David Kirsh

Dr. Kirsh is Professor and past chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD. He received a D. Phil. from Oxford University, did postdoctoral work at MIT (AI Lab), held research and visiting professor positions at MIT, Stanford, and the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL.
​He has written on situated and embodied cognition, how environments can be shaped to simplify/extend cognition, and how space, external representations, our bodies and even manipulable objects become interactive tools for thought.

His ideas about cognition include these propositions: (1) interacting with tools changes the way we think and perceive — tools when manipulated, are soon absorbed into the body schema, and this absorption leads to fundamental changes in the way we perceive and conceive of our environments; (2) we think with our bodies not just with our brains; (3) we know more by doing than by seeing — there are times when physically performing an activity is better than watching someone else perform the activity, even though our motor resonance system fires strongly during other person observation; (4) there are times when we literally think with things.
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He is the current President of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, past co-Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and past Adjunct Professor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.