

FORBES: Magazine Article