Recently I've started consuming a lot of content from Ali Abdaal's YouTube channel and there a lot of really good ideas there. He talks about productivity, organization etc.. Recently he talked about the concept of a second brain in one of his videos. There are also videos where he talks about how we can automate a lot of our tasks using technology these days. I'd like to elaborate more on these ideas and how they are leading me to think that I'd like exams to be open book.

Second brain

He says, "Anything that resonates with you and needs to be remembered goes into your second brain". I define 'Second brain' as a system of effective recording of ideas using whatever tool we find is most suited to our needs, so that accessing them at a later time becomes much easier.

But why do we need this in the first place? Our brains are infamous for forgetting things that we don't put an effort into retaining. This is a known phenomena and is encapsulated perfectly in the "Forgetting curve". So to maximize our creativity and productivity, we can work around this and put all the things that we think we will forget later into our second brain. Ali uses Notion (it is a note taking app but with a lot of super powers) as his 'second brain'.

Automation

These days a lot of mundane things that we do can be very easily automated using all the new technology that's coming up daily. Take Notion for example. If you want to start a daily practice of Gratitude journalling, you can create a template for yourself that you can then use daily to record your thoughts. This is a very basic example of automation. There are far bigger use cases for this. In the programming world, there's a sentence going around - "If you think the task takes more than 5 minutes, think of how you can automate it". I hope I've convinced you how neat this idea is.

Let's get to the actual talk

Now that the meanings of the second brain and automation are in place, let's actually get to why I started writing this.

According to me, the reason why such seemingly revolutionary ideas are becoming popular slowly is because we want to exploit our intellectual capacities to the fullest by using that very own intelligence to create tools that can compensate for our weaknesses.

The forgetting curve is real and I think everyone of us has experienced this. We forget things all the time. Don't we? So why waste our precious time trying to remember things that we know we'll definitely forget?

I know there are a few exceptions to this. For example, if we talk about medicine, doctors are expected to remember the names of medicines and the apt dosage, because there it is a matter of life and death. But in most of the other cases, I don't think remembering a lot of things is actually helping us in the long run. In our current way of imparting knowledge to the young minds of our society, we are churning out citizens who can do really well at cramming things just to get "good grades", but who have zero knowledge of how and when stuff that they're learning is applicable. I've been a victim of this too and it pains me to think that I spent so many years memorizing the years when some war happened, an endless list of formulae etc.. when I could've looked those up in a second on the Internet and instead spent all that time to actually understand the real implications of what I was learning.

I like to think of the Internet as the second brain of millions of other people whom I don't even think I would ever meet in my life time. Imagine the amount of info there is. It is gigantic, to say the least.

When we have such a wealth of knowledge at our disposal, it makes me uncomfortable to not use it.

Why I feel open book is a good choice?

When we transfer the responsibility of memorization to our second brains, we can spend more time on practicing and applying what we are actually learning. After we graduate and do an actual job, I don't think we'll have enough time to keep revising things. So we forget most of what we crammed for exams, which is a horrible waste of one of the most precious things we've got, TIME!! Instead we could spend that time applying what we learnt (which can automatically help us remember stuff for the time being) and when it comes to using it in the real world, if in case we forget something, all the info we need is just one click away!

Also when we do this, we can really understand why we are learning a given subject, which I see many students asking themselves. I ask myself this question too. When I was studying History especially, I asked this to myself so many times. The burden of memorization took over my brain and I never got an answer to this. But now I know why! Studying history helps us understand the world that we live in, in a much better manner. More than that, it makes us better decision makers and helps us evaluate events from the stand point of an outsider and helps us analyze what could have been done to prevent something from happening. I got to understand all this when I read this wonderful book called "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari.

So the point I'm trying to make is, why not do effective and useful tasks and leave the mundane stuff for our second brains to handle? They don't follow a forgetting curve. We do! Just like we are making progress in a lot of areas, why not make this change in the educational sector too?

What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear!