I had to admit that once again my attempts to disrupt thinking with a technology of note-taking had only resulted in an enormous, useless accumulation of busywork.

Seeing the shape of your ideas is not the same as having new ideas. Creating a too-comprehensive portrait of your own thoughts can amount to locking yourself into a labyrinth of your own preconceptions

If a thought is to be placed in the Zettelkasten, first consider which topic it fits to. Then this topic must be sifted through, after which a note can be incorporated - be it as a new “initial note”, as a continuation or as a branching off of a note

Links or references do not emphasize the relationship between notes (ideas, content). The context of connections usually remains unclear due to arbitrary relationships. Folgezettel, however, create specific relationships – adding manual links (references) to these relationships create relationship of relationships, the core aspect of Luhmann’s working principle

Is it possible to design a new medium which much more actively supports memorization? That is, the medium would build in (and, ideally, make almost effortless) the key steps involved in memory

it’s difficult not to be disappointed, to feel that computers have not yet been nearly as transformative as far older tools for thought, such as language and writing.

A recommendation engine for reading that could reliably supply enjoyable inceptive experiences would be a marvel.

It goes without saying that looking for incepting (or just highly extending) material is a high-risk strategy. It’ll be topics you’re not already interested in so you won’t know if you could be, and you won’t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff either.

In short, to collect connections without an explicit intention, captured meaning, or statement of relevance is not knowledge production, and as a habit, it is even counter-productive: You make shallowness of work a habit and lower your skill as a creative knowledge worker in consequence.

Luhmann stated that working with the Zettelkasten consumed most of his time, not the actual book writing. That gives us a hint, that it is the manic work with the Zettelkasten that results in such a high productivity.

If I use tags for topics I would tag everything that is relevant for the topic of diet with #diet. A note about carbohydrate intake and insulin sensitivity would definitely fulfill this criterion. If I use tags for objects, I would only tag notes with #diet when these notes are specifically on the concept of dieting. I would not tag the note on insulin sensitivity with #diet.

“See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling, and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people: what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.”

Survived & Punished (S&P) is a national coalition that  includes survivors, organizers, victim advocates, legal advocates and attorneys, policy experts, scholars, and currently and formerly incarcerated people. S&P organizes to de-criminalize efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations

Beyond cognitive biases and preconceived opinions, common sense is based on linear thinking. “I experience A, therefore I can directly explain it by B.”

Networked thinking is an explorative approach to problem-solving, whose aim is to consider the complex interactions between nodes and connections in a given problem space. Instead of considering a particular problem in isolation to discover a pre-existing solution, networked thinking encourages non-linear, second-order reflection in order to let a new idea emerge.

these systems can feel like ”a toddler with a photographic memory

Personality traits are understood as patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour that are relatively enduring across an individual’s life span.

Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism (sometimes named by its polar opposite, Emotional Stability), and Openness to Experience (sometimes named Intellect).

Since 1998, the American Psychiatric Association has opposed any psychiatric treatment, such as "reparative" or conversion therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or that a patient should change his/her homosexual orientation

POSITION: 1. APA reaffirms its recommendation that ethical practitioners refrain from attempts to change individuals’ sexual orientation. 2. APA recommends that ethical practitioners respect the identities for those with diverse gender expressions.

In order to determine if a person's left or right hemisphere is more important for their language production, physicians use things like the WADA test, in which a barbiturate is injected into one hemisphere to temporarily shut it down, allowing the physician to see what each hemisphere can do on its own.

Processing within each hemisphere relies on a rich, dense network of connections. The corpus callosum that connects the hemispheres is big for a fiber tract, but it is tiny compared to the network of connections within each hemisphere. Physically, then, it doesn't seem feasible for the hemispheres to fully share information or to operate in a fully unified fashion.

both hemispheres can figure out the meaning of words and sentences – and that they have differing strengths and weaknesses when it comes to comprehending.

Research shows that, overall, the abilities that make up math skills arise from processing that takes place in BOTH hemispheres (especially the brain area in each hemisphere that is known as the intraparietal sulcus) and that damage to either hemisphere can cause difficulties with math. A left hemisphere advantage for math is mostly seen for tasks like counting and reciting multiplication tables, which rely heavily on memorized verbal information (thus, not exactly what we think of as "logical"!). And there are right hemisphere advantages on some math-related tasks as well, especially estimating the quantity of a set of objects. This kind of pattern, in which both hemispheres of the brain make critical contributions, holds for most types of cognitive skills.

, Brittan (1989Brittan, Arthur. 1989. Masculinity and Power. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [Google Scholar]) coined the term masculinism to distinguish between masculinity and the ideology that upholds male domination. As Brittan (1989Brittan, Arthur. 1989. Masculinity and Power. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [Google Scholar], 4) argued: ‘Those people who speak of masculinity as an essence, as an inborn characteristic, are confusing masculinity with masculinism, the masculine ideology. Masculinism is the ideology that justifies and naturalizes male domination.’ As Whitehead (2002Whitehead, Stephen M. 2002. Men and Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar], 98) has argued, masculinism can also be thought of as ‘a dominant discourse rather than a dominant ideology.’ For boys, then, the question is not whether to take on a typical male sex role, but rather how to position themselves according to the masculine discourses available to them.

Questions also make good note titles because that position creates pressure to make the question get to the core of the matter