Our distinctively human ways of thinking and remembering have evolved almost entirely during the past 2.5 million years. Prior to that time, our remote ancestors were, for all intents and purposes, very much like modern apes. The first major transition period in our biological evolution was approximately 2.5 to 1.8 million years ago, with the speciation of Homo. A second major transition occurred 250 to 100 thousand years ago, with the speciation of Homo sapiens. Both of these transitions brought major changes to the brain and mind, giving hominids two distinctively new modes of representation, mimesis and language, that served as the cognitive foundation for our communicative cultures. The modern human mind has additional skills that have been formed quite recently, in close symbiosis with symbolic technologies. Broadly defined, symbolic technologies encompass a variety of devices that have a direct impact on thought and memory. These technologies emerged early in human prehistory, initially taking the form of inscribed objects, tokens, amulets, mnemonic devices, pictorial representations, and simple measuring instruments. More elaborate technologies have appeared over the past five thousand years, including powerful systems of writing and numeration, timekeeping devices, navigational devices, and a number of complex cognitive artifacts and institutionalized procedures for entrenching certain habits of thought. The rate of change has steadily increased over this period, culminating in the powerful electronic technologies of the late 20th century. Each new technology has imposed new requirements on the brains that use that technology. Taken together, symbolic technologies have brought two major changes to the human cognitive process. First, there has been a constant elaboration of symbolic literacy skills, especially those needed for numerous forms of visual decoding, including writing, mathematics, graphic representation and a variety of other forms of representation. These have placed significant new demands on the human brain, in the form of new cognitive "architectures" that are difficult to acquire, and must be imposed by extensive education. Second, there has been a gradual externalization of human memory. This has changed the way we think, remember, and communicate. There is potential for even more radical change in the future. This is evident in comparing the properties of "exograms," or external memory records, with "engrams," or internal memory records. Exograms introduce changes in every aspect of memory, including what can be stored, what format it may have, and how it can be retrieved. They drastically change the potential number and size of memory records, the ways in which memory records may be organized and transmitted, and especially, how they may be displayed (the display and viewing options for our strictly "biological" memory systems are very limited). These are not trivial changes, in cognitive terms; they have altered all of the parameters by which psychology classifies and measures memory. In some cases, the changes are qualitative. Taken together, symbolic technologies have brought two major changes to the human cognitive process. First, there has been a constant elaboration of symbolic literacy skills, especially those needed for numerous forms of visual decoding, including writing, mathematics, graphic representation and a variety of other forms of representation. These have placed significant new demands on the human brain, in the form of new cognitive "architectures" that are difficult to acquire, and must be imposed by extensive education. Second, there has been a gradual externalization of human memory. This has changed the way we think, remember, and communicate. There is potential for even more radical change in the future. This is evident in comparing the properties of "exograms," or external memory records, with "engrams," or internal memory records. Exograms introduce changes in every aspect of memory, including what can be stored, what format it may have, and how it can be retrieved. They drastically change the potential number and size of memory records, the ways in which memory records may be organized and transmitted, and especially, how they may be displayed (the display and viewing options for our strictly "biological" memory systems are very limited). These are not trivial changes, in cognitive terms; they have altered all of the parameters by which psychology classifies and measures memory. In some cases, the changes are qualitative. The greatest impact of these technologies may not have been felt yet. While it is dangerous simply to extrapolate trends from our evolutionary history, it seems likely that the impact of computers and other communication technologies will be a mix of good and bad, depending on what one values. The "good" effects are fairly easy to describe: greater freedom, the democratization of information, more rapid access, more powerful forms of representation, and so on. The "bad" effects are less obvious, but potentially quite worrisome, especially to those who cling to traditional Humanistic values. These may include the disintegration of traditional culture, increased dependency on cognitive technology, and less autonomy for the individual mind. The mastery of traditional culture was a relatively simple matter, even a century ago, defined in terms of its cognitive demands. This is no longer true. External storage has dwarfed and overwhelmed individual memory. Methods of external memory retrieval are gaining even greater dominance, in relative terms, over the speed and accuracy of biological memory retrieval. The new technology of imagination--virtual reality, television, and cinema--threatens to outweigh individual imagination, and programmed corporate agendas already outstrip the individual thought process in many kinds of work. In many areas, the creative process itself is being "managed" by institutions and corporations, employing the latest technology. The trend is clearly towards technological, corporate, and institutional control over the individual mind. When these effects are mapped out against our current models of cognition, it becomes clear that they reflect structural changes in the human cognitive process itself, rather than the actions of any ideology or interest group. Therefore they are unlikely to be prevented by the actions of ideologies or interest groups. Moreover, the rate of change is completely out of line with the slower evolutionary process that led up to the modern era. The explosion of new communication technologies presents the Humanities with an extraordinary challenge: new opportunities and tools for research, many new cultural phenomena to analyse, and formidable threats to its historic values.