ZK II note 9/8b 9/8b On the general structure of memories, see Ashby 1967, p. 103 . It is then important that you do not have to rely on a huge number of point-by-point accesses , but rather that you can rely on relationships between notes, i.e. references , that make more available at once than you would with a search impulse or with one thought - has fixation in mind.

Back in 1945, there was this guy, Vannevar Bush. He was working for the US government, and one of the ideas that he put forth was, 00:01:35 "Wow, humans are creating so much information, and we can't keep track of all the books that we've read or the connections between important ideas." And he had this idea called the "memex," where you could put together a personal library of all of the books and articles that you have access to. And that idea of connecting sources captured people's imaginations.

Durante años, los inventos han ampliado los poderes físicos de las personas en lugar de los poderes de su mente. Argumenta que están a la mano los instrumentos que, si se desarrollan adecuadamente, darán a la sociedad acceso y dominio sobre el conocimiento heredado de las épocas. La perfección de estos instrumentos pacíficos, sugiere, debería ser el primer objetivo de nuestros científicos.

In another fashion, Bush described a ‘memory index’ that would work ‘as wemay think’, by which, cryptically, he meant not artificial intelligence but the capabilityto retrace the paths of the reader’s thought process.

One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in adeeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is aboutoptimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to you

The article was a reworked and expanded version of Bush's essay "Mechanization and the Record" (1939).

Bush 1939 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. BushVannevar. Mechanization and the Record. Vannevar Bush Papers. Box 138, Speech Article Book File. Washington D.C. Library of Congress. 1939.

He highlights the Memex’s killer feature of associative linking and how trails of links have never been implemented in the way the Memex envisioned: It is associative indexing though, that is the essential feature of the memex, “the process of tying two items together is the important thing.” Bush describes a hypertext like mechanism at this point, but most interesting from my perspective is his emphasis on a trail as a fundamental unit — something we largely seem to have lost today. […] Documents and links we have aplenty. But where are our trails?

I’m going to assume most people in the room here have read Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay As We May Think. If you haven’t read it yet, you need to.