The Brain is Inefficient

I am a tech guy. I grew up with the Internet. You could probably say I’m addicted to the Internet. Not just to the concept, or to the people I can communicate with because of it, but because of the knowledge I can tap into and how easily I can find it. The only problem I find with this is that between reading blogs daily, reading business books daily, communicating with people, and attending my classes, I begin to forget just where I learned something. Generally speaking, it’s quite easy to rule out my classes. But it becomes much more difficult to rule out a book, a blog, or conversation. If it is a book or a blog, it then becomes more difficult as I have to figure out just which blog it was on. If it is a conversation, it’s not so difficult as we all have people ’stored’ generally by there interests. A friend of mine who is a Spanish major probably wasn’t the person who made good points about The Long Tail (It would be nice to have a discussion about the Long Tail with any of my friends, actually).

Fact of the matter is, I need a way to index all my knowledge. I need Gooble. Google for my brain. If I had that, I would become much more efficient.

Talking purely idea here, all you need is a refined Google. Disregard privacy issues for the moment, but it makes me wonder about the possibility of a software that could record every site you go to. It could strip the text of the site, remove unimportant graphics, and compress all this into a single search able database for you. From there you could do a search for a word or phrase, like any search engine, and it would return a list of sites you’ve been to that have this keyword. Really, this “brain” search engine would be much more effective than Google. Not because the algorithms would be more capable, but because often times when searching for something we’ve already read, it becomes much easier to recall a unique phrase from what you’re thinking of to bring up the exact result compared to taking a generalized guess.