Gravitas Plus: Welcome to the age of the second brain

hello and welcome to gravitas plus i'm palki sharma how many of you are harry potter fans in the story dumbledore had a magical vessel he used it to store and review memories it was called the pencil now this is obviously a fictional story set in a school of magic but today we have something like this in the real world it's called the second brain it's a digital brain that can be used to document every piece of information every experience every thought every learning you can access all of this whenever and wherever you want what does a second brain look like nothing too sci-fi or magical a second brain looks like this it's a word document that's backed up in cloud how much does it cost most second brains are free some cost as little as eight dollars a month that's around 600 rupees a month indian rupees the second brain has been developed on the hypothesis that a human brain is meant to have ideas not to store those ideas so the second brain can do the job of storing what does it store well everything from your thoughts to your screenshots your grocery list your notes photos passwords reminders everything you can think of how does this work through apps there are many of them like notion evernote onenote obsidian mem all of them work in the same way they expect you to log every bit of information you come across everything that you think your brain cannot hold shopping lists quotes or reminders you don't even have to type it down you can simply voice record and send if you're reading something interesting online for instance you can email the relevant paragraphs to your second brain if you have a fleeting thought we're told you can make a quick note of it basically every time you come across something that grabs your attention you log in whatever form screenshots photos excel sheets slides from a powerpoint presentation lines from an e-book excerpts from online articles and then you can access all of this information whenever you want say years later you want to write an essay or prepare an address on federalism all you need to do is go to your second brain and type in the keywords everything that you uploaded on the topic will be in front of you if you've uploaded a grocery list you can retrieve it the next time you go shopping advocates of the second brain say the system helps in knowledge management it increases creativity and the theory is pretty interesting it's almost like having your own little library in the cloud so is this the future well more like the present believe it or not all of us already have a second brain all the apps that we use double up as a second brain you know the ones that remind you to drink water or to stretch to call home even breathe abs tell you to stand up and breathe they remind you to buy bread on the way back home apps remind you what you were doing 10 years back in the month of june gigabyte after gigabyte of content from your life is spread across these apps do you remember what was the storage capacity of the first iphone 16 gigabytes today an iphone's memory can be expanded up to one tb that's one terabyte full of information from your day-to-day life what second brain apps do is replace all these apps with one a notepad which doubles up as your library your gallery your reminder your password keeper your bookmark your scrapbook your logbook basically everything it's all catalogued some apps take it a step up they use time and location data this is to remind you of information slash memories that you may have uploaded but forgotten say you go to a restaurant the app will tell you that you came here three years back and this is what you ordered then this is who you came with and this is what you thought of the experience back then obviously provided you've logged all of that but who does that who documents so much information from their daily life actually most of us do we are continuously uploading stories we're tweeting every fleeting thought blogging experiences second brain app store this content quick question can't we store the same information offline of course we can we can keep notes we can keep files see this it's a filing cabinet once upon a time every office would have such cabinets but filing and then searching for that file takes a lot of time a digital brain is more convenient but do we really need one some of us can barely handle one brain jokes apart science disagrees with the very hypothesis of the second brain it says our brain can store information in fact it can store 2.5 beta bytes of information do you know how much that is enough to store 3 million hours of tv shows you have to leave a tv running for 300 years to use up all that brain space in other words we don't have to worry about running out of brain space in our lifetime so why do we need a second brain at all these apps handicap us they make us unnecessarily dependent on technology today at least 20 million people are using a second brain some are leaning on them for making life decisions i read this very interesting story in an article this is what it said listen to this annie a 27 year old in new york city began taking notes on her dating life for annie the notion love tracker functions almost as an alternate memory which once or twice helped her clarify amorphous gut feeling she was experiencing once after a first date i remember thinking this guy is so much fun but he seems really immature and he says then during the third date with him she was enjoying herself but began to feel a bit uneasy like something was eating at me that i could not put a finger on she said so she went home consulted her notion love tracker and there in her neatly organized table she found that she had noticed his immaturity from the very beginning she stopped seeing him my question is did she really need an app to tell her this she was supposed to remember that piece of information without the help from an app the problem is not with the capacity of our brain but our shrinking attention span the reason why most of us forget information or names is because we aren't paying enough attention to them in the first place we are preoccupied all the time and mostly it's with our phone a second brain only worsens this condition it expects you to frantically document to go through life like that person in the courthouse who is documenting every word being said what would you rather do log the thoughts that cross your mind when you're sitting by the sea or let the chain of thoughts flow as you absorb the beautiful sunset i may have digressed a bit but my point is quite simple we humans are more than what we document also we humans evolve with time the thoughts that a 30 year old me penned down may not even resonate with a 40 year old me so storing those thoughts can be a waste of time both in the human brain space and the second brain space you see our brain functions in the most amazing way it ensures we only remember what's relevant our brain prioritizes clarity over clutter our brain grows and it wants us to grow what we need to do is pay more attention to things happening around us and you'll be amazed at the kind of memory the human brain is blessed with so back to the question do we really need a second brain well here's how i look at it a little medicine reminder or a grocery reminder may help us balance our daily lives better but beyond that i think the human brain is good enough [Music]

Channel: WION

Views: 272,479

Keywords: human brain, brain, the human brain, human brain class 10, the brain, brain facts, human brain chip, brain structure, human brain facts, dying human brain, brain bank, anatomy of human brain, how the human brain works, palki sharma, wion, gravitas plus, human brain second brain, second brain popular, gravitas plus wion, palki sharma wion, gravitas plus today, gravitas plus watch, gravitas plus today episode

Id: GIhpBChLpU0

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022