Tomorrow: Future States of Mind
I’ve kept a journal nightly since the mid-90s. It began on my 11th birthday. Pages of lined spiral notebooks, purchased from the local five & dime1, are squirreled away in cabinets and drawers of my adult home. Even in a world of Google Docs in the cloud, on an annual basis, I find myself purchasing a new notebook.2
What We Can Capture
The value of journaling is a common topic, but perhaps it is best-described as a conversation with a future self. At AE, among our core values is the idea of an external structure.3 These external structures, whether human beings or technology, are relied upon to increase our personal agency.
However, we often assume our future selves will have similar working memory to our current selves. This is often a terrifying mistake, which appears when we read an item on our to-do list that was written a few days ago, only to discover that we have no idea whatsoever what we meant. Being kind and helpful to our future selves requires not only details, but the capture of one’s state of mind.
What We Cannot Capture
Capturing one’s state of mind is crucial, because it offers the opportunity to deploy a perspective from another state of mind. Typically, when examining a situation, we are necessarily constrained by our states of mind. We can only observe, analyze, and assess using the minds in our heads. To this end, often we call in a “second set of eyes,” asking for the opinions, insights, and perspectives of other human beings. Often these are colleagues, friends, and family who can be valuable reliable structures.
What is lost in this behavior is our potential to become valuable external structures not just for others, but for ourselves. Unfortunately, current technologies, be they spiral notebooks or cloud-based documents, are not ideal for capturing one’s state of mind for posterity. And this leaves us with diminished agency.
What Actually Happens
How often have you sat in a meeting, and while the speaker rambled and the Zoom camera was obscured, your mind wandered to an insight or idea worth capturing? Whether an existential revelation or an idea for improving one’s daily habits, your state of mind was, at that moment, perfect for generating that notion.
It was not, sadly, perfect for capturing that notion, and harvesting its value when more of your attention can be devoted to it. Most likely, you found yourself scrambling to pull up some note-taking app while simultaneously retaining what the speaker is saying. Our human agency manifesto notes our preference for individual flow (over interruptions) and single-tasking (over multi-tasking). Trying to juggle windows, apps, concentration, and memory of what is said to you and what you want to say to your future self is a recipe for decreased agency.
What Could Be Done About It
Brain computer interfaces (BCI) offer the potential solution. Your thought might be sufficient. If the neurological activity that was catalyzed by an interesting comment or the random walk of your wandering mind could be retained in a reliable, external structure, you’d address the needs of your current and future selves.
While beyond the current reaches of neuroscience, this is our aspiration for a BCI OS. An operating system capable of supporting developers who wish to increase human agency by saving the best of our thoughts, reminding us of our own insights from other states of mind.
Perhaps I will continue to pen a few lines by hand before I turn out the lights each evening. Rituals and habits also can increase agency. But maybe there are other states of mind throughout the day where we all unlock insights, ideas, and opportunities that are lost to history in the absence of the right external structure. Perhaps, on some distant day, BCI OS can help us build such a structure and retain the wisdom of all of our states of mind.
1
Once upon a time, there were brick and mortar buildings where, in exchange for five or ten cents, items could be purchased. Eventually, the items cost a bit more, but the idea remained.
2
Admittedly, this is now an Amazon purchase rather than a trip to a local merchant, so times do change!
3
One of AE’s core values.