1) Literacy 2) Numeracy 3) ?

Every so often I will write things down with a pen on paper and feel an incredible sense of joy and gratitude. Somehow there is this system whereby I can encode my thoughts into symbols, and then transfer those symbols onto a surface, and then both I and other people can later imbibe those symbols and transfer them back into thoughts. What the hell! This is incredible.

Numbers are also incredible. I tried to write some sentences about this but I couldn't figure out how. But iyknyk: numbers are rad.

I do not believe that in a million years I would have come up with either of these myself. Some previous human(s) had this incredible breakthrough that abstract concepts can be embodied in manipulable symbols, and then that system can be taught to other humans, and those humans' abilities in all kinds of spheres can be 100+x'ed as a result. Genuinely brilliant. I don't even know what to call them – cognitive technologies? They have changed my life forever, obviously, and I'm so deeply grateful for it. YOU ARE READING MY WORDS RIGHT NOW, WE ARE DOING THE THING.

Of course this leads me to wonder... are there any other things like this out there? Are there yet-uninvented or just not-yet-popularized symbolic/cognitive technologies that we might still benefit from? If you have ideas – specific or just "I think it might be this-shaped" – please let me know in the comments.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is something spacial/directional: maybe there's some better way to symbolically map space and direction that would make it easier for all of us to rotate the proverbial shapes? But I don't know what it would be, or even what shaped hole it fills.