Mind palaces, Digital Gardens, Hyperfine Villages and Internet Pincodes
How do you inject physicality into digital medium for better memory retrieval?
Five years back, I used to have this notebook where I used to scribble my thoughts on. All that I could chew and digest from reading a book, I used to write them in my own words. Index and keep them neatly in this precious little notebook. 2015 was when I read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb for the first time. Consciously, or unconsciously, the thoughts I gathered and wrote down somewhere in this notebook became a part of me. There was a very thin line between Nassim's view point and mine. The lines blurred. I wanted his writing to be a part of me. And it became.
Was it something about the pen and the paper that made me remember Antifragile by-heart? I don’t know.
After ditching the physical notebook for a digital brain where I started putting all my highlights from Kindle, I now wonder how different handwritten notes are as compared to the current digital notes.
Would I have gulped down Antifragile if I had typed it down instead of writing it?
I have archived the heck out of all these digital notes; almost 150+ books worth of material (now available on gumroad), I still find it difficult to retrieve them on the fly.
Not that I don’t remember anything at all from my digital vaults. But it would be silly to assume that there is no difference between the physical and the digital. As the cultural critic, Marshall McLuhan aptly coined it —The Medium is the Message.
So let’s investigate this problem of physicality and digitality and resolve this issue of information retrieval once and for all.
First of all. Digital does comes with its advantages. And that’s also why we are so used to it. Writing down with pen and paper might even seem so luddite and anachronistic for our times. Digital note-taking leverages the advantages of memory and computation. Two key ways in which machine beats man.
However, the bigger question mark here is how much of this seemingly infinite digital storage tank is retrievable? Retrieval is not inherently a limitation of the digital, but that of the physical. Our biological memory is limited in capacity.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff makes an apt visual of our retention problem —How much ever we try to fill in the bucket, there is still a big wide hole in the bottom that leaks.
And you keep filling water into the bucket. And the water keeps pouring out.
To counter this leaky tap in my memory, I started using various SRS apps such as Anki and Neuracache. SRS (Spaced Repetition) is an algorithm to repeatedly churn out the saved information at selective intervals for easier retention.
However, the problem with having another digital app for combating a ‘digital problem’ is that it has to fight for your attention. And then you have apps that are designed to be attention-seekers. All these apps together, become a collective which you have to fight against. It’s already a losing battle here.
Which makes me wonder.
The Digital Conglomerate of Digital Apps might actually not be a smart place to store your information.
And there is a reason why physical books are better than Kindle ones for retrieval.
This tweet reminded me of the term Memory palace used in the book —Moonwalking with Einstein. Not actually a physical memory palace, but a mental one. It covers the journey of how Joshua Foer expands his memory retrieval limits and becomes an American Memory Champion and a record-holder for speed cards.
Memory palaces combine both visual memory and spatial navigation in a unique way for faster retrieval. Tying concepts to visually stimulating objects (blue banana, purple cow etc) and then spatially fixing them in a place helps them remember not just their grocery list, but even 1000, maybe 10,000 digits after the decimal place of irrational digits such as pi.
Artwork by Brandon evans
What’s happening in a memory palace is this —You are outsourcing your information to your 'mental environment'.
This is why reading physical books and taking physical notes have easier memory retention for us — You are outsourcing your memory to an 'external environment'.
Now think of this.
How about getting the best of both worlds? Both the physical and digital?
As we see how effective physical books are in terms of memory retention, can we combine the unique qualities of physical books and embed them onto our digital landscape?
As we discussed earlier, the catch lies in outsourcing your memory onto an ‘external environment’.
What if we re-create the external PHYSICAL environment DIGITALLY?
To understand this, we first need to understand the history of bidirectional links.
Bidirectional links go all the way back to the origins of Xanadu and its likes, but lets zoom in on one of the latest note-taking apps that has taken the internet by storm.
As long as you are not living within a cave within a cave, you might have heard of the Roam Research app, a tool for networked thought. This app created a disruption in the way people started taking notes, by means of using bidirectional links.
Bidirectional links has become a rage now, merging with the cultural zeitgeist and opening up many possibilities. Imagine creating your local wiki where all the links are bidirectionally linked back and forth allowing you to navigate into interesting rabbit holes.
You might have already encountered bidirectional links. Haven’t you clicked on hyperlinked terms in Wikipedia and see where it ends up in? That’s another example of bidirectional links. You somehow connect Ostrich eggs to Sourdough bread to Jeff Bezos and see how many connections it takes to reach each one. Sometimes you end up back to the original point where you started from, creating one big round robin.
I've played this game quite a lot out of sheer curiosity.
Now it is possible to create your own such hyperlinked environment, what is now called a digital garden.
Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools – it's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information. Away from time-bound streams and into topological thought gardens.
Digital gardens act as a counterbalance between the unstructured streams of consciousness through tweets and highly refined and distilled final outputs such as research papers, evergreen blog posts etc.
Illustration by Maggie Appleton
"The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another."
A collated list of digital gardens that are well 'pruned and trimmed', and available for the public to take a stroll through are shown below.
I've been trying to make my own digital garden inspired by Andy Matuschak's rendition of the same. And it has been a steady work-in-progress taking it's own sweet time.
I'm not sure if I have convinced you of creating your own digital garden, but the potential of expanding the web of your digital garden to create a hyperfine village is unparalleled.
Artwork by Brandon Evans
I kinda get what a digital garden means. But what the heck is a hyperfine village?
Imagine ditching the 2002-esque ways of storing information in files and folders. And replace them with metaphors and digital palaces, called together as a hyperfine village.
You could navigate through your website however you want, just like how you use a 'town map' for 'places'. Similar to how in a digital garden you are taking a stroll through the articles written by the author, you are now expanding your horizons.
Going to the library, or the museum, or even the planetarium (for seeing some visions of the future?)
The concept of hyperfine villages doubly intrigued me. As it made a lot of sense. And connected me back to the theme of memory retrieval and interconnectedness.
Memory is spatial.
And so,
Physical books and notes are retained faster than digital books and notes.
So how do we retain digital books and notes faster?
Harness the capabilities of bidirectional links and create a digital garden out of your notes, articles, visions, whatever you want.
Then connect the various themes of your content by means of metaphors (instead of files and folders) and create a hyperfine village!
Now you can not only access content faster, but also make it easier to retrieve. Your digital mind palace makes you become a better emperor of your mind.
This thought of combining digital gardens with hyperfine villages came as a result of this writing. As I was pruning these texts, I came across a potential pre-cursor for the grand idea of what a digital garden + hyperfine village might look like:
The website of Unusual Ventures pretty much conveys the essence of some of my ideas in translation. Where files and folders are replaced by metaphors of checkpoints on a travel map.
I am taking some inspiration from this and am currently building my personal website on Notion to build a one-of-a-kind hyperfine village + digital garden. I would like to call it Hypergarden. This would be my Internet Pin Code.
I would proceed to make this Hypergarden by replacing the pages such as 'Essays, Portfolio, Podcasts, Newsletter, Startups, Brain, Sketches, Photography and Mixtapes' of my website into a subsequent location of my hypergarden.
'Home' would now take the metaphor of a 'Cabin'.
Similarly,
Essays becomes a part of the Distillery
Portfolio is now The Office
Brain is now a part of The Library
Illustrations, Photography, Sketches and Mixtapes comprise The Museum
Newsletter and Podcasts is now the Planetarium
Intellectual Dark Matter is now a stroll through a Garden
The idea I have is to stretch my digital environment spatially by means of metaphors to connect and synthesize.
All of a sudden, mere text suddenly seems magical. Injecting the right amount of physicality into digital text. And the words such as Distillery, Office, Library, Museum etc stimulates much needed spatial memory for digital text.
In this way my Internet pin code is complete. Through the creation of this Hypergarden. Will update soon :)
Mind palaces, Digital Gardens, Hyperfine Villages and Internet Pincodes
i’ve been toying with the idea of a playground as a metaphor to explore and play in with other playmates (multiplayer mode) to create playbooks of curiosity and creation together. this will be a P2P model with no external supervision, direction or chaperoning needed.
Brilliant idea. All this leads to having a more "organic" set-up, not just how we learn but also how knowledge is mapped, maintained and retrieved. This will definitively be a life time archetypal work that will have many followers. Oh yes, I will begin by setting up my own patch of Garden as well. Thanks mate!