"We’ve all heard the story of the drunk searching for his dropped keys under the lone streetlamp at night. When asked why he is looking there, when they could surely be anywhere on the street, he replies, 'Because that’s where the light is.' Could it be the same with the [brain] blobs?

Is it possible that, sometimes at least, some of the activity that enables us to be the thinking, knowing, agents that we are occurs outside the brain?"

Andy Clark wonders if, like arms or legs, our Blackberries and iPhones are developing into extensions of our brain blobs:

"It is noteworthy, for example, that the use of spontaneous gesture increases when we are actively thinking a problem through, rather than simply rehearsing a known solution. There may be more to so-called “handwaving” than meets the eye."

More:

"Perhaps we are moved simply by the thought that these devices (like prosthetic limbs) are detachable from the rest of the person? Ibn Sina Avicenna, a Persian philosopher-scientist who lived between 980 and 1037 A.D, wrote in the seventh volume of his epic 'De Anima (Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus)' that 'These bodily members are, as it were, no more than garments; which, because they have been attached to us for a long time, we think are us, or parts of us [and] the cause of this is the long period of adherence: we are accustomed to remove clothes and to throw them down, which we are entirely unaccustomed to do with our bodily members' (translation by R. Martin)."