Though conceptualization is powerful, and though the mind is capacious, and even though our ability to retrieve and cross-reference knowledge within it is remarkable, there is always more information than can be contained within its boundaries. Computer systems have had the greatest effect in this area. Databases allow for fluid reindexing and filtering of information in a way much closer to that used by the mind than the static layout of a book. Information can be recombined into new syntheses, using computers, with greater ease than any previous medium short of the mind, partly because it is easier to find needed and related information, partly because the cross-references can be established when questions are being formed, partly because the capabilities provided by the computer stimulate the modularization of knowledge into reusable components, and partly because the plasticity of the medium allows for the easy combination of previously separate media into new documents. While computer-based information technologies do not, in themselves, directly augment our brain functioning, they allow us to focus that capability within a far more enormous scope of knowledge than has ever before existed.
All language is the representation of concepts.
But for concepts to be created requires differentiation and integration by an individual human mind. Information technologies which organize provide fertile ground for new concepts to be developed - and those concepts may be more general and powerful than ever before. Cartesian coordinate systems led to graphs, and to the rectangular work area of the spreadsheet, an organization of data and formulas. Two and three-dimensional graphs led to the concepts of trend and surface. Computer graphics takes the Cartesian grid and make it possible to visualize complex fractals, a concept which itself was integrated from a vast and temporally dispersed body of work.