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Comment by ollysb | Hacker News Reader

It isn't about note taking, it's about supporting a brain that simply isn't capable of retaining the level of information that we have to deal with. The ultimate note taking device is actually an augmented human brain that has perfect recollection and organisation.

In the mean time the note taking apps help with:

Working memory - a page can hold far more information than I can retain in my working memory. Having a bunch of information helps me build a working model without having to retain all the information while I'm building. Spot patterns - by organising information it's easier to spot patterns.

Long term memory - your brain just isn't very good at retaining information long term. Maybe you have a company wide wiki but the act of building your own notes is enough to form some connections in your brain so that when you come back you have far greater familiarity and insight associated with the information.

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This is the 'official' explanation, and definitely true.

But most of it is selling that next productivity upgrade that we communally all seem to obsess over here. People sharing their note graphs is the same as the guy on youtube with a sixpack promising a new and revolutionary 5 minute ab routine.

And while the 5 minute ab routine certainly won't harm you, that body was built from months of discipline and required a full fitness routine, as well as careful calorie counting.

Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software.

> But most of it is selling that next productivity upgrade that we communally all seem to obsess over here.

True, this is the "tool fetish" that is associated to any activity, for example obsessing over sneakers when the objective is the routine job (and maybe, not jogging at all); the same principle applies to notes taking.

One could even extend it to being "excessively interested" in programming languages, when the objective is actually building products.

> “Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software.”

This is very cynical reasoning. I’m not sure what this passage means.

For example, ‘productive note taking’ is a fraught statement to begin with, and the passage ends with the suggestion we’re wasting time—my guess.

I’m not making this minor point to have an argument, rather, to highlight a curious idea. Learning is arduous and a mixed bag. The cynical take down, or the undercutting joke is a bit of a psychological trick to snap us out of difficult decisions for spending too much time practicing and not enough time actually doing. Some might say whatever sport you make of learning, in the end it’s just ‘work’ … and doing nothing is also good use if our time for mental health.

So THEN, all this focus on note taking and learning how to learn is maddening and seems wasteful—not working and earning, not learning more of what employers pay money to do, and not just using the time to do nothing and be healthy. So the cynical argument (I’m starting to think this also could be a ‘joke’; XKCD) is to say all these note taking efforts are simply money making schemes.

Maybe some are. And, my personal take, maybe the note taking problem is just an interesting language/computer/information problem at _human_ scale.

> Just like actual productive note taking and creative thinking is about spending time with your notes every day, and not the software.

This is the key thing, I think, and it's why most methodologically-heavy notes apps fall by the wayside, because they get in the way.

Daily processing is incredibly powerful, but once you've got the knack it's not hard to take useful notes that you won't refer to again for months or years. When I solve a tricky problem i file the solution under whatever keywords are relevant, and if I run into that problem again I can generally find it. (In the rare case that i don't, it didn't take long to file the answer so I'm unharmed by the note taking, and indeed likely helped nevertheless, as putting it into words helped my brain understand its properties.)

I totally agree. I feel like as information workers we especially feel the pain of memory. I know mine has been more strained since I've grown older, and I'm just looking for apps to help offload it. I'll add that I think that the working memory part gets hurt on a day-to-day thing, because multitasking, tabs, and the sheer amount of "stuff" hurts my ability. I think most apps do a pretty good job at long-term memory, but there's still some problems with retrieval, and I just "have to learn" the best way of finding that doc I wrote where I described process X. Probably with better NLP things will get better, but they're not there yet.

*Slight plug. I built a side project that tries to get at the early stage of the "working memory" part. I do a lot of short-term remembering during the day - taking calls, reading docs, or flipping between tabs. I made this chrome extension that adds notepad in your tab, so you can toggle, make scratch notes, toggle off, before you commit stuff to your notion/google doc/etc.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jotter/icdbglcdnjo...

Memory can be improved with 2000-year-old techniques like memory palaces. This doesn't replace note-taking, but low-latency cache can improve synthesis and note quality.

does that actually work though?

It works but it can be limited in how useful it is and what information you can store. Great if you want to recall larger numbers of ordered or unordered simple items, not as much if you want to use it for remembering notes on every useful book or article you read.

I use a memory palace and a system of mnemonics all the time for things I want to commit to long term memory. I can speak Japanese and read 2,000 kanji thanks to memory palace techniques. Still, the cognitive load for scribbling down a grocery list is much smaller than trying to make a memorable grocery list in my memory palace. My memory palace also doesn't help me when I've mindlessly set my wallet down and can't find it 30 seconds later. I guess I'm saying that I agree, it doesn't replace note taking.

How did you use a memory palace to memorize 2,000 kanji and Japanese. I thought memory palaces were only good for remembering things in sequence, but I don't see how that fits with language or kanji.

I memorized kanji in the order laid out by James Heisig in "Remembering the Kanji." It's a guide to creating mnemonics for kanji, it has a strict learning order. You can probably read the introduction on the preview on Amazon if you're curious about how it works.

As for vocab, for example I would go for a walk in the park and create memorable mnemonics for the vocab words I saw and the park itself would be a memory palace. Later when I wanted to say the word "vending machine" I would pull the Heisig mnemonics for the vending machine I saw in the park and recreate the word. Today when I'm speaking Japanese I don't have to think about about mnemonics unless I've forgotten a word, then I kind of "look it up" in my memory palace.

The thing about the memory palace method is that it's not really fast recall, it's more like keeping a notebook in your brain until it has been adjusted to your working memory.

Memory palaces work when you want to be able to recall a whole list of things.

But for arbitrary random lookups (by some associative key), does it also work?

That's also what note taking software is about, to easily search through the notes, and find related notes. I'm not sure if such interlinks are supported well by memory palaces.

You mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

I'm afraid this won't work with Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia :(

I think it does work. I have some degree of Aphantasia, and i can still build memory palaces. I can't see them, but I can walk through them. It's weird, but it does work.

Just as a quick exercise, try to count the number of windows in your house, with your eyes closed. Even if you have Aphantasia, you can probably still do it, even if you don't see the windows themselves in your mind's eye.

I get easily lost driving in my own city, I fear I would get lost in my own memory palace too if it was too big, like "did I turn left or right here when memorizing?".

That, plus enjoying obsessing about our tooling, and perhaps a bit of fashion sense as well.

(Oh you can't query your notes for todos and have the result parsed into an agenda? How I moved from Zim to Logseq and back to Orgmode in an afternoon and became 20.6% more productive.)

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