On Building a 2nd Brain
Who among us is not drowning in information? It’s everywhere. Things we ought to know. Where once we may have had a set of encyclopedias, a few history books, a few novels, and the Bible, we now have hundreds of notes, epubs, pdfs, rss feeds, and bookmarks pointing toward all corners of the universe. It’s so pervasive that the notion of “building a second brain” (an external yet personal repository of stuff) has spawned a software niche of PKMS - personal knowledge management systems. Because having stuff means maintaining stuff. The available applications, like their reason for being, are a growing, seemingly endless, and quite fascinating rabbit hole–a rabbit hole in which to store one’s rabbit holes.
In an era of increasing censorship and propaganda, having potentially pertinent information in a controlled system feels essential. After all, it is much easier to erase or edit a web page than it is to remove a bound book from circulation. So we feel the urge to add more and more unprocessed information to the system in an attempt to build a personal, reliable search engine for someday. Too, alas, some of us have modern brains that are more suited to searching than remembering.
However, in the face of oceans of onrushing information, the tendency is to become a collector of information rather than a processor of information. In volume we find comfort and the façade of knowledge. I don’t need to know it because I can find it when I think I need it. Theoretically. But neither the accumulation of information nor knowledge itself is an end. Rather, it is a potential means to some personal or professional end. If we think of knowledge as man’s expression, whatever the form, of his experience, whether actual or imagined, knowledge has only two functions, entertainment or how-to. Both valuable but far from sustaining.
If we take in select information and allow it to sink in and settle, then, and only then, do we have the chance to use knowledge to access wisdom. Knowledge is of man, wisdom is of the soul; knowledge tells us about the past, wisdom informs us about the present. If the second brain does not serve the first brain in the pursuit of wisdom, what are we really doing?