How To Build a Digital Brain ( your second brain)

The human brain is a marvel with lots of capabilities. As more researchers study the brain, we get to know how much information the brain can store.

According to the Scientific American journal, The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem.

What if you can not only store more data but easily retrieve them and make more room in the brain for problem-solving and creativity?

You can easily cope with the growing body of knowledge by building a second brain (what I refer to as a Digital Brain). Managing information effectively means understanding that you cannot use your head to store and remember every detail.

Information is essential in everything that you do. To develop a new skill, complete a project successfully in the workplace or start and run a business, you’ll need the right information. To achieve your career goals and improve the quality of your life, you need to manage information effectively.

Read on to find out how you can build a second brain to manage information effectively and achieve your goals.
What Is a Second Brain?

How many times have you struggled to remember an important point from an article or book you read recently? Have you ever wasted time looking for a file that you thought you had saved?

If you’ve ever found yourself in such situations, you are not alone. Millions of people across the world are struggling with information overload in our modern society. Information overload is overwhelming because it taxes your mental resources and leaves you anxious.

This is where the concept of the second brain comes in.

Building a second brain doesn’t involve creating a man-made copy of your mind or recreating the human brain. It involves building an external system that captures, organizes, retrieves, and archives the ideas and thoughts that come to mind. The second brain enables you to optimize how you record, organize and recall information.

While you can use analog tools to build a second brain, digital tools are superior in every way.

Digital tools are more portable and accessible compared to physical tools. Due to these advantages, we are going to focus on the digital ways to build a second brain.
Digital Brain

A Digital Brain is similar to an external hard drive. You can store additional information if your hard drive is full. However, it records, organizes, and recalls. This means that you won’t have to struggle to improve your memory. This memory has a lot of elements.

From a computing perspective, memory involves three key elements:

. Recording — storing the information
. Organization — archiving it in a logical manner
. Recall — retrieving it again when you need it

Like a computer, having a Digital Brain will work in the same way as this memory framework to manage how information flows into and out of your brain.
For example:

When setting up a new account on a website, due to strict security settings, many sites require you to come up with complicated passwords with special characters that you don’t usually use.

As a result, you now have to memorize this new password (Record), associate it with the other passwords that are stored in your brain (Organize) and enter that password the next time you log in (Recall).

Even in this simple example, there are several parts in the process that will make it all too easy to forget. Because this new password is unique, we have a hard time recognizing it with our regular patterns. And if we don’t use the password every day, it’s easy to forget it after a few days. One day you’ll try to recall the password but enter the incorrect one over and over again.

It’s one of the most common things that happen. Is it because the information is complicated? Nope. A password is just a bunch of characters, numbers, and symbols.

It happens because our brains are not made to memorize. With a Digital Brain, you can delegate it to do the heavy lifting.