278 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2024
    1. Een chunk (letterlijk ‘brok’) is een verzameling elementen die sterke associaties met elkaar hebben. Samen vormen ze een betekenisvolle informatie-eenheid. Die chunks, groot of klein, gebruiken we in ons interne informatieverwerkings- en geheugensysteem. Ons brein houdt namelijk van logica en voorspelbare patronen. Het opdelen van informatie gebeurt automatisch en continu, maar kan ook bewust worden ingezet. Dat heet doel-georiënteerde chunking.Ons brein kan slechts een aantal zaken opslaan in het kortetermijngeheugen. Maar door veel gegevens te groeperen in kleinere brokjes informatie, kunnen we de limieten van ons geheugen uitdagen. En dus meer informatie verwerken en onthouden.

      Chapeau! Een Belgische website kaart dit aan in de context gezond leven.

  2. Aug 2024
    1. i try to validate the effort i make by paying attention to a specific group of people people more or less like me that do not allow themselves to open up to the introspective path unless and until they have some kind of conceptual model that validates that that introspective path if if the head doesn't allow the heart to have the experience by direct acquaintance then in those people the heart doesn't get there the brain is the bouncer of the heart

      for - recognizing true nature - validation of conceptual approach - brain is the bouncer for the heart - Bernardo Kastrup

    1. it's about concentration prioritization and drifting away and doing something different

      for - neuroscience - ideation depends on three different brain functions and brain areas - concentration - prioritization - and drifting away

      neuroscience - ideation depends on three different brain functions and brain areas - concentration<br /> - frontal area of brain - prioritization and - deep inner part of the brain - drifting away - back part of the brain

    2. what is the most brain friendly working environment in our digital in our digital working area and interestingly there are as I've shown you before there are different aspects of our way of thinking I mean we are not thinking the same way throughout the day um there are phases at the day

      for - neuroscience - optimal working environment - varies with brain state - different phases during the day - engagement - inspiration - concentration - communication - relaxation

    3. the brain is Islam Islam is it is lousy and it is selfish and still it is working yeah look around you working brains wherever you look and the reason for this is that we totally think differently than any kind of digital and computer system you know of and many Engineers from the AI field haven't figured out that massive difference that massive difference yet

      for - comparison - brain vs machine intelligence

      comparison - brain vs machine intelligence - the brain is inferior to machine in many ways - many times slower - much less accurate - network of neurons is mostly isolated in its own local environment, not connected to a global network like the internet - Yet, it is able to perform extraordinary things in spite of that - It is able to create meaning out of sensory inputs - Can we really say that a machine can do this?

    4. for - Henning Beck - neuroscientist - video - youtube - The Brain vs Artificial Intelligence

    1. for - climate crisis - psychology - wrong approach

      summary - Climate scientist professor Mojib Latif explores why our best efforts at rapid intervention to deal with the climate crisis are failing - Near the end of the program, he interviews professor Henning Beck, a neuroscientist who suggests that human brains have evolved to be rewarded for securing more. - Dopamine is released when we get more and we have not designed our intervention strategies aligned with this basic property of our brains

  3. Jul 2024
    1. The Early History of Counting is a great article focusing on how long humanity has been offloading its brain, which makes me feel way less awkward about taking so many notes and using fancy tools like calculators and LLMs. Ancient philosophers like Socrates complained about books making people lazy because of not doing oral memorization anymore, which solved into people complaining about computers. Stone Age cavemen probably complained about people offloading their number sense onto tally sticks.

      makes me think of tools that extend parts of ourselves. terms like "second brain" or "pkms"

  4. Jun 2024
    1. These connections are fuel for deep understanding.

      That is why you need a second brain.

      Use obsidian.md for notetaking

    2. To aid your attempt to process and capture information in the fast-paced environment of a lecture, you need an efficient, fill-in-the-blanks format that you can rely on to simplify the decision of how to record the results of this process. As you know, I’m fond of the Question/Evidence/Conclusion format described in Straight-A.

      E.g. <br> Q: How is Cato the Younger stoic? <br> E: He chose to commit s*icide instead of surrendering to Caesar.<br> C: Cato the Younger is disciplined and follows his principles. He'd rather die than live a degraded life <br>

      Note: I may not be right,

  5. May 2024
  6. Apr 2024
    1. It means you’re likely to parrot an opinion that isn’t yours as if you had done the work.

      Illusion

    1. Attachment theory hypothesizes that early caregiver relationships establish social–emotional developmental foundations

      It's crazy how the roots of almost every problem of ours can be found in how we were treat as children.

    1. The act of constructing an Anki card is itself nearly always a form of elaborative encoding

      The same happens when you make atomic notes in Roam or Obsidian, where you can link things. Non-linear note-taking

  7. Mar 2024
  8. Feb 2024
    1. While it can be used as a productivity tool specifically for writing, some are adapting and using it (and tools built for it) for productivity use writ-large. This includes project management or GTD (Getting Things Done) functions. Some are using it as a wiki, digital garden, or personal knowledge management system for aggregating ideas and cross linking them over time. Others are using it as a journal or diary with scheduling and calendaring functions tacked on. Still others are using it to collect facts and force the system to do spaced repetition. These additional functionalities can be great and even incredibly useful, but they’re going far beyond the purpose-fit functionality of what a zettelkasten system was originally designed to do.

      The ZK is a simple system. It isn't't a Second Brain. Nor is it GTD. Nor all the other things that people sometimes use it for. I have held this opinion for a while, and it is reassuring that Chris holds the same opinion.

  9. Jan 2024
    1. dreaming can be seen as the "default" position for the activated brain

      for - dream theory - dreaming as default state of brain

      • Dreaming can be seen as the "default" position for the activated brain
      • when it is not forced to focus on
        • physical and
        • social reality by
          • (1) external stimuli and
          • (2) the self system that reminds us of
            • who we are,
            • where we are, and
            • what the tasks are
          • that face us.

      Question - I wonder what evolutionary advantage dreaming would bestow to the first dreaming organisms? - why would a brain evolve to have a default behaviour with no outside connection? - Survival is dependent on processing outside information. There seems to be a contradiction here - I wonder what opinion Michael Levin would have on this theory?

  10. Dec 2023
    1. In his ideas for a "mental clearing house" Wells was probably influenced by "Die Brucke" and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House.
    2. Wells believed that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that "any student, in any part of the world, would be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica" (p. 54).

      This sounds a lot like Vannevar Bush's Memex, n'cest pas?

      • for: AI, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, brain gel, AI - gel computer

      • title: A general-purpose organic gel computer that learns by itself

      • author
        • Anirban Bandyopadhyay
        • Pathik Sahoo
        • et al.
      • date: Dec. 6, 2023
      • publication: IOPScience
      • DOI: 10.1088/2634-4386/ad0fec

      • ABSTRACT

        • To build energy minimized superstructures, self-assembling molecules explore astronomical options, colliding ∼10 to 9th power molecules s to power−1. -Thusfar, no computer has used it fully to optimize choices and execute advanced computational theories only by synthesizing supramolecules.
        • To realize it,
          • first, we remotely re-wrote the problem in a language that supramolecular synthesis comprehends.
          • Then, all-chemical neural network synthesizes one helical nanowire for one periodic event. These nanowires self-assemble into gel fibers mapping intricate relations between periodic events in any-data-type,
          • the output is read instantly from optical hologram.
          • Problem-wise, self-assembling layers or neural network depth is optimized to chemically simulate theories discovering invariants for learning.
          • Subsequently, synthesis alone solves classification, feature learning problems instantly with single shot training.
          • Reusable gel begins general-purpose computing that would chemically invent suitable models for problem-specific unsupervised learning. Irrespective of complexity,
            • keeping fixed computing time and power, gel promises a toxic-hardware-free world.
  11. Nov 2023
  12. Oct 2023
    1. Zettlekasten is an index card method of storing notes for future use. Popularized by Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is The Way, the Zettlekasten system has gained a lot of traction in recent years. YouTuber Greg Wheeler, in this short but very detailed video, shares how he integrates the Zettlekasten system with Tiago Forte’s second brain methodology in a complete walkthrough:

      We have now reached peak zettelkasten-I-just-don't-know-what-the-definition-even-is-anymore. And this is a Substack focused on productivity.

      The definition of zettelkasten here is the lowest possible version.

      It's (falsely, I think) described as "popularized by Ryan Holiday" who has a form of practice, but doesn't describe it as zettelkasten. (Has he ever used the word on his blog? There's one throw away mention to it and Luhmann #, Google doesn't find any others.)

      Then as a cherry on top, he presents a mélange of methods as a Hybrid PKM system.

    1. so we take two uh things that whose size we know could be our thumbs it could be oranges could be poker chips and look at them have one twice as far away as the other first thing to think about is you know as far as our brain and our

      Poker chip example really well explained at the Reality Distortion Kit at the stanford lecture

    1. And to prove it, she says, "The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same, and I'm going to prove it to you." She does this with cardboard, but since I have an expensive computer here I'll just rotate this little guy around and ... Now having seen that -- and I've seen it hundreds of times, because I use this in every talk I give -- I still can't see that they're the same size and shape, and I doubt that you can either. So what do artists do? Well, what artists do is to measure. They measure very, very carefully. And if you measure very, very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge, you'll see that those two shapes are xactly the same size. And the Talmud saw this a long time ago, saying, "We see things not as they are, but as we are." I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then,

      Example of the tables

  13. Sep 2023
    1. organizing content for action, according to the projects you are working on right now. Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect
    2. Using a “Second Brain” for our thoughts allows our “First Brain” to focus on creativity rather than getting bogged down by remembering tasks.
    1. Creating a "signpost user interface" can help to uncover directions to take in digital contexts as out of sight is out of mind. Having things sit in your way within one's note taking workflow can remind them to either link things, or move in particular directions for discovering new avenues of thought.

      Example: it would be interesting if Jerry's The Brain would have links directly to material in Flancian's Agora to remind him to search or find relevant material there. This could help with combinatorial creativity with inputs from others, though it needs to be narrow so as not to result in rabbit holes which draw away attention.

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/iQvo7l1zEe6dZ5_9d9rrVw

    2. Jerry Michalski says that The Brain provides him with a "neighborhood perspective" of ideas when he reduces the external link number for his graph down to 1.

      This is similar to Nicholas Luhmann's zettelkasten which provided neighborhoods of related notes based on distance from any particular note.

      Also similar to oral cultures who relied on movement through their environment for encoding memories and later remembering them. [I'll use the tag "environmental memory" to track this until a better name comes along.]

    1. Luhmann also described his system as his secondary memory (Zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or his reading memory or (Lesegedächtnis).

      Zweitgedächtnis, the German Word for secondary memory, might also have been translated as "second brain" and thus the root of this word in the note taking space.

      ref: https://hyp.is/hV9LKm71Eeq9s_f_oWRkEg/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

      Originally 2021-12-31 at https://hypothes.is/a/3tjzWGqjEeyDSae3OLOEWw

    1. scientists following this line of research have become increasingly convinced that to fully understand our emotions and behaviors, we need to study the gut as much as the brain.

      Gut influencing behaviour as much as brain

    2. The life inside The human gut is an amazing piece of work. Often referred to as the "second brain," it is the only organ to boast its own independent nervous system, an intricate network of 100 million neurons embedded in the gut wall. So sophisticated is this neural network that the gut continues to function even when the primary neural conduit between it and the brain, the vagus nerve, is severed. (Citing the enteric nervous system's autonomy and apparent infallibility, comedian Stephen Colbert once christened the gut "the pope of your torso.")

      Human gut as second brain — Forte, this is the real “second brain”

  14. Aug 2023
    1. We would not have it again. Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. The tractors lie about our fields; at evening

      They give up on modern society because of their ancestors but then learn to live with the world as is and make it their own. The internal fight between an environmental paradise and the usefulness of modern technology despite the strife. Sometimes it feels like you have a lack of connection to the earth that you live in compared to the technology of your day to day life. Maybe creating a connection to become better in the creation of more technology. Also I feel there is a racial standpoint or a generational trauma standpoint, but I’m tired and I will maybe look at this later if I remember.

    1. Extreme bad behaviour from governments and private companies – GAFAs [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon] and the like in China – will create a social and civic innovation to compensate and/or to contribute to an innovation jump. I hope for development of human cooperative brain networks.
      • for: quote, quote - Janet Salmons, quote - human cooperative brain networks, indyweb - support
      • quote
        • Extreme bad behaviour from governments and private companies – GAFAs [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon] and the like in China – will create a social and civic innovation to compensate and/or to contribute to an innovation jump. I hope for development of human cooperative brain networks.
      • author: Caroline Figueres
        • strategic consultant
  15. Jul 2023
    1. Has anybody or could anybody ever have   the experience of consciousness emerging?
      • question
      • has ANYONE ever experienced consciousness emerging from matter?

      • comment

        • what Spira is getting at is that there is a fundamental category confusion
          • deep down, matter is an abstract concept
          • matter is NOT a phenomenological experience
          • from this perspective, a phenomena cannot emerge from a concept
          • in fact a concept ALWAYS emerges from consciousness, not the other way around
          • the claim that consciousness emerges from brains is a fundamental category error that makes an impossible claim
            • that phenomena emerges from a concept
    1. we're beginning to demonstrate is that actually contrary to our perceptions Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died and in fact Consciousness 00:04:49 appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death
      • claim with evidence

        • Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died
        • Consciousness appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death
        • Explanation
          • death is a biological process
          • when you stop blood flow to brain cells they undergo certain changes and will eventually become damaged
          • however the first thing that happens is that you stop oxygen delivery to the areas inside the core of the brain that modulate your sense of being awake and alert
          • the reticulate activating system various other parts and so it's very similar to the effect of giving a general anesthetics to somebody
          • if you give a high enough dose of general anesthetic to a patient or person then you basically shut down those areas of the brain
          • the person's consciousness looks like it's lost
          • it flips out of sight but we wouldn't say that person's Consciousness has become annihilated forever
          • we just realize it's gone temporarily and so when people first die what's happening is that oxygen is stopping to those parts of the brain and it's essentially taking Consciousness out of you and making it disappear but it doesn't necessarily disappear Forever
      • comment

        • could this be the reason in Tibetan Buddhism, there is the Thukdam meditation practice as well as dream yoga practice?
    1. Researchers from Moscow State University and the Human Brain Institute in St. Petersburg told the Dalai Lama in May that they have examined 104 monks who are simulating meditation states thought to resemble thukdam.
      • comment
        • look for any research on this from the Russian scientists at the Human Brain Institute in St. Petersberg
  16. Jun 2023
    1. Found this webpage for a 3D brain model when someone (maybe frymatic?) mentioned a region of the brain I was having trouble imagining.

    1. (1:21:20-1:39:40) Chris Aldrich describes his hypothes.is to Zettelkasten workflow. Prevents Collector's Fallacy, still allows to collect a lot. Open Bucket vs. Closed Bucket. Aldrich mentions he uses a common place book using hypothes.is which is where all his interesting highlights and annotations go to, unfiltered, but adequately tagged. This allows him to easily find his material whenever necessary in the future. These are digital. Then the best of the best material that he's interested in and works with (in a project or writing sense?) will go into his Zettelkasten and become fully fledged. This allows to maintain a high gold to mud (signal to noise) ratio for the Zettelkasten. In addition, Aldrich mentions that his ZK is more of his own thoughts and reflections whilst the commonplace book is more of other people's thoughts.

  17. Apr 2023
    1. Much of their success can be attributed to their ability to keep viewers’ attention

      Very important, most viewers on social platforms are Goldfish Brains. They will eventually click/engage with something that captures their attention based on the graphics and keywords used in the caption or thumbnail.

    2. Some studies say the human attention span is less than that of a goldfish!

      This is a fact and I suffer from Goldfish Brain. As someone who creates content online, it is very important to factor in that my work will be views once and that's that. If I am lucky it will be viewed for more than 7 seconds.

  18. Mar 2023
    1. But 150 alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Other numbers are nested within the social brain hypothesis too. According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.
      • Paraphrase
      • 150 alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
      • Other range numbers are nested within the social brain hypothesis.
      • curiously, Dunbar recognized they were all multiples of 5.

        • the tightest circle has just 5 people (loved ones).
        • 15 (good friends),
        • 50 (friends),
        • 150 (meaningful contacts),
        • 500 (acquaintances) and
        • 1500 (people you can recognise).
      • People migrate in and out of these layers,

      • but that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.
    1. Alongside the bot’s launch on mobile, Microsoft is also integrating it into Skype. There, users will be able to speak to Bing directly or add the bot to other conversations.

      fact checking or arguments, with Skype it became a little more difficult to bullshit your way out. Just @Bing.... and factcheck a claim. My idea of using vioce transcription and correct factual claims automatically, not yet, but then again, a little scripting and this can be done.

  19. Feb 2023
    1. Der Zettelkasten weiß tendenziell immer weniger als man selbst, aber immer soviel, wie wir auf Karten geschrieben haben.

      google translate:

      The Zettelkasten always tends to know less than you do, but always as much as we have written on cards.

    1. If, on the other hand, I were to show you a brain scan taken before I believed it was going to rain, and after, there is no one in the world who could have the faintest clue what ideas these pictures were illustrating.

      They're working on it, for example, The neural architecture of language: Integrative modeling converges on predictive processing

    1. The prefrontal leukotomy procedure developed by Moniz and Lima was modified in 1936 by American neurologists Walter J. Freeman II and James W. Watts. Freeman preferred the use of the term lobotomy and therefore renamed the procedure “prefrontal lobotomy.” The American team soon developed the Freeman-Watts standard lobotomy, which laid out an exact protocol for how a leukotome (in this case, a spatula) was to be inserted and manipulated during the surgery. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now lobotomyThe use of lobotomy in the United States was resisted and criticized heavily by American neurosurgeons. However, because Freeman managed to promote the success of the surgery through the media, lobotomy became touted as a miracle procedure, capturing the attention of the public and leading to an overwhelming demand for the operation. In 1945 Freeman streamlined the procedure, replacing it with transorbital lobotomy, in which a picklike instrument was forced through the back of the eye sockets to pierce the thin bone that separates the eye sockets from the frontal lobes. The pick’s point was then inserted into the frontal lobe and used to sever connections in the brain (presumably between the prefrontal cortex and thalamus). In 1946 Freeman performed this procedure for the first time on a patient, who was subdued prior to the operation with electroshock treatment.The transorbital lobotomy procedure, which Freeman performed very quickly, sometimes in less than 10 minutes, was used on many patients with relatively minor mental disorders that Freeman believed did not warrant traditional lobotomy surgery, in which the skull itself was opened. A large proportion of such lobotomized patients exhibited reduced tension or agitation, but many also showed other effects, such as apathy, passivity, lack of initiative, poor ability to concentrate, and a generally decreased depth and intensity of their emotional response to life. Some died as a result of the procedure. However, those effects were not widely reported in the 1940s, and at that time the long-term effects were largely unknown. Because the procedure met with seemingly widespread success, Moniz was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (along with Swiss physiologist Walter Rudolf Hess). Lobotomies were performed on a wide scale during the 1940s; Freeman himself performed or supervised more than 3,500 lobotomies by the late 1960s. The practice gradually fell out of favour beginning in the mid-1950s, when antipsychotics, antidepressants, and other medications that were much more effective in treating and alleviating the distress of mentally disturbed patients came into use. Today lobotomy is rarely performed; however, shock therapy and psychosurgery (the surgical removal of specific regions of the brain) occasionally are used to treat patients whose symptoms have resisted all other treatments.

      Walter Freeman's barbaric obsession and fervent practice of the miracle cure for mental illness that is the "transorbital lobotomy"

    1. If you don't like Zettlekasten (I have my "own" version of Zettlekasten that I use so it's not 100% the original, but it's very heavily based on it - if you hate Zettlekasten this really isn't going to work). 

      https://elizabethfilips.podia.com/validation-cohort-muse

      Elizabeth Filips is running a validation cohort for a course (presumably called MUSE, the marketing name for her "system" as well) on how to take notes and build a zettelkasten (or a second brain—there's evidence that she's taken Tiago Forte's course). She's got some indications that she's using a zettelkasten-like method for creation, but her burgeoning empire also appears to be firmly centered in the productivity porn space. I'm curious how she views her Muse system being different from a zettelkasten?

      She's got an incredibly focused sales funnel web presence here.

    1. Tagging for personal knowledge management is a subject unto itself. Whilenot necessary to get started, I’ve written a free bonus chapter on tags you candownload at Buildingasecondbrain.com/bonuschapter.

      Forte's book is a pathway that acts as just another part of his sophisticated sales funnel.

  20. Jan 2023
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPqjgN-pNDw


      When did the switch in commonplace book framing did the idea of "second brain" hit? (This may be the first time I've seen it personally. Does it appear in other places?) Sift through r/commonplace books to see if there are mentions there.


      By keeping one's commonplace in an analog form, it forces a greater level of intentionality because it's harder to excerpt material by hand. Doing this requires greater work than arbitrarily excerpting almost everything digitally. Manual provides a higher bar of value and edits out the lower value material.

    1. The Compass of Zettelkasten Thinking.

      The Brain in some of its views (see for eg: Jerry Michalski's default brain view) instantiates this sort of directional semantics for ideas.

      Note too, that The Brain makes it much easier to help create connections between multiple ideas as a basic functionality.

    1. e twoareas in which the forward-forward algorithm may be superior to backpropagation are as a model oflearning in cortex and as a way of making use of very low-power analog hardware without resortingto reinforcement learning(Jabri and Flower, 1992).
  21. Nov 2022
    1. In addition to each of your commitments being somewhere you trust, I want your plans to also be somewhere you trust. So any thinking you’ve done about what you’re working on, on all sorts of different time scales, that should be written down somewhere you trust and review regularly as well. I think that’s often overlooked.

      Your second brain should offload more than just the task management. It should also contain the context of those tasks.

    1. The most intriguing result in the present study is thepositive effect of white noise on performance for theADHD children. This noise effect was present in boththe non-medicated and medicated children. Thissupports the MBA (Moderate Brain Arousal) model(Sikstro ̈m & So ̈derlund, 2007), suggesting that theendogenous (neural) noise level in children withADHD is sub-optimal. MBA accounts for the noise-enhancing phenomenon by stochastic resonance(SR). The model suggests that noise in the environ-ment introduces internal noise into the neural sys-tem through the perceptual system. Of particularimportance, the MBA model suggests that the peakof the SR curve depends on the dopamine level, sothat participants with low dopamine levels (ADHD)require more noise for optimal cognitive performancecompared to controls.

      Author's self-described "most intriguing result"

    2. The MBAmodel predicts that noise enhances memory perfor-mance for ADHD and attenuates performance forcontrols. We will also argue for a link between theeffects of noise, dopamine regulation, and cognitiveperformance.

      Prediction of Moderate Brain Arousal model and author's additional argument.

  22. Oct 2022
    1. new technologies leveraging techniques like spaced repetition mean it's much easier to remember what you learn

      Such as Anki

    2. In 2019 the UK school inspection body Ofsted went further than this and changed their definition of ”learning” itself to “an alteration in long-term memory”.

      learning = alteration in long-term memory

    3. to get faster at learning you must get more efficient at moving things into your long-term memory, i.e. stop forgetting things you learn. The less you forget the more you'll understand and the faster you'll learn.
    4. To learn more than 4 new concepts we must move some of them into our long-term memory before learning the rest.
    5. You can only understand something new if understanding it requires combining less than 4 new pieces of information.
    6. our working memory has a maximum capacity of roughly 4. When reading about quantum mechanics we encounter new Concept 1 and store it in our working memory. Then when learning about Concept 1 we encounter Concepts 2, 3, and 4 and our working memory becomes full. We then cannot understand Concept 5.

      Our memory is unable to hold 5 new concepts

  23. Sep 2022
  24. Aug 2022
    1. Anthony Costello. (2022, February 24). The risks of cognitive symptoms lasting at least 12 MONTHS were much higher in the infected group. 4.8x higher for fatigue, 3.2x for brain fog, 5.3x for poor memory, and an incredible 51x for altered taste and smell. We need data on children, but it could easily be similar. (17) https://t.co/JC1qYyW2Xc [Tweet]. @globalhlthtwit. https://twitter.com/globalhlthtwit/status/1496957266016313348

    1. ‘The Brain Has a Body’ (the title of a 1997 article) and the body has an environment – “but neither the body nor the environment feature in modelling approaches that seek to understand the brain.” The input from the world is part of the system in which brains operate.

      Body and environment are commonly ignored in modeling of the brain to understand its working. Example of sub-system / system / supra-system perception levels not being taken into account simultaneously, compare [[Triz denken in systeemniveaus 20200826114731]], and the corresponding switches wrt where the complexity is [[De locus van Complexiteit 20040513173600]]. Similar to [[Disruption Theory is Real, but Wrong 20191014111801]] where the disruption can manifest on a different level than the players in the scene being disrupted and causing the disruption.

    1. https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html

      I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks' memex demo at IndieWebCamp's Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

      I'll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of "networked commonplace books". [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

      Some of Kevin's conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski's use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don't think it's got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

      I'm also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu's experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

      MIT MediaLab's Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

      It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark's experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

      Next up, I'd love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites... Who will show us those "associative trails"?

      Another potential framing for what we're all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian's songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's dream for a "third archive"?

    1. As Tiago Forte writes in his excellent book, ‘Building a Second Brain’, “every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognising patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories”.

      This is exactly the kind of language that is driving people psychotic: that there's only 2 modes - recalling and creating. Yes, there are these 2 modes. But there are others too, the most important of which are "resting", "reflecting", and "gestating". Without these others, which we must visit in balance with recalling and creating, we will end up in a rubber room.

  25. Jul 2022
  26. Jun 2022
    1. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies ahead.

      Just as there are deficits like dyslexia in the literate world, are there those who have similar deficits relating to location in the oral world? What do these look like? What are they called specifically?

      There are definitely memory deficits withing cognitive neuropsychology. Is there a comprehensive list one could look at?

      Some people aren't as good at spatial orientation as others. Women are stereotyped as being less good at direction and direction finding.

    1. Raphael, you came up with thename of the course—and now the book.

      The origin of the phrase Building a Second Brain.

    2. so that your human,fallible, endlessly creative first brain can do what it does best.Imagine. Invent. Innovate. Create.

      Is this really what our brain does best?

      What about on evolutionary timescales? Is this what brains were meant to do?

    3. allyou’re doing is drawing on a growing library of Intermediate Packetsstored in your Second Brain.

      Intermediate Packets juxtaposed with Second Brain, it would have been better if he could have given a better analogy than intermediate packets to create some parallelism with Second Brain, alas... lack of creativity?

      Notice the importance he's giving to Intermediate Packets by artificially capitalizing it. An indication of attempt to commoditize and sell "note taking" as a product.

      link to https://hyp.is/OKlVhPBCEeyX96cojNH8rg/www.danah.org/name.html

    4. Intermediate Packets

      example of the creation of a buzz word for something not really quite necessary. It's useful to give names to things, but this is just a synonym for a note, isn't it?

      definitely not as developed as "second brain"

    5. If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowlyquiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is tellingyou, the inner voice will grow stronger. You’ll start to hear it in allkinds of situations. It will guide you in what choices to make andwhich opportunities to pursue. It will warn you away from people andsituations that aren’t right for you. It will speak up and take a standfor your convictions even when you’re afraid.I can’t think of anything more important for your creative life—andyour life in general—than learning to listen to the voice of intuitioninside. It is the source of your imagination, your confidence, and yourspontaneity

      While we have evolved a psychological apparatus that often gives us good "gut feelings" (an actual physical "second brain"), we should listen careful to them, but we should also learn to think about, analyze, and verify these feelings so we don't fall prey to potential cognitive biases.

    1. As Lane put it, it's a Personal Information Storage System (PISS).

      What a zinger! 😜

    2. Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.

      I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.

      Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.

      If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.

    1. "If you are held up at gunpoint, your brain secretes a bunch of the stress neurotransmitter norepinephrine, akin to an adrenaline rush," he said. "This changes the electrical discharge pattern in specific circuits in your emotional brain, centered in the amygdala, which in turn transitions the brain to a state of heightened arousal that facilitates memory formation, fear memory, since it's scary. This is the same process, we think, that goes awry in PTSD and makes it so you cannot forget traumatic experiences."

      fear hardwires memory of truamatic experiences into the brain.

    1. Note Sharers aka Digital Gardeners aka Second Brainers

      Example of a writer who wholly conflates "note sharers" with "digital gardners" and the "second brain" crowd.

      It's likely that these words and terminology have all become conflated due to ambiguous use.

    1. build a second brain

      Example of someone considering Building a Second Brain its "own system" rather than something from the commonplace book tradition.

    1. https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/32f9fc36-6963-9ee0-9b44-a89112919e29/attachments/6492d41a-73b2-20d8-b145-3283598c612b

      A fantastic example of an extensive mind map from Jerry Michalski using The Brain.

      There are lots of interesting links and resources, but on the whole

      How many of the nodes actually have specific notes, explicit ideas, annotations, or excerpts within them?

      Without these, it's an interesting map and provides some broad context, but removes local specific context of who Jerry is and how he explicitly thinks. One can review the overarching parts to extract what his biases may be based on availability heuristics, but in areas of conflicting ideas which have relatively equal numbers of links within a particular area, one may not be able to discern arguments from each other.

      Still a fascinating start and something not commonly seen in the broader literature.

      I'll also note that even in a small sample of one video call with Jerry sharing his screen while we talked about a broad sub-topic it's interesting to see his prior contexts as we conversed. I've only ever had similar experiences with Bill Seitz who regularly drops links to his wiki pages in this sort of way or Kevin Marks (usually in text chat contexts and less frequently in video calls/conversations) who drops links to his extensive blogging history which also serves to add his prior thoughts and contextualizations.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9dK76BqKJ4

      Jerry has been using The Brain for 24 years as of ~November 2021.

      In October 2021 he had approximately 484,000 thoughts in his graph.

      Ideas to explore: Lessons from My Brain

      We Are an Amnesic Society

      Loose guide:

      favicons indicate links to external sources

      Colors indicate

      • yellow - collections of things
      • purple - opinions
  27. May 2022
    1. Given the complexities of the brain’s structure and the functions it performs, any one of these models is surely oversimplified and ultimately wrong—at best, an approximation of some aspects of what the brain does. However, some models are less wrong than others, and consistent trends in performance across models can reveal not just which model best fits the brain but also which properties of a model underlie its fit to the brain, thus yielding critical insights that transcend what any single model can tell us.
    1. There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a SecondBrain to perform for us:1. Making our ideas concrete.2. Revealing new associations between ideas.3. Incubating our ideas over time.4. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

      Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?

    2. your Second Brain is a privateknowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning andgrowth, not just a single use case

      Based on Tiago Forte's definition of a second brain the primary distinction from a commonplace book is solely that it is digital.

      Note here that he explicitly defines a second brain as being private. Historically commonplace books were private affairs though there are examples of them being shared from person to person as well as examples that have been printed.

    3. This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain

      Tiago Forte directly equates a "digital commonplace book" with his concept of a "Second Brain" in his book Building a Second Brain.


      Why create a new "marketing term" for something that should literally be commonplace!

    4. Now, this eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you caneasily create your own personal system for knowledge management,otherwise known as a Second Brain.

      Marketing speech to convert an old idea (commonplacing) into a new siloed service one needs to pay for.

    5. Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Atria Books, 2022. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Building-a-Second-Brain/Tiago-Forte/9781982167387.

    1. what happens when you see one of these so-called pictures of the brain you've all seen these things they have red and blue and yellow and so on there's no red 00:01:21 and blue and yellow in the brain what happens is this if the pictures are not pictures of the brain they're pictures of gia the ratio of oxygenated to 00:01:35 deoxygenated blood in certain places and when neurons fire they need to be getting some oxygen back in there too so they can fire again and it turns out that they have different magnetic 00:01:49 properties if their oxygen if the blood is oxygenated or not and what you see actually is a bunch of pixels and each little pixel is actually 3 millimeters 00:02:03 by 3 millimeters by 3 millimeters 3 millimeters cubed and it goes over anywhere between one second and several seconds now if you ask how many neurons are in there the answer is about 125 00:02:17 million per pixel each neuron is connected to between a thousand and 10,000 other neurons so there are tens of billions of connections lots of circuitry in that one little 00:02:30 pixel and that picture doesn't show you what's going on in that circuitry very important you know we cannot see that we can say hey something is happening there

      Each pixel is an output from 125 million cells. It's similar to a country that votes for a president or prime minister. If you try to figure out how that leader was voted into power without analyzing all the voters, that is quite an impossible task!

  28. Apr 2022
    1. I previously shared Ivo Velitchkov’s 5-part series in Letter XXXII where he described in more detail his approach, and how he developed RIO (Roam Internal Ontology). Now, he has released the two ontologies he's developed (RIO and ROCO - ROam Core Ontology)

      It really kills me to see these types of jargon and acronyms popping up in the technology space around note taking. What do these really mean? Why should the average user care? It all feels like the sort of careless marketing and buzzwords like "second brain" or "MOC" (maps of content).