Indian Classical Non-Fiction Texts as Cognitive Software: Reshaping Perception, Logic, Memory, and Social Behavior

This paper reconceives Indian classical non-fiction texts, notably Nyāya, Vyākaraṇa, and Dharmaśāstra, as premodern cognitive operating systems engineered to restructure human mental architecture. Far from being mere repositories of philosophical doctrine or normative guidance, these texts function as algorithmic blueprints for rewiring perception, logic, memory, and social behavior. By foregrounding their procedural and prescriptive nature, we argue that these traditions embody indigenous forms of epistemic engineering: systems that anticipate, and in some domains surpass, contemporary developments in cognitive science, AI, and neuroplasticity research. Through the lens of distributed cognition and symbolic manipulation, these texts emerge as sophisticated vehicles for mental programming, offering scalable, text-based interventions into executive function, affective regulation, and collective intelligence. This reframing collapses the conventional East-versus-West epistemological binary and proposes these works as rival or complementary paradigms to modern cognitive technologies. While theoretical convergence is strong, the next frontier lies in empirically validating these texts' real-time effects on cognition, a challenge that could revolutionize both education and machine learning by drawing on cognitive architectures developed centuries before the digital age.