Book Notes: Create Your Own Economy

Excerpt from Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy, p. 96:

"The late Fischer Blank, the brilliant economist who helped invent options pricing theory in finance, was obsessed with recording his ideas and conversations. Perry Mehrling, Black's biographer, wrote about Black's life:

'He did almost all of his work in an outlining program called ThinkTank, which he used as a kind of external associative memory to supplement his own. Everything he read, every conversation he had, every thought that occurred, everything got summarized and added to the database that swelled eventually to 20 million bytes organized in 2,000 alphabetical files...Reading, discussion, and thinking that Fischer did outside the office was recorded on slips of paper to be entered into the database later. Reading, discussion and thinking that took place inside the office was recorded directly.'"

This is extreme, to be sure, but I highlight this example to make a point. Makers of ideas are not only, as shown above, storing more of their brain's activity, they--as Steven Johnson emphasized in Where Good Ideas Come From--are organizing it, using programs such as Devon Think to act as glorified search engine of their own brains, or at least what they document from them.

Imagine, a search engine which encourages you to make relevant connections between present and past thoughts. Johnson uses this program to write his books; I just downloaded a demo the other day to see what it's like.