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External Mind

Since 2022 I've been building an external mind and I'm really excited about it. But what is an external mind and why is it fun, useful and empowering?

What is an external mind?

An external mind is a way of keeping notes that amplifies your natural brain. Our own human brain is incredibly powerfull, but it has it's limitations. For example: our memory is not an exact storage system for experience. Stored memories change over time under influence of new experiences, or fade as time passes. Taking notes of your thoughts and experiences is a more objective and stable way of storing them. Your notes won't fade or change under influence of later experience. They are an exact, stable record of your life. But this objectivity and stability is a quality of all note taking. How does an external mind differ from simply taking notes?

Linked notes - mimicking your brain cells

An external mind has a structure that greatly enhances its power compared to simple note taking. Notes in an external mind are contextually linked. This means that with an external mind you can visually surf your own thoughts. So the core concept of an external mind is incredibly simple: link notes to eachother. It's really easy to get started with this. Many apps for notetaking support entering links to other notes. Examples are:

Markdown - the language of an external mind

What the apps above have in common is that they allow you to write your notes in markdown. Markdown allows you to easily add links to text, as well as markup such as headings, bold and italic text and links. The idea of an external mind is usually accompanied by the awareness that this is your personal intimate information. For many external mind enthousiasts the concepts of privacy, freedom and ownership are radically important. You should not have to trust a commercial company with your most intimate personal thoughts and your life story. Writing in Markdown is a way of ensuring at least freedom and ownership. Markdown, as opposed to commercial formats such as .docx (word documents) can be written and read using the most simple text editors. It is not locked to a commercial platform and you can freely import and export it into many apps. You are in control.

It's a good experience to get started writing notes that link to each other using one of the apps above. You will quickly find out what kind of notes you naturally write and discover what structure fits your thoughts. The apps I've mentioned all support additional structure beyond links: They can store notes in separate notebooks and add tags to notes. And there is powerful search functionality to find the notes you're looking for. As you start to write notes, you will inevitably face questions about structure:

  • When do you use a separate notebook for notes?
  • What tags do you use for your notes?

For example: it makes complete sense to store all notes about a topic in a notebook for that topic. Let's say you are interested in Astronomy and Philosophy. It would be neat if you can find all notes about Philosophy in a notebook called Philosophy and all notes about Astronomy in a notebook called Astronomy. But you'll immediately get into trouble when you write a note about the impact of discoveries in Astronomy (The Copernican Revolution) on our idea of our place in the Universe (Philosophy). This note belongs both in Philosophy as well as in Astronomy. How do you solve this? Store a copy of the note in both notebooks? That creates a maintenance problem: If you change the note in one notebook, you need to remind yourself to also update the note in the other notebook. This will quickly become wearisome. Imagine a note that covers more than 2 topics!

This is a classic case where labelsor tags work much better than notebooks (or folders). It is one of the historical reasons Gmail is such a user friendly e-mail client and became so popular. A single note can have multiple tags. Problem solved. Structure in an external mind is often achieved by relying more strongly on tags than on folders. There are still use cases for folders, but they are more rare than structure by tags.

History of external minds - Zettelkasten, second brain and other methods

The tradition of sharpening your mind by writing about your experiences goes back thousands of years. It is a defining feature of the human species that we extend our mind out into the world. Famous are for example the diaries of the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius, later published as Meditations. Contemporary writing about external mind usually points to Niklas Luhmann and his Zettelkasten method as an import historical example of an external mind. So powerful is the influence of Luhmann that many people refer even to modern external minds as a Zettelkasten method. Luhmann wrote his thoughts on paper cards that he always carried in his pocket. He had a system of linking these cards with a system akin to the Dewey Decimal System. It allowed him to place a card in his wooden file cabinet and easily retrieve it when another note referenced it. He maintained a set of index cards as entrypoints into his Zettelkasten. An often overlooked part of this system was his desk, where he could spread out several cards and surf his thoughts at his leisure. Luhmann was an extremely productive social scientist, publishing more than 70 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles. He credited his Zettelkasten as a way to achieve this remarkable creative productivity.

The Artumis Method is the result of my own adventures in building an external mind. Over the years I've discovered additional principles and techniques that allow me to write more meaningfull notes in a more powerfull structure while taking less time and effort.