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Comment by Ifkaluva | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting to me that it says that in some versions of second brain:

“Second brain grows, but first brain doesn’t get smarter.”

Something I remember Tiago Forte said, which turned me off of his partículas brand of a second brain, is that his goal is to “remember nothing”, and have the second brain surface exactly the context necessary at the moment, which he would proceed to read and ingest.

That sounds terrible to me :) it’s like “we don’t need to remember things if we can google them”.

I much prefer this author’s vision of using the second brain to strengthen the first brain.

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Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything. Humans are absolutely terrible at accurately recalling things that they observed even a few minutes in the past.

But we also can't remember nothing and just dump _everything_ into the second brain, otherwise we'd have no map, no context, no way to even know how to look for what we need in the moment. It would be like taking a random teenager off the street, handing them an electronics engineering textbook, and asking them to build a power supply on the spot.

So there is definitely a spectrum. Everyone seems to disagree on the optimal point on the spectrum and that is almost certainly because it varies greatly from person to person.

My personal experience has been that simply writing extremely detailed notes in the first place makes the information "sticky" in my brain, and greatly increases the likelihood that I won't even _need_ to directly reference the notes in the future. Fun little catch-22 there.

> Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything.

Yet it's possible to remember a lot. Those who pass "The Knowledge" test are truly inspirational. See this 60 Minutes report on London's Black Cab drivers [0]

[0]: https://60minutestonight.com/the-knowledge-60-minutes-report...

...yes but apparently while the posterior hippocampus actually grows in these people the anterior hippocampus shrinks... so there may be tradeoffs required to get this level of spatial knowledge... https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070039597

Remembering and learning are very different activities, however. It is pretty impressive what people can learn! And some of us do have superior knowledge of what appear to be "useless" trivia as well. (Ever seen Jeopardy?) But it is very well-researched and understood that _most_ of us have very bad memory and recall compared to a computer. One popular hypothesis is that every time a particular memory is recalled, it is slightly changed until it bears little resemblance to the original event, or even the earlier memories of it.

Thanks!

I've been growing my knowledge base for many years, with great results.

And you really need all that much to start taking notes.

No techniques, no workflows, just the the simplest setup would do.

"Second Brain", however, brings excitement to people's minds.

But in reality it just doesn't work. It makes great sales, though.

That’s not what he said. And that part is from the GTD principle, much older than the “second brain” wave. That GTD principle, backed by psychological research, is basically saying that you should extract what you have in your mind immediately when you have it / remember it, so that you don’t need to keep it in your mind all the time. That free your mind to perform at optimal capacity. In psychological lab test, they basically test people doing “remember X and perform this next task Y. I’m going to ask you about X after you finish Y.” The mere fact that you need to remember X degrades your performance.

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