In order to keep this essay short, we cannot go beyond introducing in a few, necessarily selective and cursory, sentences the term “artifact” as understood in psychology and neuroscience. An artifact is an unavoidable bias that is present during an experiment. An example would be our inability to determine the weight of a living organism with the precision usual in Physics, because the living organism continuously interacts with its surroundings, e.g. by breathing, sweating, eating and discharging, etc.; the artifact of living imposes a bias on the exactitude of measurements. Similarly, the artifact of social interactions makes it impossible to determine in a conclusive fashion, once and for all, the opinion of the general public with respect to the Punic Wars: as long as there were, are and will be historians, there will be differing opinions on the role of Hannibal. Artifacts are a fact of life and when planning experiments in social psychology, one will always try to discount them.

Among the artifacts of perception, one will have to accept the influences of optical illusions, because we cannot escape the fact that our visual apparatus does process sensory input the way it does. We can deal with neurological artifacts: we have learnt to discount the Doppler Effect; we also know that it is not the Sun rising and setting, although the fact of our stationary place on a rotating body generates this sensory impression. Once we have realized that our brain generates neurological, psychological or mental artifacts, we are ready to discount their effects and feel enlightened by not falling prey to the bias our neurology imposes on our perception and naïve thinking.

With regard to rational thinking, there is still an extended catalogue of perceptional and cognitive artifacts that need some reevaluation. The present essay will enumerate the most obvious among the cultural conventions that we have learnt to accept as axiomatic. There is no danger of insanity in contemplating the ways the human brain builds up its view of the world. We in our culture of the 21^st century smile about the resistance scientists and the general public of bygone ages have offered against ideas that went against the socio-cultural axioms of the respective ages. We can glide over the arguments against the idea that the Earth is a big globe: no one today offers the argument that the “antipodes” would fall off the Earth, if it were actually round, and so on. The ideas that appeared hair-raising of the day have made it eventually into both common-sense and scientific thinking. A fine example for accepting the formerly ‘unthinkable’ as a self-evident axiom is the discovery that children as young as newborns have a neurology and try to maximize sensual pleasures; this scandalous thought was encountering strong resistance in the cultural environment of the last years of the Monarchy.

What counts as a self-evident, rational truth is deeply dependent on the cultural environment of the day/decade/generation. The fact that a Conference is called that dedicates itself to Natural Information Technologies gives rise to the hope that our present day/decade/generation is ready to question what is the present cultural agreement on Information Technologies and in which ways would be a modification necessary and acceptable in order to make the presently orthodox view of Information Technologies to be changed and become a system of thoughts and insights that merits the name Natural Information Technologies. Working on the artifacts of perception and cognition in the domain of rational thinking could help in this endeavour.