Building a second brain

there was a German sociologist – Niklas Luhman, he produced a huge body of work, spanning over 70 books and hundreds of articles over his lifetimes

how?

typically when we curate information / knowledge, we do it linearly.

force knowledge into structures and try to compartmentalise it. we do this for good reason, for easier retrieval.

this is not how our minds work though. our Brain is Fractal.

it stores information best when it connects thoughts, ideas & experiences.

that’s how we interpret the world.

think :

when we take notes, store highlights from a book, capture our thoughts into a journal.

it’s like building a second brain but outside our heads.

but our approach is contrary to how our brain actually functions.

enter Zettelkasten (German for: slip box).

over his lifetime, Niklas Luhman built his second brain in his house. how?

treat every thought, piece of knowledge as an atomic unit. written down (or typed)

this could be from a variety of sources, books, articles, imagination, podcasts.

call this a Zettel (each Zettel is just one idea, just one).

each Zettel connects to others in a web of relationships, just like the neurons in your head.

now we have all our knowledge stored in a way that our brain comprehends naturally.

Niklas use analog infrastructure to store all his zettels, from them he produced his body of work

picture an interconnected knowledge base being accessed real time.

imagine the depth and quality of such work. beauty is that it compounds, the longer he did this, the better his work became.

again, this will seem very hard at first.

but just like an anti-fragile way of life , it gets immensely liberating in the long term (i just connected this to an earlier piece i wrote 2 days back)

this blog is an attempt to create a second brain for myself

fin.