These days I think a lot about thinking, and I'm often reminded about something CGP Grey said many years ago:
The single thing that changed me the most was keeping a paper notebook and writing down my thoughts and simply looking back at that notebook on a regular basis... it's so simple but it comes down to increasing communication between past, present, and future you. That's what helps you direct change in yourself over time.
This quote has really stuck with me over the years and hopefully I can adequately explain why.
The Matter of the Mind
The brain is a miraculous and wondrous thing, but however fantastical its capacity, it has never been possible to keep everything we experience, know, understand, or wish to remember in our heads at once. Hence, we record such things outside of our brains if we wish to someday recall them. We use calendars, notebooks (and books in general), videos, memes, smart phones, sharpie-covered-forearms, and all manner of other non-brain spaces to jot down and persist our ever-fleeting thoughts. The brain's space is very limited, especially given the demands of our modern world, and while it is fast to recall information (usually) it is easily overwhelmed and must depend on more durable forms of memory for concrete details or in-depth analysis.
Sounds a lot like computer memory, doesn't it?
Well, the analogy goes deeper! Indeed, if one needs to add more system memory to a computer, we add more RAM: a slower, yet more expansive pool of memory. When this overflows, we can swap to disk or write files which we later come back to. The same is true—almost literally and by design—in ourselves.
Where the Mind Resides
The question of where precisely does our mind reside?
has dogged humanity for millenia, but if one takes the idea that the mind is able to be comprised of things outside the body then it only makes sense that our smartphones, notebooks, and other physical media we interact with are a core part of our own minds. These media are slower to recall information from and require constant upkeep to avoid losing, degrading, or fragmenting—but so do all forms of computer memory and storage. Notebooks must be constantly upkept to stay relevant, digital files backed up and properly organized, and books must be catalogued and their core tenants bookmarked, dog-earred, or otherwise recorded for later reference.
Thinking of the world in this way, even other people become a form of our own minds: we share information with others who later remind us of what we said. It's an incredibly lossy and error-prone medium, but it is an important one and perhaps the oldest form we know.
When thinking of the world in this way, the idea that one wouldn't want to keep notes, organize files, record memories, take pictures, and scrawl every meaningful thought on whatever was around to record it seems strange to me. By choosing not to record one's thoughts, one chooses to succumb to a natural form of memory loss: the default form of human dementia.
Obviously not everything is important or worth recording and one cannot always know in advance what will turn out to be important later, but if it feels important or insightful, write it down. Then, critically, come back to it later. That last step is important, because information lost or unread is just a scribble of ink on the pressed pulp of trees.
