Why build a second brain? | Software vs psychedelics

Dec 22, 2024 – by Zeyad Mahran

During covid lockdown, I was constantly dragged between all sources of information, consuming tons of stuff – books, podcasts, videos, everything. With time, I wished my mind would expand to fit in everything I was learning; this seemed like the only way to make consuming all this information worthwhile.

Instead of regulating consumption, I was doing a thing that I now believe was quite far-fetched; I was searching for ways to deliberately expand the capabilities of the mind. Because I learned the brain indeed utilizes far fewer connections than it is capable of.

Think of your brain as a vast network of roads connecting different pieces of information. While the potential for connections is enormous, we only use a small portion of them regularly. Just like muscles get stronger with exercise, your brain strengthens the connections you use often. But theoretically, at its full capacity, your brain has the potential to outsmart any supercomputer exists today.

To me this was mind-blowing because it meant that there’s probably something to do about the original problem: not being able to store and remember enough information.

If I’d choose one topic to learn about for the rest of my life, it’d be ‘human consciousness’ – I don’t find anything as particularly interesting as practices that dig in deeper states of the mind. Isn’t it fascinating how we get to understand and remember and make sense of… things? Maybe if we understand how the mind works, lots of our problems would be solved?

After looking into ways people used over history to practically extend capabilities of their minds, I found the most obvious way was psychedelics. I read stories of how it was life-changing for some of the most influential people. And one day I’d do it. But the problem is, I thought, and still think, I’m not ready. After reading lots of stories, I learned that getting into psychedelics is not as easy as it seems. There has to be a setup and you have to be ready for all types of outcomes.

So now that I’m going to exclude psychedelics for the time-being, I found there’s no tangible way to extend the capability of the mind. Except for one thing.

I found some people online talking about doing it with software (strange I know), and it felt kind of exciting. I later learned they were implementing practices to collect and preserve all their knowledge, and then let software help them make sense of it.

The only reason this felt compelling is that my only picture of a ‘more capable’ mind was as if it’s able to peek anywhere and retrieve any piece of information from my entire life history. If I could remember everything from my past, this would be my definition of having a supermind. And this is where I learned software can help.

This category of software is known as “tools for thought” – these are tools that function as extensions of the mind. Think of it as if we can outsource the heavy lifting, normally done by the brain, to a piece of software.

Another name for these tools is “second brains” – And the way this works is: if we can offload lots of the information, thoughts, and ideas we have daily to an external second brain, this frees up mental space for our brain to do its functions without getting overwhelmed. I’m going to discuss how to do that during the next posts of this series.

For now it’s important to note that while in the broadest sense, a second brain is just a fancy name for a note-taking app, not every note-taking app qualifies as a second brain app.

The most important characteristic of a second brain is its ability to create connections between thoughts. So second brain apps are used to function exactly like the human brain (extensions of the mind). This is actually where this all starts to be interesting.

If you feel like you're consuming far more knowledge than you can retain, the solution is not to try remember more, but offload much of what you already know to trusted systems.

Remember how we started by discussing how neural connections in the brain determine its capabilities? Therefore, the clearest answer to “why build a second brain” is to extract as many connections as possible between things we learn daily.

And we could talk about lots of other good things that come with building a second brain, like clarity of thought, enhanced cognitive ability, an organized life, and effortless output. But fundamentally, none of this would be possible without that simple concept: ability to create automatic connections between thoughts.

As soon as you read “I want to remember everything from every time” it’s easy to think “But I don’t want that. I don’t want to remember everything. We’re made to forget for a reason” – Well that’s the beauty of it; you are the curator.

Fortunately, in software we have finer control over bad trips than in psychedelics.

In psychedelics, your thoughts roam into an infinite kaleidoscope, there's no map. Anything could happen; your favorite childhood memory could show up as a terrifying nightmare, and your grocery list could show up as a list of philosophical questions.

But in software, you have carefully spent time obsessing over the ingredients. There’s no sneaky way your subconscious could surprise you on your trip. It’s like this calm, controlled, cultivated space that you’ve been curating for so long. So when it’s ready to be put to use, it’s all upside. Thousands of good recipes are embedded deep in the network. Your research notes from three years ago could lead to a viral discovery, your years of journals could turn into a book, and an insight you wrote during a team meeting from last week could change the direction of the company.

Inside a second brain, you can only see ideas you put in, but you cannot imagine the infinite possibilities that could result from connecting them. Most of the transformative effect from our seemingly simple ideas comes from letting them collide with each other in a space that embraces this collision.

Exactly like a real mind. The best output is always one that comes as a direct result of the mixing process that happens inside the mind. AI is not going to produce good work or novel ideas on its own. And the book you read is not going to give you superpowers on its own. But the connections that naturally emerge from all of these things simmering together is where the magic happens.