Scott P Scheper, page 14
An Antinet is not an analog note database. It’s not even about storing notes. The Antinet concerns itself with the dualistic emergence of a second mind. A second mind is formed by properly integrating the four principles of the Antinet, and implementing an effective workflow enabling it to operate as a thinking system.
An Antinet is not a notetaking system; it’s not a notetaking app based on the functionality of linking notes (that is, wikilinks). To its creator (Niklas Luhmann), the Antinet was not “just an analog database,” writes Johannes Schmidt.246 It was not a container for storing notes; it was not chaotic for its creator either. The Antinet “was not a maze but a thinking tool, a communication partner, and a publication machine.”247
The problem with thinking of the Antinet as a notetaking system is that, well, it’s not a notetaking system! The term notetaking connotes the idea that you’re writing down facts or thoughts that are already formed. Luhmann’s Antinet was not a notetaking system. Hell, even the principles of an Antinet are not that important if the only thing they yield is the better taking of notes. The reason why an Antinet is important centers on the benefits it yields for one’s mind and thoughts. The Antinet is a thinking system because it transforms the way one thinks. It also is a thought system because it develops thought, both in the short term and the long term.
The key differentiator between an Antinet and a digital notetaking app is precisely that the Antinet is a thinking system.
The Antinet, when used properly, and when its four principles are involved, results in one’s thinking being transformed. The way you read books and recall thoughts changes in the course of using the Antinet. It’s an incommunicable experience, and something I’ll be touching on throughout the book.
Digital notetaking apps, on the other hand, can perhaps be employed to develop thought. In that respect they can be thought of as thought systems; however, they cannot be characterized as a thinking system (unless they are properly structured by way of the four principles of the Antinet). Even then, a digital notetaking app’s effectiveness is watered down because it naturally omits the first principle of the Antinet (analog).
The analog principle is critical because it involves writing by hand. This practice results in neuroimprinting thoughts on the mind, which is a critical element involved in a process called neuro-associative recall, which we’ll discuss next.
From using the Antinet, it could be postulated that Luhmann’s mind grew in two areas: (1) memory span of thought (or thought-span), and (2) neuro-associative recall.
Let’s explore both of these concepts now.
The Antinet’s Effect on the “Memory Span” of Thoughts (“Thought-Span”)
Within the field of memory research, scientists use the term memory span to refer to the minimum number of items one can recall.
Related experiments traditionally focus on more rudimentary recall tasks. They entail asking participants to recall a list of words, letters, or digits.248 The goal with an Antinet is to develop your memory span not for words, letters, or digits; but to develop your memory span for thought. That is, the goal is to develop the mind to instantly recall thoughts, and to recall as many thoughts as possible. This is what is meant by thought-span.249
How is it possible to develop the memory span of thoughts? This is achieved through neuroimprinting thoughts on your mind via something called elaborative rehearsal in the field of human memory. Also involved is maintenance rehearsal. Both of these processes are procured by a feature innate to the Antinet by way of its first principle (analog). Before moving on, let’s take a moment to address what is meant by the term neuroimprinting.
Neuroimprinting in the Antinet
Within the world of copywriting (which is the profession of writing compelling advertisements), one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived is Gary Halbert.250 This self-proclaimed, “Prince of Print,” used a method called neuroimprinting by which he taught copywriters how to become the best in their field. The simple practice is to write down, by hand, every single word (word-for-word) of the best advertisements ever written.
By trade, I was a copywriter in my previous professional life. Today, I am more generally, a writer. I was a good copywriter—scratch that—I was really good. My experience as a copywriter provided me with the greatest gift one could ask for: a lime green Lamborghini.
Just kidding!251 Success as a copywriter has given me the gift of time. It’s given me time to concentrate on writing about things I become fascinated with. For the past year, this fascination became an obsession with the powerful physical thinking system used by Niklas Luhmann. I had been writing and developing a notecard database from readings over the course of sixteen years. It wasn’t until fifteen years into this that I discovered the secret magic of Niklas Luhmann’s Antinet. My notebox has since been transformed and transitioned into an Antinet. How to transition a legacy notebox isn’t something I’ll cover right now, just know that it is indeed possible.
Here’s the point: I’ve had a lot of success as a copywriter, which has gifted me with the time of writing right now, to you. The secret to how I developed such skills as a copywriter can be found inside my own Antinet. Inside of it, I have over three hundred hand-written notecards of the best headlines ever written in advertising. I have personally experienced the magic of neuroimprinting. I won’t belabor this point. Neuroimprinting is a critical tool for developing one’s skills, mind, and thoughts. I have not found this magic to translate into the digital medium in a lossless way.
If you write out a great poem by keyboard, it will be imprinted on your screen. If you write out a great poem by hand, it will be imprinted on your soul.
the deep roots of neuroimprinting
It can be argued that neuroimprinting is a biological term observed to occur in infant birds, such as geese, ducks, and chickens.252 However I believe the concept to be less formal in nature (scientifically). Regardless, I hold the concept of neuroimprinting to be true because of empirical evidence.
The concept of neuroimprinting has rich and deep roots in scholarship. The scholar Francesco Sacchini (1570–1625) cites ancients who copied down texts. He explains they did such a practice not in order to have copies of them, but in order to better retain the knowledge.253
Sacchini recounts a story of Demosthenes copying down Thucydides eight times in order to understand the ideas more thoroughly. Sacchini also asserts that Saint Jerome (342–420 ad) wrote many volumes by hand, “not due to the weakness of his library but out of desire to profit from the exercise.”254
The New England preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1682: “The very writing of any thing fixes it deeper in the mind.”255
At Harvard College in the late seventeenth century, students were taught in the following manner. They were given the assignment to write down textbooks bought in England, by hand.256 It may sound like a lazy way of teaching; however, there remains a serious argument for the power of teaching students by making them write out knowledge by hand. We have moved away from the practice in modern times, but it’s something that may warrant revisiting.
The Antinet’s Effect: Neuro-Associative Recall
By neuroimprinting thoughts on your mind, via writing by hand, you’re primed to develop the most important muscle for recognizing and installing important thoughts from the books you read. The “muscle” I’m referring to is the neuro-associative recall “muscle” of your brain. The strength of your neuro-associative recall muscle is predicated on the analog principle of the Antinet. It’s also predicated on the index principle of the Antinet. The index principle forces you to imprint a term onto your mind. That term then maps to a specific numeric-alpha address. Without these two principles, you lose the ability to exercise and strengthen the neuro-associative recall muscle. In other words, when using an Antinet you’re training your memory by lengthening the memory span in which to recall a thought. You’re doing so by neuroimprinting a cue (in the form of a keyterm). This cue acts as a way to immediately recall thoughts to your mind. This exercises your neuro-associative recall muscle, which transforms your brain. While reading you’ll suddenly spot an idea or a thought. Instead of thinking of this thought as something new, you’ll immediately think of the keyterm it relates to in the Antinet. This better allows you to classify the idea, associate the idea, and then develop the current knowledge that you have of the thought. All of this, again, is founded on the four key principles of the Antinet. It’s specifically founded on two of those principles working together (analog and index). If it’s not apparent by now, it should start to become more obvious why the four principles are so critical for developing the type of system Luhmann used. When you strip the system of such functionality (which is what digital Zettelkasten do), you prevent such phenomena from happening.
When you use a physical thinking tool like the Antinet, you end up exercising your brain and its various “muscles,” and its various pathways. There’s no easy-way out; no lazy search mechanism that enables you to avoid thinking and associating ideas. It may seem outdated at first, but I assure you, a system that requires you to think and exercise your mind beats the latest and greatest digital app every time. Why? Because the best computer you’ll ever have is the one already operating inside your skull. Using an Antinet results in developing this organ; it could be argued that digital tools work in the opposite direction—perhaps they even tend to degrade your thinking.
The Antinet Is Not in the Same Category as “Notetaking Apps”
Notetaking apps primarily concern themselves with storing information that is mostly developed already. With an Antinet system you’re developing thoughts primarily through the process of writing them down by hand. It is a thinking system because it produces thoughts. It’s not the best tool for storing already thought-about information; though that does indeed have major benefits (neuroimprinting the great ideas and work of others on your mind). Primarily, the Antinet is a tool for developing information into knowledge—knowledge being your own thoughts.
The primary benefit of a digital notetaking app is its storage capacity. People seem to find comfort in digitally storing notes and syncing them across devices. They prefer this, without realizing they are prioritizing storage over the more crucial benefit: developing and evolving thought. It is my belief that a system that develops and evolves thought into developed thought is preferable to a system that merely stores (and links) undeveloped thought. Paradoxically, it seems that digital notetaking apps ultimately do a worse job of storing thoughts. Why? Because information is encountered less frequently, and thus recalled less frequently by the user than the knowledge stored in an Antinet. Why? Because digital information faces the perennial issue of generating a black hole of too much information.
Why an Antinet Is Not a “Memory System”
While an Antinet is a thinking system; it’s not only that type of system. It comprises other systems: it is a memory system, but not only a memory system; it’s also a sorting system, and a search system. Markus Krajewski has observed that an Antinet is not just a “memory aid” for recalling thoughts. It’s also, (1) a “sorting aid” (for sorting through thoughts), (2) a “search engine” (by way of index), and (3) a “computer” (in German, Rechenmaschine), “in the strict etymological sense of rechnen as ‘to organize’, ‘to guide’ and ‘to prepare’.”257
Another way of phrasing it is that an Antinet acts as a pre-processing engine allowing your thoughts to become ruminated on, fixed, corrected, recorrected, and matured. All of this happens before even writing the first word of your book, paper, essay, dissertation, blog post, or anything else. The way in which a thought forms and evolves is also different compared to how it would otherwise evolve in digital notetaking apps.
A key reason the Antinet is not a memory system, but more of a thinking system, centers on its proficiency in bringing to the surface parts of your thinking that are, upon further rumination, potentially not entirely correct. The Antinet, thanks to its structure and analog design, allows for proactive interference. It does this in a manner that is different—if not entirely impossible–for digital tools to achieve. What is meant by proactive interference will be covered next.
Human memory is complex, important, and still a mystery.258 When Luhmann began building his Antinet, it was in reaction to his “poor memory.”259 Yet he discovered the issue to be much more complex, in part because his understanding of memory was incomplete. What he referred to as a “poor memory” when he began building his Antinet in the 1950s related to retroactive interference, the interference caused by losing thoughts you’ve already previously learned.
Another type of interference in human memory prevents one from thinking clearly. It’s called proactive interference.260 You’ve probably heard the expression involving the notion of being your own worst enemy. This expression is founded on the idea that your own false-beliefs and cognitive fallacies can end up harming you more than any other person could. This isn’t an imaginary notion; much of the time it perfectly describes reality.
Wherever you go in life, you carry something with you. You carry information, facts, knowledge, and beliefs. These are stored in your mind. These things rely on your memory for their encoding, storage, and retrieval. There’s a problem, however: your memory may have filled in gaps or assumptions with an oversimplified representation of reality to support the encoding, storage, and retrieval of thought(s). These parts proceed to go unquestioned; they’re never analyzed or consciously recognized by yourself. The core problem with this is that these memory shortcuts, if you will, end up preventing you from assimilating new, deeper, and more profound ways to think about things. In brief, it is not the inability to recall thoughts that is the problem; rather it’s the inability to learn and evolve current thoughts that becomes a problem. This is what is meant by proactive interference.
Why does proactive interference happen? It happens because thoughts remain in a fixed state; not in a state where they can evolve—and just as important—not where the trail of a thought’s evolution can be clearly viewed. This is one of the benefits of analog notecards. When notecards combine with the evolving branching and stemming tree structure component of the Antinet, it is possible to observe knowledge growth. This prevents thoughts from being subject to proactive interference by forcing the thinker to constantly review and recall thoughts they stumble across—this happens more frequently in an Antinet because users are forced to swing from card to card, guided by the index, instead of simply searching the collection by keyword (like in digital notetaking apps).
Thinking systems that mitigate proactive interference are a critical component to improving the intelligence of one’s work. “Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet, in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.”261 A system that mitigates proactive interference is a system that helps one rethink and unlearn. This type of system is precisely what the Antinet allows with its third principle, the tree structure.
In summary, the Antinet is not a memory system, alone. Memory systems imply helping solve for one type of interference in human memory (that is, the interference that causes one to forget something). The Antinet solves for both types of interference in thought development (including the interference caused by thinking you know something that you don’t really know).
Working with an Antinet Develops Your Memory Faculties
An Antinet is not an external system that enables you to simply offload the
energy you’d otherwise rely on for your brain to recall thoughts. It acts as a system that exercises and enhances your brain’s memory faculties. That is, the Antinet enhances your brain’s ability to encode, store, and recall thought(s). The Antinet, with its neuroimprinting process, develops your mind’s capabilities for recollecting and recognizing interesting patterns when you read. This enables you to make connections to material ruminating in your Antinet. In the field of human memory studies, this involves a process called recognition.262 Let’s cover this briefly now.
In the field of human memory studies, when you recognize a concept, two processes occur in the mind:
1.Familiarity: this process involves placing a confidence value on how familiar you are with the content you encounter. This includes what those who study human memory call strength theory.
2.Recollection: this process involves the recall of contextual information related to the content you encounter while reading.
It’s critical to recognize a concept while reading because it provides for two things: (1) it enables you to create information via comparison, and (2) it allows you to relate this information to a selective set of other relations. This is a necessary precursor for creating knowledge, and ultimately, achieving wisdom. The concept of selective relations will be discussed at length later in this book.
Let’s jump back to the two processes occurring in the mind during recognition: familiarity and recollection. The question becomes How does the Antinet serve to enhance these two processes?
The Antinet enhances the process of familiarity (familiarity with a concept) through the practice of two of its principles: (1) its analog principle, which spawns neuroimprinting, and (2) its index component, which results in consistent reviewing of information while searching for previously-noted thoughts.
The Antinet also enhances the process of recollection through forcing users to develop thoughts within contexts. This emerges via the third principle of the Antinet, its tree structure. Users create different contexts by organizing their knowledge around branches, or stems of thought in their Antinet.
As scholars have observed, both variables (familiarity and recollection) paradoxically transform a notetaking system from something designed to replace human memory into a system that both replaces and enhances human memory. Alberto Cevolini points out that handwritten notetaking, due to the repetition that helps the mind retain passages, and the respective construction of a card index, serve as both a substitute for personal memory and a memory aid.263
