Pensieri di un lunatico minore

17 September 2007 Technology

The joy of two brains

There is an enormous amount of information in the world any more. Even as we narrow our focus more and more as individuals, it has become effectively impossible to keep up with everything that is going on. The possibility that a single person could ingest, digest, analyze and store the magnitude of information that now permeates our lives decreases every year, and yet the expectations continue to increase. Part of my job is to know something about everything and a lot about a few areas. This creates a vast storehouse of random information that can be often difficult to make sense of. To do so, I’ve resorted to using two brains.

Inboard Brain The first brain is the traditional one that everyone thinks of when you use the word brain. It’s that miraculous collection of proteins, fat and electrical impulses that somehow make us sentient beings. The amount of power in the average human brain is enormous, and the capability for critical and complicated thought is awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, the human brain is also amazingly fallible when it comes to the storage of vast amounts of detailed information. For me, at least, what “sticks” when I read something are some high-level ideas, random tidbits of detailed facts and most of all a vague recollection of having read it. It sounds worse than it is. So far, I’ve not tripped up on knowing that I’ve read something, heard something, or otherwise ingested information; instead, I simply can’t remember the details. That’s where the other brain comes in handy.

Outboard Brain This is the odd phraseology that often confuses people. The term outboard brain refers not to some creepy jar containing formaldehyde-picked remnants of some mad scientist, but instead to a tool to organize the massive repository of tiny bits and pieces that my inboard brain can vaguely recall, but seems to have lost the details of for easy retrieval. Instead, I have a clue as to where to find things, and can quickly discover what I am looking for, refresh my memory, and proceed to analyze the information and situation, without the intense silliness associated with the traditional rote memorization.

Now, you might ask where one might find an outboard brain, and that would be a fine question. The truth, as much as I can remember it, is that I actually possess two distinct brains for retrieval. The first, and the most common that people often fail to recognize as such, is Google. By providing a nearly exhaustive index and collection of the information online—which today represents a vast majority of information available on current topics—with blinding retrieval times, Google functions as a quick method to recall rarely used bits of information. Whether people realize it or not, this is often the purpose Google is used for most often. The second outboard brain is a bit more unique to how I work, and is actually a product on my Mac: DEVONthink.

DEVONthink has been around for quite some time, and I’ve been a user of it for a long time as well. ON my MacBook Pro, I have something approaching 20GB of data, information, pictures, PDFs, clippings, bookmarks and other things stored, cross-indexed, organized and quickly retrievable. Read a paper, or technical report, that has an interesting idea in it; it goes in DEVONthink. Find a web page that has some potentially useful information for the future; it goes in DEVONthink as an archive, just in-case it disappears. Whatever it is, it goes in, gets indexed and cross-referenced. Sometimes it’s just a bookmark and sometimes it’s 100+ page PDFs. Some of the things that I have stored in DEVONthink locally, and tend to keep up-to-date through some scripts:

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