🌱 thoughts are not unique, but the combination (or linking) of thoughts are what makes them distinct

Zettelkasten and Evergreen MOC connection → folgezettel → combinations

People are more similar then different. Most people are also not that smart. How to create our own unique thoughts and insights? Combining non-unique input, with our personal memories creates a relatively unique perspective. Combine this with a multitude of previously studied material should open up the possibility of unique ideas.

This shows that not the facts themselves matter, but how we link them with the rest of our PKM. Facts don’t matter (for uniqueness), thinking does.

If we want our thoughts to be of higher quality, more original Permanent notes are intellectual creativity, and less a regurgitation of what other people already said, we should link to concepts further from the obvious insights or originality occurs at the juncture of two before unrelated concepts

Our understanding broadens and gets strengthened by adding nodes and connections to our ZK

Literature notes

source:: Your mind works more like Sherlock Holmes’s than you think | Science | AAAS

• When the researchers compared the viewers’ brain activity while watching Sherlock to when they were recalling it from memory, the brain patterns were so similar that the scientists could accurately identify which scenes the participants were describing at any given time just by looking at their fMRI results. “This goes beyond just showing that some part of the brain is active during some movie scene,” Chen says. “We’re showing that there is a distinct brain pattern, like a fingerprint, for each movie scene.”
  • … That suggests that when humans experience the same events, their brains organize the memories in an extremely similar way …
• Though humans naturally share the same basic neural architecture, most scientists have thought that when it comes to memory, the big similarities are confined to “lower-order” brain regions like the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the amygdala—things our brains have in common with most other vertebrates. The “higher-order” regions within humans’ intricate cerebral cortex are thought to contain distinctive, highly personalized brain activity for memories. Interestingly, the shared brain patterns identified in this study were found exclusively in higher-order, cortical brain regions, including the posterior medial cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex.
• These findings could make cognitive scientists rethink the way they view how personalized and special our memories really are, Chen says. “We feel our memories are unique, but there is a lot in common between us in how we see and remember the world, even at the level of these brain activity patterns that we measure at the scale of millimeters,” she says.

commonalities noticed when doing brain scans, even for higher functions

• Distinct brain patterns follow distinct inputs
• Commonalities go a lot further than initially thought

In any case, communication becomes more fruitful when we succeed to activate the internal network of links at the occasion of writing notes or making queries. Memory does not function as the sum of point by point accesses, but rather utilizes internal relationships and becomes fruitful only at this level of the reduction of its own complexity. In this way, more information becomes available at this isolated moment of an search impulse than one had in mind. There is also more information than was ever stored in the form of notes. The second mind provides combinatorial possibilities which were never planned, never preconceived, or conceived in this way. This effect of innovation is based on the one hand on the circumstance that the query provokes possibilities of making relations which could not be traced prior to it. On the other hand, it is based also on the fact that the internal horizons of selection and comparisons are not identical with schema of searching for them.

Link to original

– Communicating with ZK

Transclude of Austin-Kleon#^combining-ideas

Fleeting notes

thinking = linking

• brain patterns like finger pints
  • closer to reading minds?
• similarities not just the lower order brain functions, but even cerebral cortex
  • this makes it easier to study
    • which makes it easier to create laws and rules
      • opens up ways to improve ourselves and others 🔑 understanding: people respond (initially) the same when watching TV
• thoughts are not unique(!)
• still later people come to different conclusions, why?
  • linked to earlier memories & thoughts → linking is where the thinking happens, not just the consuming