Search results for: “memory”

My notes are not a storage unit: they’re a graph of possibilities. When I revisit the right nodes, patterns emerge that are useful for thinking and designing.

After getting tired of accumulating notes without doing anything with them: How I didn’t write this article, I decided to take any two notes and create a third one that describes their connections: Anti-Entropy: from atomic fragments to knowledge molecules.

The first note: “interconnected ramified lives” — I found it still open from yesterday. Let’s start from here, why not?

I split my Obsidian screen in half so I can place two notes side by side.

I remember the satisfaction (what an intense life!) of having found this note again yesterday, so I could connect it with a video I’d found on YouTube. One of the useful techniques for retrieving things is associating them with a concept, a memory, a place.

Spontaneous connections come to mind:

• “Memory Palace,” the technique mentioned, for instance, in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, where the formidable detective manages to remember long, rich sequences of details by mentally placing them inside a memory palace where he can walk through any scene at will, as if it were his personal hard disk.
• In “Learning How To Learn” the suggestion is to associate concepts or structured ideas with absolutely surreal and comical fantasy scenes — the crazier they are, the more they’ll stick in your memory and be easy to retrieve when needed.

It turns out this first note is already rich with connections. A suggestion, my dear friend: don’t get lost, stay focused, it’s easy, use this note. It’s already written. And you wrote it. Your past self was generous enough to capture it and save it for you. Respect that time dedicated with so much care. Gather these little seeds of information and place them gently in fertile soil. Why don’t you just comment on these ideas? It’s easy. Come on. Try.

So… the note is titled “interconnected ramified lives” and — incredible! — I remember the difficulty I had finding a title that was both concise and representative. And I also remember worrying about choosing a title that would be easy to recall the day I’d want to find this idea again.

I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity that can spring from the combination of simple elements. The moves of a few pieces on a small chessboard. All the possible sequences of crosses and circles in a game of tic-tac-toe. And here, the infinite possibilities of a specific branch of mathematics open up: combinatorics.

And then, filling a great gap left during my youth, reading the great classics of literature, I found these envelopes of possibility in some great writers like Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Umberto Eco.

And here, my dear, comes the first note:

Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others. 

—If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino

Connection! I remember the “click!”, the flash visualised in my brain. And I remember it in three dimensions, animated, interactive, in colour. A tangible world into which I was catapulted instantaneously: a dense tangle of gnarled branches exploding from a root.

Connection!:

TREE the very slow explosion of a seed.

— Bruno Munari “Fenomeni bifronti, Etra/Arte, 1993 Versi” 

Every branch, a potential path, a possible life. The tree is the set of all possible lives — not just arbitrary or random choices, but truly ALL possible lives.

Imagine yourself, my friend, reading Calvino’s passage and having this Vivid Vision explode in your mind, where concepts that seemed distant and foreign are summoned like luminescent spirits and transform into parts of a whole that assembles itself into a new concept: connection!

And this is only the first paragraph. Let’s continue reading.

I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told.

—If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino

Maremma Maiella! Connection! I reread this passage, captured a year ago, and I feel the same electric sensation. I don’t know how useful it is, how important it is, but it’s beautiful! Connection!

How is it possible that Italo’s words describe what I saw in the private intimacy of my own brain? I’ve never told anyone (until now). It’s an image of mine! Mine alone! And Italo described it decades earlier and turned it into one of the most resonant literary works in history. I was struck then; I’m astounded now.

Not only is it easy, but it’s so spontaneous that the words gush from my fingertips. And why have I denied myself this intellectual pleasure for all this time?

But it’s not over. That messy, scrawny note, tossed in perhaps absent-mindedly months ago, has still more to offer. Keep going. Don’t stop.

«It seems a matter of fact that man — and perhaps woman even more so — needs a certain dose of fiction, which is to say, needs the imaginary as well as the actual and the real. (…) He needs to know the possible as well as the true, conjectures and hypotheses and failures as well as facts, what was left aside and what might have been as well as what was. When we speak of a man’s or a woman’s life, when we trace a recapitulation or a summary, when we tell their story or biography, in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia or a chronicle or chatting among friends, the custom is to recount what that person accomplished and what actually happened. Ultimately, we all share the same tendency, namely, to see ourselves in the various phases of our lives as the result and compendium of what happened to us and what we achieved and what we accomplished, as if this alone constituted our existence. And we almost always forget that people’s lives are not just this: every path is also composed of our losses and our refusals, our omissions and our unfulfilled desires, of what we once set aside or didn’t choose or didn’t obtain, of the numerous possibilities that in most cases never came to fruition — all except one, in the final reckoning — of our hesitations and our dreams, our failed projects and our false or feeble aspirations, the fears that paralysed us, what we abandoned and what abandoned us. In short, we people perhaps consist as much of what we are as of what we have been, as much of what is verifiable and quantifiable and memorable as of what is more uncertain, undecided and blurred; perhaps we are made in equal measure of what was and what might have been.»

— Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Novel by Javier Marías

What can I say except, once again, shouting: “connection!” Of course. We’re still talking about potential lives, lived lives, and lives that might have been. This note is formidable — it’s a resonant attractor that with every discovery triggers a small jolt in the pit of my stomach. How could I have captured this gem and let it gather mould in my digital basement? This nearly became a mortal intellectual sin. Never again!

Not yet satisfied — there are more notes. Let’s go taste them.

“The Possibility Machine.” At this point, shivers run down my spine and the skin on my forearm stiffens into bristling bumps of trembling pleasure.

Some pictures are just for me. They’re part of the thought process, answers to questions I have about possible outcomes. I’ll share them with my peers to get their input on a problem I’m working on. Call these pictures that discover. The purpose of a picture that discovers: explore the vast space of possible designs. Visualize alternate realities. Play. Pictures that discover are usually messy, unfinished, abandoned once the exploration is done. They’re sketches in notebooks, moodboards filled with screenshots, and unlabeled artboards in Figma. In some ways, the messiness of these pictures is a symptom of modern design tools’ ways of keeping many copies of your work side by side. It’s a brilliant way of time traveling, creating many branches of reality where you can explore the possibilities of design decision. But the tools don’t often have a way of organizing or managing the copies of your work.

— Pictures of websites by Matthew Strom

There are pictures that discover, define, deliver.

I’m speechless. I’ve connected Calvino’s potential lives in his novel with combinatorics, the visualisation of possibilities, fate and the effect of choices, the intertwining of lives, and now — splendidly — the tree of possibilities that a designer has and can reveal when exploring possible solutions through prototypes. I’m speechless. I admire, moved, in silence.

Everything I’ve recounted so far happened in my “Second Brain” (a term I ardently despise), somehow without my “first brain” knowing. Since I started systematically using Obsidian and got into the habit of annotating things, I do it (evidently) in such an automatic way — I’d call it, at this point, “in a trance” — that I forget about it immediately after. Is this a good thing? A bad thing?

If I capture the inspiration and the motivations that drove me and am then able to “relive” that context: it’s a good thing, definitely.

But if I forget about it forever or can’t find it when I need it, it’s an absolute disaster.

Here lies the inestimable value of this exercise: giving new worth to the thousands of notes scattered across my various brains, celebrating their happy intuition, and sowing seeds for further development.

And it’s not over. Let’s go to yesterday.

[[2026-02-12]] I was able to find this note again searching “connected lives”.

I like thinking about ramified lives as the graph depicted in this video:

Are you pondering what I’m pondering? Connection! A three-dimensional, interactive visualisation of all possible combinations of moves in a puzzle. A visualisation that lets you appreciate the extent, the nature, the shape and the complexity of what unfolds from what seems like an innocent pastime.

Serendipity: The molecule I found is a different one 

My notes are precious: this makes me feel good. In the apparent chaos of my jottings, treasures lie waiting to be discovered. Deciding to dedicate time to rediscovering old notes and developing them into chains of ideas is a precious activity that gives value to my intuitions and allows them to grow into more elaborate ideas. Revisiting past notes is not necessarily boring or painful: discovering notes in which evidence of intuition accumulates signals the importance of that subject to me and allows me to discover patterns. Unlike unmotivated or mandated research, going to browse through my spontaneous notes can bring genuine joy and delight: this is the world of ideas I love to inhabit.

There would be dozens of connections to chase — every note calls another. But what strikes me is that an unexpected connection emerges at a meta level:

• Atom A: The act of note-taking is almost unconscious, “in a trance” — I capture intuitions and then forget them.
• Atom B: The act of revisiting those notes generates an emotional and cognitive reaction disproportionate to the effort — the chain of “connection!” moments, the shivers, the emotion.
• Molecule: Writing and rereading are two halves of the same cognitive gesture, separated by time. My “past self” wasn’t simply taking notes — it was sowing seeds in the soil of my future mind. And the molecules exercise is the deliberate act of going to harvest those seeds.

This is Molecule Zero. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t expected — it emerged while I was trying to figure out where to begin. And perhaps that’s exactly right: a project about connecting ideas could only be born from an unexpected connection.

Until the next molecule: two atoms, one bond, a small deliberate act of meaning. Let’s see where it leads.