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Several times in the video he mentions loosing a piece of inspiration because it's flowing too fast for writing it down. I wonder how many ideas and insights h

Several times in the video he mentions loosing a piece of inspiration because it's flowing too fast for writing it down. I wonder how many ideas and insights have been lost throughout history to this phenomenon. Sometimes you crack a problem from an unexpected angle and an entire forest of insights fall down onto you. You take a minute to type the first one but already some of the others are lost forever. Plus you broke out from the free flowing zone. Will we ever come up with a tool to fix this tragedy?

jarmitage 10y ago
This guy is trying to create a stream of conscious recording Memex: http://quantifiedself.com/2009/09/the-social-memex/ http://quantifiedself.com/2009/09/the-social-memex/ ---- Relevant excerpt from The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson: "Actually, now that he thought of it, losing his train of thought had been happening a lot. Or so he seemed to remember. It was an odd problem that way. But certainly he had been aware of losing trains of thought, which seemed, in their blank aftermath, to have been good thoughts. He had even tried to talk into his wrist pad when such an accelerated burst of thinking began, when he felt that sense of several strands braiding together to make something new. But the act of talking stopped the mentation. He was not a verbal thinker, it seemed; it was a matter of images, sometimes in the language of math, sometimes in some kind of inchoate flow that he could not characterise. So talking stopped it. Or else the lost thoughts were much less impressive than they had felt; for the wrist recordings had only a few phrases, hesitant, disconnected, and most of all slow – they were nothing like the thoughts he had hoped to record, which, especially in this particular state, were just the reverse – fast, coherent, effortless – the free play of the mind. That process could not be captured; and it struck Sax forcibly how little of anyone’s thinking was ever recorded or remembered or conveyed in any way to others – the stream of one’s consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist."
Bartweiss 10y ago
I know of at least one author (Roald Dahl?) who swears that he lost several novel-quality ideas to this pattern. The sort of thing where you're lying awake at night and go "that would be a great idea for a book, I should write it down in the morning!" He also recounts saving one published story he came up with in the car: he pulled over and scribbled it in the dust on the rear windshield. Among authors alone, I would imagine we've lost a great many brilliant books because brainstorming is tricky and variable. Some days you get nothing, some days you get a dozen ideas and only one makes it out to the rest of the world. I can't think of a good answer. Meditation and memory training might help, but are not silver bullets. Typing tends to be flow breaking (though I'm sure smartphones have improved matters) and vocalization is slow and awkward. It's hard to imagine anything short of EEG-translation removing the I/O limits on the mind.
sampl 10y ago
> ...loosing a piece of inspiration because it's flowing too fast for writing it down I've been using the voice recorder on my phone to capture inspiration for years now (plus journals, ambient recordings, etc). I've got 1,700 recordings now, and whenever I dive deep into a new project I listen through the relevant ones for help.
- redler 10y ago
  If it's been years, how do you know which of the 1700 are the relevant ones? Are you tagging or transcribing them? Seems like this would be a good use case for even moderately accurate transcription of the audio files by software -- the way even moderately accurate OCR of a bag of scanned PDFs can provide the fodder for search tools like Spotlight to interactively surface approximately useful results.
  - sampl 10y ago
    Yes, I usually tag them when I'm done. Would love to have some good transcribing software for deeper search though.
amasad 10y ago
This seems like it could easily be confirmation bias. When you have an idea that comes as a fast-flowing "inspiration" and you manage to write it down, and it turns out to be relevant, it registers in your mind as a close-call. However, you'd also have lots of those fast-flowing ideas that are actually not that great and are just ignored.
AYBABTME 10y ago
I've been thinking a lot about this problem. I have at least an analogy for it. Imagine that you have a high resolution, high fps camera. To record its feed requires a memory card that is capable of handling the data rate that the camera produces. Otherwise, the events captured by the camera are lost forever as they are flushed away by the forthgoing frames. Essentially, the problem boils down to the ability to encode the information at least as quickly as the lifetime of the information. I believe the same thing happens in thought. We have a state of mind, an idea, that we want to share. Because we can't simply transfer whole brain states between each of us, we first need to serialize our ideas in writing or speech. That process is lossy, and possibly lengthy (or at least longer than your train of thought). In the mean time, a variety of new thoughts come to your mind, flushing the original idea. So following this analogy, a solution to the problem of lost ideas would be to have higher bandwidth means of expressing and recording ideas. Personally this problem annoys me quite a lot in a variety of incarnations, and I think advances in Human Computer Interactions will directly address this. For instance, consider a program. Sometimes I have a full blown picture of the program I want to build in mind. Then along the many hours it takes to serialize this into a programming language, I battle myself, attempting to keep the idea fresh. There many steps along the way that contribute to the serialization cost: - The abstractions of the programming language. - The step from "programming language" to "abstract syntax tree". - The letters I have to type. - The movement of my fingers on the keyboard. - The translation of my brain from program construct, to structure, to sentences, to words, to tokens, to letters, to movement of my fingers, to keypresses. There's many steps in this process that could potentially be removed to reduce the cost of serialization. * * * So yes, I think this is a real problem, and I think that it can be addressed with better tools and techniques.

jarmitage 10y ago

This guy is trying to create a stream of conscious recording Memex: http://quantifiedself.com/2009/09/the-social-memex/ http://quantifiedself.com/2009/09/the-social-memex/ ---- Relevant excerpt from The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson: "Actually, now that he thought of it, losing his train of thought had been happening a lot. Or so he seemed to remember. It was an odd problem that way. But certainly he had been aware of losing trains of thought, which seemed, in their blank aftermath, to have been good thoughts. He had even tried to talk into his wrist pad when such an accelerated burst of thinking began, when he felt that sense of several strands braiding together to make something new. But the act of talking stopped the mentation. He was not a verbal thinker, it seemed; it was a matter of images, sometimes in the language of math, sometimes in some kind of inchoate flow that he could not characterise. So talking stopped it. Or else the lost thoughts were much less impressive than they had felt; for the wrist recordings had only a few phrases, hesitant, disconnected, and most of all slow – they were nothing like the thoughts he had hoped to record, which, especially in this particular state, were just the reverse – fast, coherent, effortless – the free play of the mind. That process could not be captured; and it struck Sax forcibly how little of anyone’s thinking was ever recorded or remembered or conveyed in any way to others – the stream of one’s consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist."

Bartweiss 10y ago

I know of at least one author (Roald Dahl?) who swears that he lost several novel-quality ideas to this pattern. The sort of thing where you're lying awake at night and go "that would be a great idea for a book, I should write it down in the morning!" He also recounts saving one published story he came up with in the car: he pulled over and scribbled it in the dust on the rear windshield. Among authors alone, I would imagine we've lost a great many brilliant books because brainstorming is tricky and variable. Some days you get nothing, some days you get a dozen ideas and only one makes it out to the rest of the world. I can't think of a good answer. Meditation and memory training might help, but are not silver bullets. Typing tends to be flow breaking (though I'm sure smartphones have improved matters) and vocalization is slow and awkward. It's hard to imagine anything short of EEG-translation removing the I/O limits on the mind.

sampl 10y ago

> ...loosing a piece of inspiration because it's flowing too fast for writing it down I've been using the voice recorder on my phone to capture inspiration for years now (plus journals, ambient recordings, etc). I've got 1,700 recordings now, and whenever I dive deep into a new project I listen through the relevant ones for help.

redler 10y ago
If it's been years, how do you know which of the 1700 are the relevant ones? Are you tagging or transcribing them? Seems like this would be a good use case for even moderately accurate transcription of the audio files by software -- the way even moderately accurate OCR of a bag of scanned PDFs can provide the fodder for search tools like Spotlight to interactively surface approximately useful results.
- sampl 10y ago
  Yes, I usually tag them when I'm done. Would love to have some good transcribing software for deeper search though.

amasad 10y ago

This seems like it could easily be confirmation bias. When you have an idea that comes as a fast-flowing "inspiration" and you manage to write it down, and it turns out to be relevant, it registers in your mind as a close-call. However, you'd also have lots of those fast-flowing ideas that are actually not that great and are just ignored.

AYBABTME 10y ago

I've been thinking a lot about this problem. I have at least an analogy for it. Imagine that you have a high resolution, high fps camera. To record its feed requires a memory card that is capable of handling the data rate that the camera produces. Otherwise, the events captured by the camera are lost forever as they are flushed away by the forthgoing frames. Essentially, the problem boils down to the ability to encode the information at least as quickly as the lifetime of the information. I believe the same thing happens in thought. We have a state of mind, an idea, that we want to share. Because we can't simply transfer whole brain states between each of us, we first need to serialize our ideas in writing or speech. That process is lossy, and possibly lengthy (or at least longer than your train of thought). In the mean time, a variety of new thoughts come to your mind, flushing the original idea. So following this analogy, a solution to the problem of lost ideas would be to have higher bandwidth means of expressing and recording ideas. Personally this problem annoys me quite a lot in a variety of incarnations, and I think advances in Human Computer Interactions will directly address this. For instance, consider a program. Sometimes I have a full blown picture of the program I want to build in mind. Then along the many hours it takes to serialize this into a programming language, I battle myself, attempting to keep the idea fresh. There many steps along the way that contribute to the serialization cost: - The abstractions of the programming language. - The step from "programming language" to "abstract syntax tree". - The letters I have to type. - The movement of my fingers on the keyboard. - The translation of my brain from program construct, to structure, to sentences, to words, to tokens, to letters, to movement of my fingers, to keypresses. There's many steps in this process that could potentially be removed to reduce the cost of serialization. * * * So yes, I think this is a real problem, and I think that it can be addressed with better tools and techniques.