Humans have achieved so much. We flew to the Moon, we've used energy to transform the way we live, we've taken billions of people out of poverty, we have smart phones with more processing power than we needed to send a rocket to the moon. However, our phones, with the potential to make us hundreds of IQ points smarter, just aren't doing it. I believe the reason for this is that we simply don't use our phones in a smart way.
We play games, we read Tweets, news articles, watch videos. There is no doubt that our brains are changing because of smart phone use, but generally, we use our phones for communication and entertainment. What if we could just change a few habits in the way we use our phones as an extention of our actual brain?
MEMORY
We know human memory is questionable. You could have a good idea one minute and forget it in the next. You could come up with a story or song and by the time you get round to creating it, you won't remember any of it.
In utilising our phone as an extension of our brain, the first thing we should be doing is offloading our memory to it. Our main brain should do the thinking while our phone should act as an additional memory card. And by increasing our storage, we won't forget anything.
Some of us already do this, but usually for very specific reasons, ie. a journalist making research notes, an author recording ideas, a musician recording song ideas, etc. We should be teaching this skill to young people to use for other tasks such as creating shopping lists or reminders. But some may not see the benefits immediately, some may not even know our phone has these capabilities, and changing habits can take time and effort like learning to write, building an audience, building a Blog, etc.
The main benefit and the main cause of effort for anyone wanting to extend their brain is this - Being organised. By taking a small amount of time to organise, you will save A LOT of time in everything you do because being organised makes everything easier. All you have to do is create a system.
In day-to-day life, creating a list is useful for meanial tasks as well as planning gym workouts or running schedules. It can be as easy as talking to your phone.
As a writer, you take a small amount of time to create a basic list of story / article ideas to work on for the next 6 months. If planning to write a novel, the list is simply be a basic structure of that story. Each day the writer refers to the list to provide focus.
Without the list, each day the writer has to spend time searching for an idea, or recapping to try and work out what happens next in the story before beginning the actual writing process. It can be stressful finding the right idea, particularly if the writer has a short deadline, and it takes time to get back into a story (particularly if you're a 'pantser') and in life we never have enough time. But where a writer is armed with a list, they can cherry-pick from the list depending on the needs, or it will help them know immediately what they have to work on next, reducing stress and allowing the system to really work for them. to
TEN APPS TO EXTEND YOUR BRAIN CAPACITY
Organising your life in the form of lists will help you become alot more efficient. Try it now. Here are ten Apps I use every day.
Evernote
I use Evernote to record everything from my shopping list, story ideas and structures, write articles such as this, to other day to day things like the cost of my son's nursery and how much I need to pay from the childcare voucher schemes we have Vs the cost from our bank account.
Live Transcribe & notification
This little app is fantastic for speech to text transcription. I wish I had this when I did the interviews for my Master's Thesis. I use it to record anything from my own conversations to bits I find useful on YouTube.
Google Drive / Mega / Dropbox / OneDrive
I use all of these file storage applications. I use them to store videos, work on my comic book, images I create, work on my books, spreadsheets, etc. I save things I'm progressing, for example, drafts and edits of stories.
Google Lens
Google Lens is great, it has several uses, but if I see something written down somewhere I can use in my stories I'll take a pic of it and Lens will change it into text for me. It can also identify plants, translate words, and more I'm sure.
Gettr / Twitter / Facebook
I mainly use Gettr and Twitter to record weird websites I come across which also allows me to share those websites with others.