Allen Newell is my spiritual PhD advisor :). I was able to get a copy of both Volumes of the Soar papers. I really hope to be able to emulate him someday.

Do you know if there is a field of study that looks at such architectures for the use of designing tooling aiding your own brain? It seems starting with and improving already existing cognition might be a good stepping stone before building something from scratch.

Not sure if this is what you mean...

Herb Simon, a collaborator with Newell at CMU, used a "memory palace" to greatly enhance recall.

I sat in on one of his courses once, a grad seminar in Cognitive Processes. He took questions for 20 minutes and then answered them in order for the rest of the lecture. They were very detailed subject matter, well over my head. I've never seen anything like it.

I was studying cog processes as an undergrad and I think I asked my professor about it and they said it was a memory palace technique.

Nope, but that’s an interesting application. Cognitive Science is a deep field, and I’ve just started scratching the surface.

There don't seem to be many people interested in cognitive architectures. Maybe we should form a club?

I’ll probably start one at CMU once the pandemic is over.

I'm working on a deep meaning NLP system that will have an API to connect with architectures such as Soar. You can sign-up to be notified of early access here: https://lxnlp.com/

asdf