Writing is an incredible medium for thoughts. It’s what I’m doing now. I am thinking as I pen my thoughts onto the note-taking app I’m using. One of the incredible assets we have is the ability to ‘write’ everywhere. We have a selection of paper, sticky notes, diaries and hundreds of note-taking apps. These forms are each designed in intricate ways with careful attention to help you frame your thoughts in a certain way. For example, a plain paper is purely for brain dump. You can put ANYTHING you want in there and just unlock the cage for free-flowing thoughts to rush out like a 100 bats flying out of a cave. In addition, a diary is more personal and more intended for the purpose of journaling and writing about your experiences and opinions on your day, people you’ve met and so on. It’s another incredible form of writing which is much closer to you. Ultimately though, these different forms are designed for the purpose of getting thoughts out of your brain into a sequence of weird-looking squiggly lines and shapes that somehow have meaning.
I find this thought fascinating! The fact that we are able to express our thoughts through characters is just an evolutionary masterpiece. It has allowed us to communicate with immense detail whilst keeping it efficient. And the skill is something that anyone can pick up and cultivate! Language is a deeply interesting topic in the sense that it’s a great enabler for humans to communicate at such large scales. We’re able to convey our thoughts and ideas to people on the other side of the world! I guess I’m overlooking at this concept although, without it, it does seem like a very boring world with flaws left, right and centre. Just picture a clueless guy approaching another clueless guy who each just stare into the other with no idea of what to do or how to do it. Weird right? I mean where do you even start!?
I guess my point is that I appreciate the evolution of language. However, as nothing can be perfect, this isn’t either. Let’s take an example. Our goal is to communicate an idea to someone else. To do this, the traditional approach is that you’d think of the message you’d like to communicate. Then you’d use your brain to translate that thought into a language that both of you can understand. Then you communicate that translation through your mouth. The flaw in this process is that your brain is actively trying to translate your original thought into something else which the recipient can understand for the purpose of communication. So, ideally speaking, it’s not achieving the goal of communicating the thought. Why? Well, it’s compressing that thought into an immature version which is deviated to the original thought. And this is purely for the purpose of making that message communicate-able. On top of this, you’d have to use your brain to compress that thought into speech which also requires a lot of energy(which we don’t realise).
If you think about it, I’m sure you’ll be able to recall scenarios where you haven’t been able to convey a message to someone because of the challenges that ‘languages’ create. They force you to squeeze your thought into words. Ok, we’ve recognised the flaw. And to be perfectly honest with you, it’s not like the end of the world that this flaw exists. It’s just to give you an intuition of the potential improvements we can make to the language system. Enter Neuralink. Well, not exactly…
Neuralink, if you haven’t heard, is one of Elon musk’s many companies which aims to carry out brain implants through a Neuralink chip in aid of curing major brain related diseases including memory loss, paralysis, blindness and much more. What it got to do with this topic? Well, recently, Elon gave a demo of the current progress in the Neuralink chip which has successfully been implanted in a pig and is accurately measuring the brain activity of it. And in the demo, a section was dedicated to the potential future with such a powerful brain implant. One of the things that Elon talked about was to create an experience that simplifies the need for a language to allow thoughts to be communcated in their primitive state. This instantly grabbed my attention. You’re probably thinking, of all the things why the hell is he interested in a language-less communication? Bare with me.
Essentially, with this feature, we’d be able to communicate the original message and the flaw would be eliminated as a result. And with this comes the fantastic opportunity to eleimante the chance of errors in communication. That’s awesome! I’ve created a small diagram to show what I mean by the traditional and Neuralink approach.
I’ve deviated massively although I think it’s worth mentioning why. In my first set of blogs, I constantly mentioned that I’d work on a blog at a different time where I hit tangential concepts. That has actually gone against me as a) I am not getting around to do that and b) I forget the original idea over time. Hence, in this blog(and perhaps henceforth), I’ve excused myself to go on tangents to get the true thoughts out of my brain and into the paper(post in this scenario).
Anyway, yeah, language is brilliant with that flaw which Neuralink is potentially going to fix. In terms of writing though, I find that despite all the mediums that exist, the digital mediums are the best! With an exception. The thing with traditional paper and the likes is that they allow thoughts to flow freely as if they’re floating in an infinite space. They are not constrained by any factors unless you create those constraints. For example, if you title the page ‘Complex Numbers'(as that’s what I’m currently learning), you are commiting that page to be about that particular topic. Bu the idea is that it’s generally ‘free’. With digital notes, they’re organised and maintained in a top-down hierarchical structure which already suppresses that elemtnet of free-flowing thoughts. Along with this, the other flaw that spikes is that physical notes are great for retention. The choice of doing digital notes makes it so much easier to just ‘copy’ notes and type fast without thinking elaborately. Physical notes slow this process down and make the process of writing more like writing!
With those 2 flaws set aside though, digital notes are great for efficiency, storage, access and a whole lot more due to their capabilities. In terms of ‘writing as a medium of thinking’, digital notes allow you to pile up a databse of thoughts that you can revisit and cultivate and so on. In summary, they’re great as a medium for thinking as they allow you to have a centralised location for your thoughts to exist.
This has gone beyond the world limit and I do have a few thoughts but I guess they’re for another blog. Perhaps something about ‘physical notes vs digital notes’… Anyway, bye for now!
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