Free up your mind’s real estate(very practical)

[Rigel]

I remember a guy a while back arguing here that you should not write down your thoughts but try to remember everything inside your head. He was arguing that by doing this you increase the capacity of your mind to hold information.
To me that is idiocy. Let me explain.

The real estate of your mind is going to be filled at full capacity no matter what’s held within it. Which leads me to the insight(very obvious): Learn to use a goddam calendar & to do list.

If you try to remember every appointment & shit you gotta do on a daily basis, you are not training your mind to increase its real estate, you are actively taking it away from things like creativity, spontaneous insights or general awareness of your emotions and your surroundings. Earlier today I was on the bus, commuting and I started to tear up looking at the beauty of my hands. That sort of moment can’t happen if I have useless junk in my mind like: “I gotta remember to pay the rent tomorrow”. Fuck that useless information😅 I’d much rather have an app remember for me and send me a notification when I have to do it.

 If you are delegating the task of remembering chores, appointments, action steps toward your goals, calling your grandmother, brushing your teeth even, you aren’t decreasing the ability of your mind to hold information. You are just freeing space for your mind to hold better information.

Your mind is made to have creative thoughts not to remember them. Calendar & to do list are as important as a common place book in remembering what’s important to you.

Have a block in your calendar just to contemplate what you want, what you need to do to get there & fill it up with those high quality action steps instead of just going about your day being swayed by things that aren’t on purpose.

[Thought Art]

I agree

[Bobby_2021]

That guy is me and you are missing the point.

Your mind is a mess and is not optimised to hold information. I can recall almost every significant event in my life with the exact event and dates because I trained me mind to do it.

My brother can easily recall the number plates of cars even if he saw that once. The point is to optimise your mind to do it. Don't try too hard if it doesn't feel too natural to you. 

Anything I think is relevant stays in my mind. I am not saying that you should hold useless information in your mind like phone numbers or appointments.

The fundamental reason why you cannot hold things in your mind is because you think it's somehow irrelevant. That's the problem. 

You think the image of your hand is somehow worthwhile while paying your rent tomorrow is useless and you struggle to hold the useless part of the information in memory. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening here. Your mind is biased against one thing.

You have no problems holding the memory of your mother or spouse in your mind. Your mind does it for you.

All I am talking about is to extend that capacity to more stuff around you. But you have to train your mind to do that. And don't try too hard if you can't, because you are not interested. You cannot force yourself to hold information in your mind which becomes torture. 

[Bobby_2021]

If you need a superior understanding of the world, you would need to hold a lot of information in your mind even before they start making sense. 

Only then, after tons of hours of contemplation, will things start to make sense. 

[Bobby_2021]

Also I started writing all my insights after that. But I never went back to reading my own insights. Because my mind already has them by second nature.

Nevertheless, it is good to swift past them I guess. 

[Chadders]

@Rigel Yes that is good advice. I use Apple reminders for anything like that

I hate how society values logical studies as more prestigious than creative or emotive ones. These logical studies are the ones that demand you remember a ton of shit and get stuck in your head 

[Rigel]

@Bobby_2021 You do you brother.

I am biased and ain’t ashamed of it. I don’t see any value in remembering licence plates. To me it’s taking space on the hard drive for no reason. My bias is towards creativity & awareness, not remembering the door lock code on the 15 different places I gotta go teach every month and where I’ll never go again.

It’s not like I don’t care about the things I write down. I write them down because I care about them and I understand my human mind is finite.

Every time I sit down to practice my instrument I increase my capacity to hold information like you are saying. But you gotta choose what’s important and what’s not at some point. You can’t remember everything about everything.

My point is that by deciding what’s important and putting it in the calendar or the notes saves all the energy you would be directing towards remembering it. That energy is not wasted. You just use it for bigger and better things. 

Edited March 9, 2024 by Rigel

[Rigel]

@Chadders A lot of people will want to sue us but I love apple reminders as well😅 That’s the one I use.

Edited March 9, 2024 by Rigel

[Bobby_2021]

44 minutes ago, Rigel said:

@Bobby_2021 You do you brother.

I am biased and ain’t ashamed of it. I don’t see any value in remembering licence plates. To me it’s taking space on the hard drive for no reason. My bias is towards creativity & awareness, not remembering birthdays. I love when all of my bandwidth is occupied by that. It’s not like I don’t care about the things I write down. I write them down because I care about them and I understand my human mind is finite.

Every time I sit down to practice my instrument I increase my capacity to hold information like you are saying. But you gotta choose what’s important and what’s not at some point. You can’t remember everything about everything.

My point is that by deciding what’s important and putting it in the calendar or the notes saves all the energy you would be directing towards remembering it. That energy is not wasted. You just use it for bigger and better things. 

At the end of the day, it is to each their own. 

To be real though, it does not consume "space" in your mind. Your mind has a lot more space than you can ever imagine. And even more with neat optimizations or understanding. Not having such tools when you are starting out can also be a factor. 

Also, I do not "try" to remember. I simply remember. There is no effort involved in this. You simply involve deeply in something and your neurons fire energetically enough, you will naturally remember.

Anyhow, pick what feels right for you. The trick is to not force anything on you that feels unnatural. 

[Rigel]

@Bobby_2021 That’s reasonable. Maybe you got some kind of mind that remembers better than most. I still think using a calendar and to do list is good advice for most people hence the post.

[Rigel]

17 minutes ago, Bobby_2021 said:

To be real though, it does not consume "space" in your mind.

Yes it does. Your human mind is finite. Only an infinite mind wouldn’t have a limit of capacity and at that point it wouldn’t be here having this discussion. A human can’t be an astronaut and a musician and an author and a psychologist and a race car driver and a programmer and the president of 10 different countries and the starter of 34 different businesses in different fields at once. Humans are finite.

Edited March 9, 2024 by Rigel

[Reciprocality]

2 hours ago, Rigel said:

To me it’s taking space on the hard drive for no reason.

@Rigel ^You said this in reference to remembering insignificant details, but are you sure the mind works similarly to a hard drive in these ways?

In certain circumstances I would agree that there are upper limits in our mind the way there are upper limits to a hard drive, but while the information you can store on a hardrive in any given hour on a pc is limited by how much is already stored within that duration it appears from my own experiences that many times I will have a higher capacity to remember something particular from within the duration of a given hour the more things I were doing in addition to that thing, until perhaps the law of diminishing returns.

Edited March 9, 2024 by Reciprocality

[Bobby_2021]

6 hours ago, Rigel said:

Yes it does. Your human mind is finite. Only an infinite mind wouldn’t have a limit of capacity and at that point it wouldn’t be here having this discussion. A human can’t be an astronaut and a musician and an author and a psychologist and a race car driver and a programmer and the president of 10 different countries and the starter of 34 different businesses in different fields at once. Humans are finite.

It's definitely possible but not easy. You need to build the mental infrastructure for holding all that. It's not easy to build it.

Is it possible? Absolutely.

I don't think it's realistic. But if you put in the work then it is possible. 

Da Vinci did something similar. Polymaths are not that uncommon. 

[Rigel]

On 2024-03-09 at 3:52 PM, Reciprocality said:

@Rigel ^You said this in reference to remembering insignificant details, but are you sure the mind works similarly to a hard drive in these ways?

In certain circumstances I would agree that there are upper limits in our mind the way there are upper limits to a hard drive, but while the information you can store on a hardrive in any given hour on a pc is limited by how much is already stored within that duration it appears from my own experiences that many times I will have a higher capacity to remember something particular from within the duration of a given hour the more things I were doing in addition to that thing, until perhaps the law of diminishing returns.

I think you are right about that. It’s just a metaphor. Your mind is much more complex than a hard drive. Much more complex than I make it out to be here. I should have been more careful there.

Edited March 11, 2024 by Rigel

[Rigel]

22 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

It's definitely possible but not easy. You need to build the mental infrastructure for holding all that. It's not easy to build it.

Is it possible? Absolutely.

I don't think it's realistic. But if you put in the work then it is possible. 

Da Vinci did something similar. Polymaths are not that uncommon. 

Well lets add the information necessary to be accomplished in a thousand other disciplines of similar complexity to what I said.

My point was that life is infinite. There’s infinite specific knowledge to be learned and your human mind is not. You have limited time to learn unlimited information.

Leo’s video on decisiveness is à propos here. I want to keep this practical. This was about calendars and to do lists😄

[Princess Arabia]

Memories are stored in the heart.

[Chadders]

@Rigel it’s brilliant

I have three categories. One for general reminders, one for my business and one for occasions like birthdays, Mother’s Day etc as I never remember that!

I do go for walks a lot in nature and deliberately don’t take my phone with me but often have insights. Need to start taking a notepad out rather than rushing back once I have the insights to include on the notes app!