for - question - the brain believes what it imagines - clarify - John Churchill

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac049

Resource: (BDSC Cat# 8760,RRID:BDSC_8760)

Curator: @mpairish

SciCrunch record: RRID:BDSC_8760

What is this?

DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac308

Resource: (BDSC Cat# 37749,RRID:BDSC_37749)

Curator: @mpairish

SciCrunch record: RRID:BDSC_37749

What is this?

just like how our brain works

DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac460

Resource: Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (RRID:SCR_006457)

Curator: @mpairish

SciCrunch record: RRID:SCR_006457

What is this?

DOI: 10.1093/brain/awab409

Resource: RRID:BDSC_52384

Curator: @olekpark

SciCrunch record: RRID:BDSC_52384

What is this?

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

DOI: 10.1093/brain/awae078

Resource: Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (RRID:SCR_006457)

Curator: @bandrow

SciCrunch record: RRID:SCR_006457

What is this?

DOI: 10.1093/brain/awae018

Resource: (BDSC Cat# 8751,RRID:BDSC_8751)

Curator: @mpairish

SciCrunch record: RRID:BDSC_8751

What is this?

That is why you need a second brain.

Use obsidian.md for notetaking

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,

https://coda.io/blog/about-coda/introducing-coda-brain

DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac136

Resource: Rat Resource and Research Center (RRID:SCR_002044)

Curator: @Naa003

SciCrunch record: RRID:SCR_002044

What is this?

Illusion

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

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

2:11:00 Cognitive revolution for knowledge workers: a shift in how we perceive and treat our brains in relation to knowledge work

48:00 Huberman asking about how the phone is almost like an extension of us

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-video-saturday-june-10-2023-a-discussion-with-jerry-michalski-on-the-brain-and-tinderbox/6720

Tinderbox Meetup 2023-06-10 featuring Jerry Michalski and The Brain

https://www.braneframe.com/

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.

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?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/world-brain-wells-welles-orwell-and-the-role-of-information-in-society/

https://leanpub.com/analogbrain/c/I9hqZbLpOxa9

via https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/18ufpsr/booklet_about_analog_zk/ from u/Natural_Grocery4786 aka Juan M. Ferrera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain

H. G. Wells and the "World Brain" or "World Encyclopedia" : History of Information by Jeremy Norman

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

Wells, H. G. “The Idea of a World Encyclopedia.” Harper’s Magazine, April 1937. https://harpers.org/archive/1937/04/the-idea-of-a-world-encyclopedia/.

• 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.

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.

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

Example of the tables

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

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.]

https://www.jerrysbrain.com/

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

https://medium.com/intelliboosters/is-tiago-fortes-build-a-second-brain-still-relevant-in-the-age-of-chatgpt-b7a7c5e8637c

These articles kill me. They sit at surface level and don't delve any deeper for actual insight. And this is why these techniques are necessary. (BTW, these methods go back thousands of years... Tiago didn't invent them.)

https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/a-true-second-brain-xrODaBD2

Recommended by Michael Grossman

Gut influencing behaviour as much as brain

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

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.

• 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

https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-part-1/

Maybe come back to read this???

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-video-saturday-june-10-2023-a-discussion-with-jerry-michalski-on-the-brain-and-tinderbox/6720

• 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

• 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?

• comment
  • look for any research on this from the Russian scientists at the Human Brain Institute in St. Petersberg

Found this webpage for a 3D brain model when someone (maybe frymatic?) mentioned a region of the brain I was having trouble imagining.

(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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

Thoughts on Vulcan (Philosophy and Commentary) by Harlan (developer)

Mentioned by Jerry Michalski

google translate:

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

!- Title : How is Reality Constructed in the Brain

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.

https://fortelabs.com/blog/why-i-will-no-longer-teach-building-a-second-brain/

Tiago Forte teaching his last cohort... meh

Hypothes.is + Wiki -> Global Knowledge Graph

I came here looking for an image of the cerebellum, but found a much more helpful interactive 3d tool to understand parts of the brain.

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

Author's self-described "most intriguing result"

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

Artykuł przedstawia w głównej mierze ogólne założenia Second Brain, próbuje przedstawić je w odniesieniu do zawodu programisty. Tekst nie jest szczególnie odkrywczy.

Such as Anki

learning = alteration in long-term memory

Our memory is unable to hold 5 new concepts

https://www.theispot.com/stock/webb

I really love this piece of stock photography.

NDR. (2021, March 19). AstraZeneca: Greifswalder Forscher finden Thrombose-Ursache. /nachrichten/mecklenburg-vorpommern/AstraZeneca-Greifswalder-Forscher-finden-Thrombose-Ursache,coronavirus4660.html

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

Gollub, R. L. (2022). Brain changes after COVID revealed by imaging. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00503-x

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.

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"?

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOkniMkDPyM

L.A.T.C.H. (five ways to organize information) 1. Location 1. Alphabet 1. Time 1. Category 1. Hierarchy

from the book Information Anxiety by Richard S. Wurman

4.3 Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what “you” want.

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.

The origin of the phrase Building a Second Brain.

Is this really what our brain does best?

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

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

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"

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.

What a zinger! 😜

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.

fear hardwires memory of truamatic experiences into the brain.

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.

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

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/engage-brain-never-gonna-popular-call-action-brian-jenner/

Are there examples of people using The Brain in public as more extensive commonplace books or zettelkasten?

https://thebrain.com/

Initially came across this via Jerry Michalski who has an extensive personal mind map of over 24 years (as of fall 2021).

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.