Working Outside Your Brain
This article introduces a new series on creativity and the extended mind: how we use tools, our body, and the world around us to enhance the capacity of our brain and create in ways the mind can’t manage on its own. In this series I’ll be writing about note-taking, personal knowledge management systems, thinking with your body, and more.
An Explosion of Note-Taking Apps and Notes
The note-taking* app category is exploding, with a seemingly endless stream of new entrants**. Perhaps you’ve heard of, or use one of these new note-taking tools: Notion, Roam, or Coda? For over a decade, the note-taking category was dominated by Microsoft OneNote (launched in 2003) and Evernote (launched in 2008). While both tools are still widely used, their approach to note-taking feels dated (even though Microsoft and Evernote are actively refreshing their apps). In a world of networked content, hyperlinks, and new graphically rich ways of presenting information, the traditional hierarchical approach to organizing content doesn’t resonate the way it used to. Note-taking is no longer a one-size fits all category.
Venture capital has been flowing into the segment over the last two years. Notion, the most established new player in the category, has raised over $62M over six rounds on a valuation of over $2B. Roam raised $9M in 2020 on a market valuation of over $200M. Newcomer Mem just raised $5.6M from the investment firm Andresseen Horowitz. Other new and popular note-taking apps include Agenda, Bear, Craft, Dendron, and Obsidian—and there are many, many more. Some of these are being developed by privately held companies, others are in the early stages of raising capital. Venture capital firms invest because they believe there’s the potential for a substantial return. Why do they think there’s a potential payoff from note-taking apps?
Five factors are driving the growth in the note-taking app category:
The Internet-enabled information explosion that’s continually increasing the volume, speed, and diversity of the information we contend with daily.
Our increasing reliance on digital information and communication technologies in our personal and work lives (a trend that’s been accelerated by COVID and the nearly instant transition to wide-spread remote work).
The increasing support in the major computing platforms and information services for sophisticated information interchange and data sharing.
The introduction of no-code “programming” tools (like Notion and Coda) that make it easier than ever to design, build, and share interactive, information-rich documents.
The growth of the creator economy that presents us with new opportunities to express ourselves and connect with others who are sharing their work in our areas of interest.
Together, these forces are creating enormous pressure on us to learn how to work outside our brains. Our brains are being pushed to their limits—and beyond:
What we’re coming up against are universal limits, constraints on the biological brain that are shared by every human on the planet. Despite the hype, our mental endowment is not boundlessly powerful or endlessly plastic. The brain has firm limits—on its ability to remember, its capacity to pay attention, its facility with abstract and nonintuitive concepts—and the culture we have created for ourselves now regularly exceeds these limits.
—Annie Murphy Paul, “How to Think Outside Your Brain.” The New York Times, June 11, 2021.
In fact, recent research suggests the steady gains in average I.Q. scores recorded during the 20th century may be leveling off. The neuroscientist Peter Reiner and his student Nicholas Fritz write in the journal Nature that it’s possible “our brains are already working at near-optimal capacity.” Some suggest drugs and device implants will help us overcome the limits of our brains. These invasive strategies may pay off, but there are other, less dramatic ways of enhancing your cognitive capacities.
The Extended Mind
In 1995, two English philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, wrote a paper titled “The Extended Mind” that opened what seems like a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” The traditional answer is that the mind is contained in your head, but it turns out that we’re much cleverer than we give ourselves credit for. The brain takes elements of the world around beyond the skull and skin and uses those elements to extend itself—to think in ways the brain cannot manage on its own. Clark and Chalmers called these non-traditional forms of thinking the “extended mind.”
Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain explores the ways we use the world around us to “shift mental work onto the world around us and to supplement our limited neural resources with extraneural ones.” She identifies four categories of mind extensions:
Tools: The physical tools and digital technologies we develop to offload information, extend our sensory perceptions, and amplify our mental powers.
The Body: The gestures that help us express our ideas, and the sensations that alert us to familiar patterns of events and experiences
Physical Space: The techniques we use to extend and organize our thinking in physical spaces, and the ways we use physical spaces to change the nature of our attention and refresh our mental energy.
Social Interaction: The ways we use teams and social networks to overcome confirmation bias, refine our thinking, extend our limited individual memory, and add diversity to the knowledge we are able to bring to problem solving.
Paul adds:
When we intentionally cultivate the capacity to think outside the brain, a new world of possibility opens up; we gain access to reserves of intuition, memory, attention, and motivation that are not available to the naked brain. In order to think the intelligent, informed, original thoughts we’re capable of, we can’t rely on the brain alone. We have to think outside the brain.
— The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
I want to continue this introduction of the extended mind by looking at how we use writing to extend our cognitive abilities. I will return to thinking with the body, thinking in physical space, and thinking with others in upcoming articles in this series.
Writing and the Culture of Commentary
Writing is one of our most powerful tools for thinking outside the brain. From the earliest pictographic writing on clay tokens in the Neolithic era, to the pictograms used in early Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese cultures, to the fully developed alphabets that eventually developed in cultures all around the world, writing has been our most powerful tool for capturing, reflecting on, and developing thought. Many of the advances humans have made would have been impossible to conceive of without writing.
A writing system is generally defined as a way of visually representing spoken language. Like oral communication, writing is a way of communicating messages. But writing is fundamentally different from speaking: whereas speech comes to us naturally (everyone who is not physiologically or psychologically impaired learns to talk), writing is completely artificial. There is no “natural” way to write. In his classic text Orality and Literacy, humanities scholar Walter J. Ong wrote:
To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.
Humans were conscious (aware of their internal and external existence) before the appearance of writing, but by separating the knower from the known, writing made possible “increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.” Ong believes it's writing that made the great introspective religions and artistic traditions possible, as well as modern forms of “articulate introspectivity” like psychology.
Writing and printing enabled a broad culture of commentary. Anyone who could read and write could enter into a never-ending conversation with the artists, philosophers, politicians, historians, scientists, and critics of the ages. But doing so required a way of capturing, processing, reframing, connecting, and sharing one’s thoughts: the note.
Our minds have limited capacity. The note is the tool we developed for focusing and externalizing a thought so we can see it in relation to other thoughts, refine it, and use them to develop more complex, multi-faceted thoughts. The atomic unit of written thought is not the word, sentence, or paragraph, it’s the note.
In the next article in this series, I’ll expand on the concept of the note as the atomic unit of thought and turn to capturing, using, and organizing notes.
Footnotes
* You’ll find this term written as "notetaking," "note-taking," and "note taking." I prefer the hyphenated version. Your preference (and spell checking tool) may differ.
** My focus is personal note-taking and personal knowledge management (PKM), not enterprise content management (ECM). Many of the tools mentioned support collaboration across teams, but my focus here is on the ways they can be used as personal note-taking and knowledge management tools, not their collaboration features.