Personal knowledge‑management systems (notes, linked archives, indexed media—what Tiago Forte calls a 'second brain') are becoming de facto cognitive infrastructure that extends human memory and combinatory capacity. Widespread adoption will change who is creative (favoring those who curate and connect external stores), reshape education toward external‑memory literacy, and create inequality if access and skill in managing external knowledge are uneven.
— Treating 'second brains' as public‑scale cognitive infrastructure reframes debates about schooling, workplace credentials, platform design, and digital equity.
Bob Grant
2026.09.29
52% relevant
William Dowd’s yearlong Dormio experiment (using a dream‑inception device to steer nightly content and produce prose poems) exemplifies a small, concrete instance of external cognitive tooling being used to extend or outsource creative cognition, which maps onto the 'second‑brain' notion of external systems augmenting human thinking and memory.
Jake Currie
2026.04.02
65% relevant
The study supplies empirical evidence that mycelial networks transmit and modulate electrical signals in response to localized stimuli (water) and not to others (brief urine exposure), which concretely supports the broader idea that fungal mycelia act as distributed information systems — a ‘second brain’ or ecological signalling infrastructure — rather than being passive biomass; the article gives a named researcher (Yu Fukasawa), taxa (Hebeloma), experimental manipulations (electrodes, water, urine), and a hypothesized mechanism (localized vs global information utility).
David Eagleman, Scott Barry Kaufman, Tiago Forte
2025.12.03
100% relevant
Tiago Forte’s explicit pitch for a 'second brain' (personal system for knowledge management and note‑taking) in the article; Eagleman’s point about cortical 'space' between input and output; Kaufman’s learning vs imagination distinction.