Tools that enable connections between ideas and memories help to improve the growth of accumulated knowledge. These tools build a ‘knowledge graph’ that mirror the way the human brain functions and offer the possibility to query it in ways that we typically access knowledge and memories, by context and association.
Implementations typically include some form of bi-directional linking (as Zettelkasten does for linking notes together) and a graph of nodes and edges.
See also:
Links to this note
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How we think about thoughts is composed of metacognitive knowledge - our understanding of our thinking and learning, metacognitive regulation - strategies and practices that control our learning, and metacognitive experiences - thoughts and feelings while learning something.
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Org-Roam-Ui Helps You Peer into Your Brain
The org-roam-ui is a visualization and exploration companion to org-roam. The force-directed graph of notes (nodes) and links (edges) shows how concepts fit together and relate. I thought it was primarily eye candy, it’s useful for 1) spotting connections you haven’t already made and 2) identifying orphaned notes that could be linked to other notes.
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A tools for networked thought that allows the user to offload a process into something external to themselves. This augments one’s ability to do certain kinds of tasks. For example, a zettelkasten offloads the collection off ideas and their connections into ‘off-brain’ storage that can be queried later thereby removing the need to memorize and retain accumulated knowledge.
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How to Take Smart Notes (Literature Notes)
A book by Sönke Ahrens about taking notes to improve productivity and writing which is incredibly convincing but extremely impractical in describing what to actually do.
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One explanation for how creativity works is by a process called associative thinking. By linking ideas and information together in unique ways, people are able to come up with something new. This happens spontaneously (what’s the first word that pops into your head) and also in a directed way (what’s the connection between these two clues).
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The Mundaneum Was a Paper Internet
In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine built a paper internet with 18MM index cards affectionately referred to as the Mundaneum. They sought to catalog the world’s information (much like Google) but quickly ran into the physical limitations of such a thing. As more information was added, they realized the 15,000 drawers needed to hold all those index cards was never going to be enough.
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Slow Burns Prevent Blank Page Anxiety
It’s easy to be intimidated or anxious when doing something big all at once like writing an essay. Turning a large project into a ‘slow burn’ helps remove that worry—it’s easier to do small parts over a longer amount of time across several projects than in one big effort in a short amount of time sequentially.
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Open tasks occupy short-term memory until they are done. It’s distracting to have so many open tasks because it’s natural to keep thinking about them.
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List of Tools for Networked Thought
Below is a list of tools for networked thought I’ve come across:
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A fictional device from the essay As We May Think, written in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, which both stores knowledge (books, notes, annotations, conversations) and connections between them allowing someone to follow trails of associated knowledge. A memex is an example of a tools for networked thought that builds on top of existing knowledge.
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The Internet Is a Disjointed Memex
The memex device imagined a lattice of information that grows and can be built on top of incrementally. The internet and hypertext are that—nearly all the world’s information is now captured in the format of the web. However, it’s disjointed which makes it largely inaccessible.