For years now, I’ve been reading about people who create a second brain to record what they want to remember. Most of these second brain systems use software, but not all. Many base their ideas on the Zettelkasten system, which was originally stored on note cards.
Over the years, I’ve tried different methods and software applications. I’m currently learning Obsidian. I’ve used note cards, notebooks, Google Docs, Evernote, OneNote, InstaPaper, Recall, and others. I love reading – taking information in – but I don’t like taking notes.
The trouble is, information goes through my brain like a sieve. When I want to tell someone about what I’ve learned, or think I’ve learned, I can’t cite my source, or, for that matter, clearly state what I think I know. And I seldom think about how I’ve come to believe what I believe.
I’m currently reading False by Joe Pierre, MD, about how we all live with delusions. This book makes me want to rededicate myself to creating a second brain for two reasons. First, I want to take precise notes on this book because it offers dozens of insights about how we deceive ourselves, and about how other people are deceived and are deceiving. Second, the book inspires me to start tracking what I think I learn every day and study where that knowledge comes from.
One of the main ways we fool ourselves is with confirmation bias. Pierre says:
In real estate, it’s said that the most important guide to follow when buying a house and trying to understand home values is “location, location, location.” If I were asked about the most important guide to understand the psychology of believing strongly in things that aren’t true, I would similarly answer, “confirmation bias, confirmation bias, confirmation bias.”
Pierre explains how the Internet, Google, AIs, Social Media, and various algorithms reinforce our natural tendency toward confirmation bias.
Pierre claims there are almost 200 defined cognitive biases. Wikipedia has a nice listing of them. Wikipedia also has an equally nice, long list of fallacies. Look at those two lists; they are what Pierre is describing in his book.
Between these two lists, there are hundreds of ways we fool ourselves. They are part of our psychology. They explain how we interact with people and reality. However, everything is magnified by polarized politics, the Internet, Social Media, and now AI.
I’d like to create a second brain that would help me become aware of my own biases and fallacies. It would have been more useful if I had started this project when I was young. And I may be too old to overcome a lifetime of delusional thinking.
I do change the way I think sometimes. For example, most of my life, I’ve believed that it was important for humanity to go to Mars. Like Elon Musk, I thought it vital that we create a backup home for our species. I no longer believe either.
Why would I even think about Mars in the first place? I got those beliefs from reading dozens of nonfiction and fictional books about Mars. Why have I changed my mind? Because I have read dozens of articles that debunk those beliefs. In other words, my ideas came from other people.
I would like to create a second brain that tracks how my beliefs develop and change. Could maintaining a second brain help reveal my biases and thinking fallacies? I don’t know, but it might.
Doing the same thing and expecting different results is a common fallacy. Most of my friends are depressed and cynical about current events. Humanity seems to be in an immense Groundhog Day loop of history. Doesn’t it seem like liberals have always wanted to escape this loop, and conservatives wanted to embrace it?
If we have innate mental systems that are consistently faulty, how do we reprogram ourselves? I know my life has been one of repeatable behaviors. Like Phil Conners, I’m looking for a way out of the loop.
Stoicism seems to be the answer in old age. Is it delusional to think enlightenment might be possible?
While watching Wicked, I struggled to recall the excitement I felt when I first read the Oz books at age 10 back in the summer of 1962. I wanted to know whether the fantasy world Wicked created matched the one L. Frank Baum created in his fourteen Oz novels.
The barrier to making this comparison is memory. Memories are highly unreliable. Plus, we overwrite our memories every time we recall them, so am I really remembering 1962, or just the last time I thought about reading the Oz books as a kid?
Like most of my brain excavations, I have to rely on logic and deduction instead. I also look for corroborating evidence. I spent many days on this problem, and here are my results.
The Oz books were the first novels I discovered on my own. For various reasons, I concluded this was the summer between the 5th and 6th grades. My family lived on base at Homestead Air Force Base, and I found the Oz books in the children’s wing of the base library. They were old and worn.
The first novel I remember is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which my mother read to me in the third grade. I started using libraries in the fourth grade, but read nonfiction books about airplanes, space travel, cars, and animals.
I remember roaming up and down the fiction section at the base library and discovering the Oz books. I had no idea who L. Frank Baum was, nor did I have any idea when they were written. I didn’t know about copyright pages or genres. I saw “Oz” on the spines and connected those books to the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, which I had seen on television every year since the 1950s.
I did not know the word fantasy. I doubt I understood the concept of fiction. In other words, these books were an exciting discovery. To compound that excitement, they were all set in the same fictional universe. They were my Harry Potter books. L. Frank Baum had tremendous world-building skills.
Analytically, I know that at ten, I didn’t know much about the world. My vocabulary was limited. And I was unaware of most concepts and abstractions. My previous beliefs in fantasy – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy had caused me great embarrassment in first grade when a girl called me a baby for mentioning them. I was five, she was six.
In other words, I knew Oz did not exist, even though Baum created so many wonderful details to make it believable. I remember wanting Oz to exist, but I knew it didn’t. I don’t think I grasped the idea of fantasy at that time. All I knew was that the books created an artificial reality in my mind that was mesmerizing.
Watching Wicked and then rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz this week let me compare the two versions of Oz, but I couldn’t compare my initial reactions. Wicked is quite colorful, creative, and contains many elements of the original stories, but it no longer worked on me as the Oz books had in 1962. And that’s to be expected, since I’m 74, long past the age for fairytales.
My quest changed. I now wanted to know how my ten-year-old self saw the world. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gave me very few clues.
My contemplations led me to some ideas, though. I have damn few memories of life before age five. I have zillions of memories dating from age five to twelve. I started thinking about them, and a revelation came to me.
Before age five, I theorize our minds are like LLMs (large language models). Those AIs can take in information and react to it, but they are unaware of the world. After five, but before puberty, we develop some self-awareness, but it’s very limiting. It isn’t until around twelve or thirteen that we start thinking for ourselves.
Here’s my main bit of evidence. As a child, my mother told me about God and took my sister and me to Sunday School and church. I just accepted what I was told. But when I was twelve, I started thinking about what they were telling me about religion. I didn’t buy it. I considered myself an atheist by 1964, when I was thirteen, maybe fourteen.
In my thirties, when I was working in a library, I came across an article that said that some librarians in the 1950s felt the Oz books gave children unrealistic expectations about life, and pulled the books from their shelves.
When I read that, I knew it had been true for me. The Oz books led me to science fiction, a genre that also inspired unrealistic expectations regarding the future that have proven to be unrealistic.
Here’s the thing: I was being told two fantasies at age ten. The first was from The Bible, and the second from the Oz books. Looking back, I see that my young self began to reject religion at age ten because I preferred the stories from L. Frank Baum. I wasn’t aware that I was comparing two fantasies; I just preferred one over the other.
Then I discovered science fiction. Concurrently, I was also discovering science. That gave me the illusion that science fiction was reality-based. When I consciously rejected religion, I thought I was choosing science. However, in recent decades, I’ve realized I had substituted science-fictional fantasies for religious fantasies.
I realize now that the Oz books had the power of Bible stories on me at age ten. The reason why so many people are true believers as adults is that they were programmed as children. Wicked doesn’t have that kind of power over me today. I can’t remember what that power felt like, but I do remember that for a few weeks in 1962, the ideas in the Oz books set my mind on fire. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz did not reignite that fire because I’m no longer a believer in anything.
I’ve often wondered if I hadn’t been lied to about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and thus had not experienced humiliation at discovering they were lies, and if I also hadn’t discovered Oz books, would I have accepted the Bible stories as truth as a kid and believed them now?
I used to keep up with the world by watching NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reading The New York Times on my iPhone, and bingeing YouTube videos. I felt well-informed. That was an illusion.
I then switched to reading The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. I focused on the longer articles and developed the habit of reading one significant essay a day. That has taught me how superficial my previous methods were at informing me about what’s going on around the world. Television, the internet, and newspapers were giving me soundbites, while articles provide an education.
However, I still tend to forget this deeper knowledge just as quickly. I don’t like that. I feel like I learn something significant every day. What I’m learning feels heavy and philosophical. However, it drives me nuts that I forget everything so quickly. And I’m not talking about dementia. I think we all forget quickly. Just remember how hard it was to prepare for tests back in school.
I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about study methods, and they all show that if you don’t put information to use, it goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve decided to start reading with a purpose.
At first, I thought I would just save the best articles and refer to them when I wanted to remember. That didn’t work. I quickly forget where I read something. Besides, that approach doesn’t apply any reinforcing methods.
I then thought about writing a blog post for each article. It turns out it takes about a day to do that. And I still forget. I needed something simpler.
Recall allows me to save this into a structure. But again, this is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If I were writing an essay or book, this would be a great tool for gathering research.
Recall is also great for understanding what I read. Helpful with quick rereading.
This morning, I got a new idea to try. What if I’m trying to remember too much? What if I narrowed down what I wanted to remember to something specific?
Within today’s article, the author used the term “climate gentrification” referring to neighborhoods being bought up because they were safer from climate change, and thus displacing poor people. The article mentions Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in Miami, with a slightly higher elevation, bought up by developers moving away from low-lying beachfront development.
I think I can remember that concept, climate gentrification. What if I only worked on remembering specific concepts? This got me thinking. I could collect concepts. As my collection grew, I could develop a classification system. A taxonomy of problems that humanity faces. Maybe a Dewey Decimal system of things to know.
I use a note-taking system called Obsidian. It uses hyperlinks to connect your notes, creating relationships between ideas. I could create a vault for collecting concepts. Each time I come across a new concept, I’d enter it into Obsidian, along with a citation where I found it. That might not be too much work.
I picked several phrases I want to remember and study:
Climate gentrification
Heat islands
Climate dead zones
Insurance market collapse
Climate change acceleration
Economic no-go zones
Corporate takeover of public services
Climate change inequality
Histofuturism
Sacrifice zones
Corporate feudalism
Contemplating this list made me realize that remembering where I read about each concept will take too much work. I have a browser extension, Readwell Reader, that lets me save the content of a web page. I could save every article I want to remember into a folder and then use a program to search for the concept words I remember to find them.
I just did a web search on “climate gentrification” and found it’s already in wide use. I then searched for “corporate feudalism,” and found quite a bit on it too. This suggests I’m onto something. That instead of trying to remember specifically what I read and where, I focus on specific emerging concepts.
Searching on “histofuturism” brought up another article at The Atlantic that references Octavia Butler: “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.” Today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II is also built around Octavia Butler. This complicates my plan. It makes me want to research the evolution of the concept, which could be very time-consuming.
The point of focusing on key concepts from my reading is to give my reading purpose that will help me remember. But there might be more to it. Concepts are being identified all the time. And they spread. They really don’t become useful until they enter the vernacular. Until a majority of people use a phrase like “climate gentrification,” the reality it points to isn’t visible.
That realization reinforces my hunch to focus on concepts rather than details in my reading. Maybe reading isn’t about specific facts, but about spreading concepts?
If you don’t know what aphantasia or hyperphantasia then you should read “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.” by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall, so I’m going to reiterate the high points to encourage you to find a copy. I highly recommend subscribing to the magazine or Apple News+.
The article is about a condition called aphantasia, one that I have. I wrote about that when I first discovered it in 2016. This new article by MacFarquhar describes the condition and its discovery in much greater depth than I have previously read. It also describes the opposite of this condition, hyperphantasia.
If you don’t know what aphantasia and hyperphantasia are, then you need to read this article if you have a certain kind of mindset such as artist or scientist, have trouble remembering the past, have difficulty recognizing faces, feel disconnected from your self, think you might be autistic, and many other personality traits that make you wonder if you’re different.
Aphantasia is the inability to remember mental images. Most people can close their eyes and recall a scene from their life. The face of a loved one, their desktop at work, the home they lived in as a child. About 2-3 percent of people can’t. But it turns out there all many degrees of not being able to see mental images, including some people who are overwhelmed with mental imagery. That condition is called hyperphantasia.
This article taught me a great deal about this condition I didn’t know. From my previous readings, I simplistically thought aphantasia meant one thing, but it’s not. For many people with the condition, they can’t remember their own past. I can. In fact, I’m obsessed with my past. I was particularly impressed what aphantasia did to artists and scientists.
I’m not like the extreme members of The Aphantasia Network or the people interviewed in the book Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle. That’s comforting, but I still miss mental memories. Yet, I’m lucky. Some people have aphantasia so severe they can’t remember anything about their past, and they feel like living corpses.
For most of my life, I assumed everyone perceived reality pretty much the same if all their sense organs were healthy. Of course, I knew some people had better sight or hearing than others, but I assumed what we perceive was the same reality. That’s because I naively thought we observed reality directly.
I now know we don’t. Our senses are used to construct a model of reality inside our heads. And we all model reality differently. This is called our Umwelt. I highly recommend reading An Immense World by Ed Yong if you want to learn more about that.
MacFarquhar’s article explores how the ability to recall mental images affects our personality, memory, sense of self, and our Umwelt. When I first learned that I lacked the common ability to consciously recall mental images, I felt deprived. Some call it mental blindness. MacFarquhar suggests I would be a different person if I had what I missed. More than that, aphantasia affects people in various ways, and I could have been very different in other ways.
MacFarquhar begins her article by profiling Nick Wakins. He thought he was normal, but couldn’t understand why other people could remember their past and he couldn’t. He abstractly knew about his earlier life from what people told him and photographs. He started researching his condition and discovered that some 19th century scientists had discovered people like him. Then in the 1970s, psychologists again explored visual memory, but it didn’t go far.
In 2010 Adam Zeman and colleagues published research in Neuropsychologie about “blind imagination.” The journalist Carl Zimmer wrote an article for Discover magazine. That caused dozens of people recognizing the condition in themselves to contact Zeman. Zeman coined the term aphantasia with the help of a friend, and published “Lives without imagery–Cogential aphantasia” in Cortex in 2015.
That inspired an article in The New York Times and Zeman got around seventeen thousand emails. It was around this time that I heard about it and wrote my blog piece.
Zeman was now hearing about many related conditions that people claiming to have aphantasia experience. Since 2015 a tremendous wealth of research has gone into this topic, information I didn’t know about. Larissa MacFarquhar does a fantastic job of catching me up.
This article is as exciting as anything Oliver Sacks wrote about. He also had aphantasia. And it’s more than just visual memories. It also relates to being remember sound, smells, tastes, and touches.
We all peceive the world tremendously different.
Nick Wakins thought he was absolutely normal until he uncovered this research. Nick has a PhD. He didn’t know what he was missing until he researched how other people peceived. We seldom compare notes like that.
Melinda Utal had an extreme case of no past memory that is very sad:
One of Kendle’s interviewees was Melinda Utal, a hypnotherapist and a freelance writer from California. She had trouble recognizing people, including people she knew pretty well, so she tended to avoid social situations where she might hurt someone’s feelings. When she first discovered that she was aphantasic, she called her father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and living in a nursing home in Oregon. He had been a musician in big bands—he had toured with Bob Hope and played with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. She asked him whether he could imagine a scene in his head, and he said, Of course. I can imagine going into a concert hall. I see the wood on the walls, I see the seats, I know I’m going to sit at the back, because that’s where you get the best sound. I can see the orchestra playing a symphony, I can hear all the different instruments, and I can stop it and go backward to wherever I want it to start up and hear it again. She explained to her father what aphantasia was, how she couldn’t see images in her mind, or hear music, either. On the phone, her father started to cry. He said, But, Melinda, that’s what makes us human.
Melinda had an extremely bad memory for her life, even for an aphantasic. She once had herself checked for dementia, but the doctor found nothing wrong. She had become aware when she was in second grade that she had a bad memory, after a friend pointed it out. In an effort to hold on to her memories, she started keeping a journal in elementary school, recording what she did almost every single day, and continued this practice for decades. When, in her sixties, she got divorced and moved into an apartment by herself, she thought it would be a good time to look through her journals and revisit her younger days. She opened one and began to sob because, to her horror, the words she had written meant nothing to her. The journals were useless. She read about things she had done and it was as though they had happened to someone else.
MacFarquhar profiles many people for her long article, but I was particularly taken by two artists she interviewed. Sheri Paisley had aphantasia:
Among the e-mails that Zeman received, there were, to his surprise, several from aphantasic professional artists. One of these was Sheri Paisley (at the time, Sheri Bakes), a painter in her forties who lived in Vancouver. When Sheri was young, she’d had imagery so vivid that she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing it from what was real. She painted intricate likenesses of people and animals; portraiture attracted her because she was interested in psychology. Then, when she was twenty-nine, she had a stroke, and lost her imagery altogether.
To her, the loss of imagery was a catastrophe. She felt as though her mind were a library that had burned down. She no longer saw herself as a person. Gradually, as she recovered from her stroke, she made her way back to painting, working very slowly. She switched from acrylic paints to oils because acrylics dried too fast. She found that her art had drastically changed. She no longer wanted to paint figuratively; she painted abstractions that looked like galaxies seen through a space telescope. She lost interest in psychology—she wanted to connect to the foundations of the universe.
On the other hand, Clare Dudeney had hyperphantasia.
In talking to a friend of hers, an aphantasic painter who was one of Zeman’s research subjects, Clare had realized that she was the opposite—hyperphantasic. Her imagery was extraordinarily vivid. There was always so much going on inside her head, her mind skittering and careening about, that it was difficult to focus on what or who was actually in front of her. There were so many pictures and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn’t sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans, a relentless flood of images and ideas continuously coursing through her mind. It was hard to get to sleep.
At one point, in an effort to slow the flood, she tried meditation. She went on a ten-day silent retreat, but she disliked it so much—too many rules, getting up far too early—that she rebelled. While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.
An interesting aspect of new research is showing that some people have aphantasia since birth, but others acquire it later in life, often due to a physical injury. Other reseach suggests that visual memory is better in children and women, and that many children might have hyperphantasia. I believe I did see mental images when I was young. And other studies suggest that taking drugs brings back the ability to create mental imagery. I can testify to that. I used to get great flashes of imagery when I got high. Other studies show that people repress the ability to create mental imagery because of psychological trauma. All of this makes me wonder if I could retrain myself to create mental pictures in my head.
It is quite common for people with aphantasia to dream with vivid imagery, although others claim their dreams are thin and dark. As I’ve gotten older, my dreams have become dark and shadowy. However, the other night I had a dream that was intensely vivid, bright, and colorful. I was even aware in the dream to a slight degree. I said to myself that I was in a dream and I couldn’t believe it was so damn real. It felt so real that I was afraid I couldn’t get back to my old life. I was on a street looking at buildings I didn’t know, and was worried that if I became stuck in the dream I wouldn’t know where to go. I was quite relieved to wake up.
Scientists who are very good at thinking abstractly often forget how to create mental imagery. And some even theorize that spending so much time reading and staring at words have ruined our capacity to create mental pictures.
At first I envied people with hyperphantasia until I read this:
Hyperphantasia often seemed to function as an emotional amplifier in mental illness—heightening hypomania, worsening depression, causing intrusive traumatic imagery in P.T.S.D. to be more realistic and disturbing. Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, began interviewing hyperphantasics in 2021 and found that many of them had a fantasy world that they could enter at will. But they were also prone to what she called maladaptive daydreaming. They might become so absorbed while on a walk that they would wander, not noticing their surroundings, and get lost. It was difficult for them to control their imaginations: once they pictured something, it was hard to get rid of it. It was so easy for hyperphantasics to imagine scenes as lifelike as reality that they could later become unsure what had actually happened and what had not.
I believe I’ve copied as much of this article as I ethically should.
I’m using this blog to encourage you to go read the article. I’m also encourage people to subscribe to magazines. If you want good information it costs. We need to get away from always assume information should be free. Free information on the web is corrupting our society. Subscribing to magazines supports the spread of better information.
My new effort at home schooling myself is to read one great article a day from magazines with solid editors. I look for articles that expand my mental map of the world. This one certainly has.
It wasn’t until I couldn’t talk to my old friend that I became truly puzzled about a recent piece of advice. I lost Connell, someone I’ve known for 58 years, last April. I keep wanting to talk to him, but he’s no longer there to hear me.
My social media algorithms keep sending me various kinds of warnings about dealing with life in my seventies. A recent video told me people would stop listening to me. And, if I were a parent, I shouldn’t be shocked if my children stopped listening to me, too. What did that mean?
At first, I didn’t think that advice applied to me because I don’t have children, and I have lots of friends. I wasn’t even sure what they were talking about. I wondered if it was similar to how some of my older female friends talk about how men no longer look at them. Does becoming old make what we have to say unworthy of hearing?
I’ve always assumed I would be ignored when I got old. I remember when we were young, we’d say, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Now I don’t trust anyone under sixty. Was the advice about that kind of age prejudice? Actually, moving into my seventies makes me distrust everyone of all ages.
The video said people would stop listening to you once you got into your seventies. What do I have to say that people would no longer care to hear? And why was it a warning? Were they talking about loneliness? And who wouldn’t be listening? And does that include me? Will I stop wanting to listen to other people?
Many of my family and friends became quiet as they got older. Did they say less because they no longer cared what other people had to say and stopped listening, too?
I often want to talk to people who have died. They can’t listen anymore. Is my desire to communicate with them revealing why I want people to listen to me? And what do I have to say that will make me feel bad if it’s not heard?
Mostly, we chit-chat in life. We find damn few people to converse with on a deep level. Was that what the warning was about? Was the warning suggesting that meaningful conversations will disappear?
As I get older, I feel I’m withdrawing from the world. Maybe the warning is suggesting that as everyone withdraws, we’ll stop talking to each other?
I remember an acid trip I had back in the sixties. I took a hit that I didn’t know was a four-way hit, and got rather high. I lost my sense of self. I felt every person dwelt in their own island universe. And that real communication wasn’t possible, and the best we could do was like tossing a message in a bottle onto the ocean, hoping someone would find and read it. I sometimes feel that getting older will be like that. Was that the warning?
Do we have a need to be heard that goes unfulfilled as we age?
Maybe someone older can clarify what that warning meant. Leave a comment.
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how many people do listen to me. Oh sure, I converse with friends all the time. But that’s chit-chat. I have a few friends with whom I believe we resonate on the same wavelength. Was the warning telling me that those people will disappear in my seventies? That is a depressing thought.
I have one last theory. The older I get, the less energy I have to express myself. So I don’t make the effort. Maybe, if we don’t make the effort to send, we stop making the effort to receive.
Auxiliary Memory 