Organizing my brain

Currently, I’m down this path of curiosity again. I find when I travel this path, I want to allow myself to flow but also be able to capture what I’m thinking, consuming, researching, and musing (find a better word?) as fast as possible. I recently found myself doing AI Training and I got a prompt that asked to explain Zettelkasten which I’ve never heard of before. Which took me down an entire rabbit hole that got me here — on Obsidian.

Now that I’m using Obsidian, I want to import all of my notes from Apple and Notion to reorganize my thoughts.

In the shower this morning, I realized I have spatial memory. All these years, I’ve compensated my linear and chronological memory by attaching noteworthy and non-noteworthy objects from particular memories in time to help remember.

For example, if I want to remember 2015, I attach general spatial objects like: the year I graduated, began working at Zara, half-day schedule at Blake HS, Mr. Pazulski, Internship Program program, Web development, Vincent,Wrestling, etc. to that year and it pieces together what 2015 might’ve felt like for me.**

Why Mr. Pazulski?

• He was a teacher at Blake
  • Why Internship program?
    • Mr. Pazulski was the Internship Coordinator at Blake and my Web development teacher for two years.
      • Why Zara?
        • That’s where I worked full-time while in my half-day/internship program
          • Why Vincent?
            • It’s my middle name
            • But also the kid who was my co-Web Master/Administrator
              • Why wrestling?
                • Vincent was a wrestler

Now, instead of keeping all of those seemingly disjointed ideas in my brain and trying to categorize them properly, I can visualize them with Obsidian. All of these ideas begin to form webs, and these webs are precisely how I think.

In a sense, these ideas can cascade into each other, which led me to not think about how it’s organized in hierarchical folders. However, just because they intersect doesn’t mean they should be categorized together. If anything, they’re more or less a Venn diagram of ideas that unionize at specific points, but nothing further than that.

Each of these ideas are a point in spacetime in my head. I don’t necessarily define the space or the time until I retrieve the idea/memory. In reality, space nor time exists in my mind. Things just are and because they just are, I can connect a dot “in the past” to a “current” dot. These intersections create the web of ideas I’m constantly expanding, which we’ll call my Circle of Competence.