Suffering from information overload? In her popular vlogs, neuroscientist Charlotte Fraza (Radboud University) explains how she processes the world in her ‘second brain’. The computer programmes she uses to do this may be new, but information overload and 'infobesity' are age-old phenomena, argues book historian Rindert Jagersma. Delicate and precise, neatly arranged in alphabetical lemmas. I stumbled across the manuscripts in the Special Collections of the Leiden University Library, where they were listed in the inventory as ‘Adversaria of mixed content’. Without further explanation, except that their author was Jan Wagenaar. This eighteenth-century author was a household name in his time, writing about history, theology, and politics. Now here I was, looking at the notes he had used to write all those books, sermons, and pamphlets. The four leather-bound volumes contained pages and pages of lemmas on a variety of topics, from ‘concubines’ to ‘thatched roofs in the cities of Holland’. The lemmas included excerpts from a variety of texts, including snippets in French, English and Hebrew. This was how Wagenaar tried to organise his information flows, subsequently using this information to produce new texts. In doing so, he was using his notebooks in the same way as contemporary gurus of the trendy personal knowledge management (PKM) movement do. The popular note-taking vloggers may have more sophisticated techniques, but their goal is no different: to bring order to the information chaos. Seventeenth-century infobesity Indeed, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans also suffered from this chaos. Complaints about information overload and ‘infobesity’ are age-old phenomena, as book historian Rindert Jagersma observes. Until the invention of printing, monks and officials used to copy texts by hand, which was a slow and expensive process. But with the advent of printing presses, books and other texts became cheaper to produce and consume. Jagersma: “Seventeenth-century theologians complained not only about quantity – the number of new books – but also about their quality. The ease with which people could now publish led, in their opinion, to the distribution of many poor-quality theological tracts. Their own books, the complainants wrote, were obviously not in that category.” Discovery in the archive A few years ago, Jagersma made a discovery. Or, to be more precise: a rediscovery. At the National Archives in The Hague, Jagersma was able to recover two documents that historians believed to be lost. These were the notebooks of Ericus Walten. These manuscripts had been confiscated by a court, the High Court of Holland, when Walten was arrested in 1694. Three years later, the freethinker died at the Gevangenpoort in The Hague. Walten was a troublemaker for city administrators and Calvinist ministers, according to Jagersma. “He was one of the most active pamphleteers of his time. And that while he was only active for a short time, from 1688 to 1692. During that period, he wrote more than 30 pamphlets.” A pamphlet was a short, printed text on a current topic. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was an important medium of public debate. Theology, politics, and juice “Walten railed against and became involved in all kinds of theological discussions,” Jagersma says. “In the process, he grew into a radical voice. For example, he denied the existence of the devil. He also wrote about local politics, thus displeasing the authorities. After he had angered the Regents in Amsterdam with his pamphlets, he felt it would be safer to relocate to Rotterdam.” In Walten’s two notebooks, referred to as Memoriaelen, Jagersma discovered a lot of details about the pamphleteer’s life. “These notebooks look a bit like the Moleskine notebooks that we know today,” says Jagersma, “but thicker, and bound in parchment.” In the more than five hundred pages, Walten collected all kinds of information. Jagersma lists the categories: “Personal anecdotes, philosophical and theological reflections, ideas, incursions, medical recipes, accounts of alchemical experiments, but also departure and arrival dates of the trekschuit (sail- or horse-drawn boat). The notebooks also contain lists of books he still wanted to read.” Walten’s notes partly belong in the early modern tradition of the commonplace book: notebooks in which people noted down various quotes from books, often arranged by theme. But Walten’s notes went further than quotes by classic authors. He also collected facts about all kinds of people, including his enemies. For example, he took note of any gossip about conservative ministers who disagreed with him. He recorded their visits to prostitutes in his Memoriaelen. Jagersma: “Perhaps he was planning to later use this against them. These notes are pure, seventeenth-century juice.” Second brain or knowledge base “Everything. I really put everything into my knowledge base,” says neuroscientist Charlotte Fraza. “Ideas for my PhD research, words in the languages I’m currently learning, ideas for videos, but also the ‘friends and family’ category.” Fortunately, this category is not about ‘juice’; quite the contrary. Fraza: “When friends mention something they’d like to have, I’m quick to write it down as a gift idea.” As she explains her system, she scrolls past the menu of her note-taking system on her laptop: an endless array of icons and labels. “It is precisely because everything is in it that it works so well. I rely on this system completely.” Fraza works for the Radboud University Donders Institute, a world-famous neuroscience research centre. Alongside her research on real, meaty brains, Fraza is also building a ‘second brain’ in her computer. That term was coined by Tiago Forte, a PKM guru. Not that Fraza is such a big fan of the word – more on that later – but by now, the concept of a 'second brain' is already a well-established concept within the PKM community. In her YouTube vlogs, Fraza explains how she takes and organises her notes. Some of her videos have been viewed more than a hundred thousand times. Fraza uses the computer programme Notion. The software allows users to link thoughts using hyperlinks, thus creating a network. And this is precisely what Fraza does. “As a researcher, I get inspiration from things outside my own field. For example, when I attend a theatre performance, listen to music, or go to a museum and look at a Frida Kahlo painting, I sometimes see connections to something I’m working on. Science is very creative, and this creative process also takes place outside the lab or office.” Those crazy or unusual connections are what Fraza is after. “I think we all do this: we’re constantly making unusual connections. My system tries to systematise this process a little more.” “I use three types of categorisation for my notes,” Fraza continues. “The most important is: what do I want to use it for? Number two is: where did I get this from?” For example, a list of quotes from a specific book. And the third category is for things that inspire me but that I don’t yet know exactly how to use. This category is actually the most interesting.” Self-portrait Fraza uses the term ‘second brain’ because it is currently trending within the PKM community. But actually, the analogy is not quite right. “A brain can think for itself. My notes in Notion cannot. Or, maybe I should say: not yet.” Fraza sees her note-taking system as part of her thinking process. “Our body and our environment influence our thinking. We’re not brains floating in a vat. What happens around us is also part of our information system.” The books in your cupboard, the conversations you have at the café, and yes, even your own notes – whether digital or on paper – make up that environment, Fraza believes. With her note-taking system, she builds an environment in which she can be creative. In the process, her notes become very personal. “The more personal, the more valuable,” says Fraza. “The way in which you link your ideas is what makes your knowledge base unique.” Browsing through Walten’s notes also helped Jagersma to get to know the pamphleteer better, even though he is been dead for three hundred years. “The Memoriaelen say a lot about him. I could read how Walten did his research, follow his fascinations, and see the ideas for pieces he was not able to work out anymore. In a way, these two notebooks are a kind of self-portrait.” I relate to Jagersma’s experience. As a historian, I could not do much with Wagenaar's notes – I was looking for something else. Still, I felt as I leafed through those finicky notes that I was getting a little closer to the eighteenth-century writer. That I was being given a glimpse of how his brain worked: his first and his second. Does Fraza also see her Notion index as a self-portrait? She responds enthusiastically to this idea: “That’s a good one! I’ll make a note of that one, mind you.” She immediately starts typing. This article is a translation of an article that appeared earlier on NEMO Kennislink. Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash.