Notes

If I have made a mistake somewhere in this book—either in attributing an idea to the wrong person or not giving credit to someone where it is due—please email me at hello@fortelabs.co so I can fix the issue as soon as possible. In addition to the notes below, you can find a full list of updated endnotes and corrections at Buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.

CHAPTER 1: WHERE IT ALL STARTED

  1. 1 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), Amazon Kindle Location 1990 of 5689.

CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS A SECOND BRAIN?

  1. 1 Nick Bilton, “Part of the Daily American Diet, 34 Gigabytes of Data,” New York Times, December 9, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/10data.html.
  2. 2 Daniel J. Levitin, “Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain,” New York Times, August 9, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share.
  3. 3 Microsoft, The Innovator’s Guide to Modern Note Taking: How businesses can harness the digital revolution, https://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-GQE-382/images/EN-US%2017034_MSFT_WWSurfaceModernNoteTaking_ebookRefresh_R2.pdf.
  4. 4 IDC Corporate USA, The Knowledge Quotient: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information Using Search and Content Analytics, http://pages.coveo.com/rs/coveo/images/IDC-Coveo-white-paper-248821.pdf.
  5. 5 Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 224.
  6. 6 Craig Mod, “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing,” craigmod.com, June 2011, https://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/.
  7. 7 Including innovators like Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay, among many others.

CHAPTER 3: HOW A SECOND BRAIN WORKS

  1. 1 Wikipedia, s.v., “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” accessed October 13, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Structure_of_Nucleic_Acids:_A_Structure_for_Deoxyribose_Nucleic_Acid.
  2. 2 Deborah Chambers and Daniel Reisberg, “Can mental images be ambiguous?,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 11, no. 3 (1985): 317–28, https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.11.3.317.
  3. 3 Nancy C. Andreasen, “Secrets of the Creative Brain,” July/August 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/secrets-of-the-creative-brain/372299/.
  4. 4 Wikipedia, s.v., “Recency Bias,” accessed October 13, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias.
  5. 5 Robert J. Shiller, “What to Learn in College to Stay One Step Ahead of Computers,” New York Times, May 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/upshot/what-to-learn-in-college-to-stay-one-step-ahead-of-computers.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share.
  6. 6 For a fascinating look into how persuasion and sales is becoming a fundamental part of almost everyone’s job, see Daniel Pink, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), 6.
  7. 7 Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 421.
  8. 8 Each of these stories is real, but names have been changed to protect their anonymity.
  9. 9 Erwin Raphael McManus, The Artisan Soul: Crafting Your Life into a Work of Art (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 171.

CHAPTER 4: CAPTURE—KEEP WHAT RESONATES

  1. 1 Wikipedia, s.v., “Taylor Swift,” accessed October 13, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift.
  2. 2 Swiftstyles II, “Taylor Swift being a songwriting genius for 13 minutes,” July 27, 2020, YouTube video, 13:52, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLHQatwwyWA.
  3. 3 NME, “Taylor Swift—How I Wrote My Massive Hit ‘Blank Space,’ ” NME.com, October 9, 2015, YouTube video, 3:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYUDY4lmls.
  4. 4 Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (Boston: Birkhäuser Boston, 1997), 202.
  5. 5 James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Open Road Media, 2011), 226.
  6. 6 Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2, no. 2 (June 1998): 175–220, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175.
  7. 7 Marianne Freiberger, “Information is surprise,” Plus Magazine, March 24, 2015, https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise.
  8. 8 Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman, “The Science of ‘Inside Out,’ ” New York Times, July 3, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-inside-out.html.
  9. 9 Stephen Wendel, Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2013).
  10. 10 Zachary A. Rosner et al., “The Generation Effect: Activating Broad Neural Circuits During Memory Encoding,” Cortex 49, no. 7 (July–August 2013), 1901–1909, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2012.09.009.
  11. 11 James W. Pennebaker, “Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process,” Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (May 1997), 162–66.

CHAPTER 5: ORGANIZE—SAVE FOR ACTIONABILITY

  1. 1 Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 80.
  2. 2 Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 2 (2007): 174–86, https://doi.org/10.1086/519146.
  3. 3 Adam Davidson, “What Hollywood Can Teach Us About the Future of Work,” New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2015.

CHAPTER 6: DISTILL—FIND THE ESSENCE

  1. 1 “Inside Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Notebook”: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/inside-francis-ford-coppolas-godfather-notebook-never-before-seen-photos-handwritten-notes-9473-947312/.
  2. 2 AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies - 10th Anniversary Edition, Television Academy.
  3. 3 Francis Coppola’s Notebook, imdb.com, 2001, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0881915/.
  4. 4 Jess Wise, “How the Brain Stops Time,” Psychology Today, March 13, 2010, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/extreme-fear/201003/how-the-brain-stops-time.
  5. 5 Meghan Telpner, Academy of Culinary Nutrition, Academy of Culinary Nutrition (blog), https://www.culinarynutrition.com/blog/.
  6. 6 Artyfactory. (n.d.). Animals in Art—Pablo Picasso. Retrieved January 27, 2022, from https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/pablo_picasso.htm.

CHAPTER 7: EXPRESS—SHOW YOUR WORK

  1. 1 Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories: Positive Obsession (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 123–36.
  2. 2 Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2020).
  3. 3 Dan Sheehan, “Octavia Butler has finally made the New York Times Best Seller list,” LitHub.com, September 3, 2020, https://lithub.com/octavia-butler-has-finally-made-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/.
  4. 4 Butler’s archive has been available to researchers and scholars at the Huntington Library since 2010.
  5. 5 Deborah Barreau and Bonnie A. Nardi, “Finding and Reminding: File Organization from the Desktop,” ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 27, no. 3 (1995), 39–43, https://doi.org/10.1145/221296.221307. Joseph A. Maxwell, “Book Review: Bergman, M. M. (Ed.). (2008). Advances in Mixed Method Research. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage,” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 3, no. 4 (2009), 411–13, https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689809339316.
  6. 6 William P. Jones and Susan T. Dumais, “The spatial metaphor for user interfaces: experimental tests of reference by location versus name,” ACM Digital Library 4, no. 1 (1986), https://doi.org/10.1145/5401.5405.
  7. 7 Adam Savage, “Inside Adam Savage’s Cave: Model Making for Movies,” Adam Savage’s Tested, YouTube video, 20:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKRG6amACEE.

CHAPTER 8: THE ART OF CREATIVE EXECUTION

  1. 1 Danny Choo, “DIY: How to write a book,” boingboing, January 27, 2009, https://boingboing.net/2009/01/27/diy-how-to-write-a-b.html.

CHAPTER 9: THE ESSENTIAL HABITS OF DIGITAL ORGANIZERS

  1. 1 Dan Charnas, Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2016).

CHAPTER 10: THE PATH OF SELF-EXPRESSION

  1. 1 Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money (New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), 43.