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 re

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.