MW #3 | Thinking Outside Your Brain-Case
Better Capturing Your Ideas, Insights from Neuroscience on Thriving, Upcoming Events of ‘Mental’ Note, and the Release of ‘Crown’ BCI from Neurosity
Welcome to Mind Whoosh! A newsletter series on thoughts, learnings, and speculations from my spelunking journey through minds, metaverse, and this messy meatspace called reality.
In this issue:
- Building a Digital Brain — Capturing fleeting thoughts before they fade away
- Sleep, Dreams, Creativity, Fasting, and Neuroplasticity — Lex Fridman’s second episode with Andrew Huberman
- Upcoming Events — Gatherings of note in NeuroTech and Cognitive Science
- New BCI on the Block — Neurosity Releases a new Brain-Computer Interface
Building a Digital Brain
Keeping track of thoughts and ideas over time is hard. If you’re like me, you’ve tried many different ways of doing this throughout your life. My success has been spotty at best. It’s non-existent, in the worst of times. Long periods or spaces of experience that we have no record of for future self-reflection.
Over the past year or so, I feel I’ve finally begun to get a handle on this problem. (Don’t worry. I’ll regret that statement next week when existential confusion strikes again.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
There are many variations on the concept when you dig down, but all of the most popular approaches these days revolve around the idea of creating a ‘second brain’ to reflect your chaotic mind. The basic ideas tend to follow a modern understanding of how our brains work. We think in concepts; the fragments are constantly rewired and interwoven to reconstruct memories and improvise new ideas.
The goal is to get the formalities of structure, categories, and hierarchy out of your way so that you can record your thoughts with minimal hesitation. Try to recall later and look directly at what you wanted to jot down; our thoughts often escape into the heat of a misty shower or a long, lonely stretch of highway. Our recall is notoriously unreliable. The fundamental problem is that humans are better at thinking than remembering things. That’s what language and writing are for; projecting our fleeting thoughts outside of our heads.
Consider this the first of multiple forays I’ll make into the topic here. If you continue down the winding rabbit hole, you’ll most certainly continue to form an entirely personal spin over time. For starters, take a look at Ali Abdaal’s video on the topic below, followed by Tiago Forte if you want a deeper dive into organizing your ideas. It’s a journey I’ve only just begun.
The Second Brain — A Life-Changing Productivity System
Notion as a Second Brain: Full Recording w/ Tiago Forte
Sleep, Dreams, Creativity, Fasting, and Neuroplasticity
Lex Fridman has managed to sit down with a brilliant cast of individuals over the years on his podcast. This conversation marks his second round with Andrew Huberman, a Neuroscience Researcher I’ve been following a lot over the past month. He’s incredible at articulating our current understanding of fundamental mechanisms in the brain. The real value here is translating them into actionable incite for the rest of us in daily life. I urge you to check this one out.
It’s highly relevant if you also:
- have slept at some point in your life
- Consume organic matter
- Often sporadically flail your limbs around while careening through time and space
As an aside, I’ll be digging into the Huberman Lab Podcast over the coming months. Andrew just started this series of topically-focused episodes, and I’m sure it will be inspiring some future posts here as well.
Upcoming Events
Neurotech Future Conference
Queen’s University, Kingston, will host a virtual conference next month, bringing together multi-disciplinary minds to discuss Ethical, Legal, and Policy Issues around brain-focused technologies.
Can Consciousness Be Fully Explained By Science?: A Debate
This group is taking a crack at the ‘Hard Problem’ of Consciousness. It’s a massive topic of debate among the Cognitive Science community, and reasonably so. Though research seems to be steadily growing in this domain, we -like Jon Snow- are still woefully vexed upon the ground truth of the matter.
This particular virtual event was rescheduled multiple times, so a growing number of RSVPs are anxiously awaiting the debate. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it happens this time!
One last update from this week:
I wanted to give a quick shoutout to the stalwart team at Neurosity. They are a founding core team of two( AJ Keller and Alex Castillo ) with a tight-knit community supporting the endeavor to build an accessible brain-computer interface with privacy and ease of use as their priority. They just announced the first consumer-grade version of their wearable device, called the “Crown.” After personally testing and providing feedback on the device’s early iterations, I’m incredibly excited to see where this new milestone takes them.
You can check out their recent post on Medium here.
Anywho, I think that’s enough for one post. I’ve got some other stuff coming down the pipe, so keep an eye out for more. If you appreciate any of the things I’ve gathered or written about here, consider sharing this with other like-minded humanauts in your circles.
Right now, the best thing you can do is to help find a larger community of people who can benefit. You can help me help you help everyone!
