Better Answers & How I Learned to Defrag My Brain first posts this video on Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

Then it moves on to talking about Johnson’s blog post The Spark File. (Doesn’t Getting Things Done have something similar?)

We have outgrown our ability to remember everything that might be useful in the future. Last week I heard Ray Kurzweil on Biotech Nation say around age 22 we reach the upper limits of what we can remember. After this point to remember something we forget something else. His idea is that we will connect our brains to the Internet for additional storage. But not as an external hard drive but for searching for the data or information we need.

The Spark File is more the clunky approximation of the external hard drive. I have also seen it called the External Brain. It is cathartic in that once we commit things to writing, we can stop constantly thinking about it. Really, this is a major reason why I blog. There are usually a dozen drafts sitting around waiting for me to revisit them and flesh out the post. (This one was originally started 30 days ago as just a link.)

My smartphone is my clunky approximation of searching the Internet for whatever I need whenever I need to know it. I’d appreciate Google Glass if it read my brain rather than having to talk to it. I can talk to my phone now to do a search, but I never do. Guess I am too quiet?

P.S. Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You changed my life.
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