"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." -J.K. Rowling

A couple days ago, I resurrected and wore to work a blazer that was purchased when I was in high school, if not earlier. I received several compliments, but in my mind it was still my old high school blazer. This old thing? Seriously? Not exciting, I've had it forever.

Yesterday, my iPhone fell out of my pocket and the screen completely shattered. We're talking shards of glass. And in that moment when I first set eyes on my damaged phone, my emotion matched that of the device: crushed. But that feeling passed surprisingly quickly. I was upset, but not especially concerned. Because in the end, these technological devices are easily replaced. In a world where we compete against computers in the workforce and on game shows, my iPhone-shattering experience was a gentle reminder that in the epic battle between man and machine, man has that uniqueness and irreplaceability that no mass-produced device ever will.

Not to go all "When I was your age..." on you, but I didn't have a smartphone until my senior year of college. Though I couldn't read emails milliseconds after they had been sent out or tweet about the long line at Starbucks while I stood in line, I still managed my responsibilities and personal PR quite effectively.

My life changed after I got an iPhone, mostly for the better. I say "mostly" because of my increased dependency on the device for basic information coupled with a twinge of self-doubt that had been absent before. Things like looking up definitions of words I could have easily understood using contextual clues, confirming facts of which I was already "pretty sure," or using an app to complete simple calculations.

As our existence becomes increasingly entrenched in these powerful machines, doubting our own capabilities will only get easier. If you aren't a programming nerd like my brother, you probably find the functions carried out by these technological devices to be mysteriously magical. I know I do. We might even come close to accepting them to be superior to human-power in every way. But the truth is, our brains do some pretty magical computing, every single second. Unfortunately, because most of it is unconscious and the rest is routine, we are rarely impressed. Our brain is our high school blazer, if you will.

A recent study on the psychology of human smiles suggests that there is much more to interpreting a smile than perceiving lip movement. Researchers argue that our brains actually have a three-step model for understanding the meaning behind a smile: "comparing the geometry of a person's face to a standard smile, thinking about the situation in which someone is making an expressing, judging if it's the sort where a smile would be expected, [... and] mimicking them." In assessing what to us is "just" a smile (or a fake smile), our brains do some pretty involved computations and analyses, without our even realizing it. That is mysteriously magical.

Gladwell's theories on "thinking without thinking" are another great example. In explaining how we make decisions in novel situations or evaluate new people, he writes in Blink, "Snap judgements are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience...they are also unconscious." In making in-the-moment decisions, we evaluate our beliefs, our values, our past experiences and our memories unconsciously (this is definitely explained by evolutionary psychology and the ways in which our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced adversity). When it comes to quick decision-making, our brains are computing beasts. We occasionally mess up, but...Toronto?

The feats of modern technology are earth-shattering. Nobody can deny that. But technology will only ever be as amazing as we humans make it to be. How we use it. An especially thought-provoking post-mortem on the Egyptian revolution posted by TechCrunch touches on this issue. The blogger insists, "Twitter and Facebook are indeed useful tools, but they are not tools of revolution -- at least, no more than Paul Revere's horse was. People are the tools of revolution."

Use technology to make your life easier. Use technology to amaze yourself and others. That is what it's here for. But never forget that your brain, your mind, your psyche, is the most fascinating and mysterious computer out there. As the President of my company's Global Business Division expressed to a group of technology savant-advocate-lovers last Thursday, "No matter what, nobody can ever take from you what you know." And no computer either.