# Cognitive Prosthesis A cognitive prosthesis is an external structure that extends or disciplines a person's thinking rather than merely storing its results. Atomic Markdown functions as a cognitive prosthesis by forcing the writer to hold contextual and autonomous sentence realizations, their transformation, the paragraph arc, and a fidelity constraint in working memory during composition. The notation changes which formulations survive into the document. Related: [[wiki/Externalized Recursive Introspection|Externalized Recursive Introspection]], [[wiki/Constraint Satisfaction|Constraint Satisfaction]], [[wiki/Dual-Render Composition|Dual-Render Composition]], [[projects/Dual-Render Authorship and the Atomic Markdown Double-Brace Grammar|Dual-Render Authorship]].