Technologies of the Mind is a VELUX Foundation core-group, awarded the Humanities Initiative grant in 2010.

People have a unique capability to change actions, behaviour and their ways of organising. The technologies that surround us influence our perception of the world, but at the same time our ways of organising ourselves is part of a technology that influences the world we are living in. How are we going to understand the interaction between technology, practice and cognition? The project is focusing on how human thought activity exploits technology and culture and how it is influenced in return. Usually the brain is seen as a biological and ‘natural’ part of the body, that can be separated from ‘artificial’ inventions like culture and technology. As opposed to this, the project tries to understand technology as a way of using the brain and body, incorporated into practices that people develop naturally to reach different objectives. The project includes resources from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and cognitive sciences to investigate e.g. rituals, reading and writing, masquerades and physical objects.