Getting Your Thoughts and Feelings on Paper is Hard

Reclaiming bandwidth and making it easier

My off-grid home in the woods

In Human Factors Engineering, Ergonomics, and Cognitive Psychology, we talk a lot about the Man-Machine Interface. We study how to design systems that don’t overwhelm the user’s cognitive load. I’ve been applying those same principles to my personal life.

​For the last 3 years I have lived in an off-grid cabin in the remote wilderness. One of the reasons I did this, other than it’s really fun, is because of my background in Human Factors Engineering & Applied Cognitive Psychology. From this perspective, living as I do results in a noticeable optimization of cognitive resources.

​Social Noise

​In my research on face recognition and viewpoint-invariant properties, it became clear how much of our neural machinery is specialized for social processing. When another human is in the room, your brain automatically allocates massive chunks of processing power to track social cues, intent, and proximity.

Our brain has a limited capacity for processing, and this social-based cognitive processing uses a lot of these limited resources. Your ability to detect, out of the corner of your eye, that someone is looking at you, your ability to empathize with people, and your ability to socially interact with people and read cues… these are all automatic cognitive processes that continuously run in the background in social situations.

These processes use up some of your available resources for controlled, effortful, conscious processing. They affect your ability to think, in other words. Probably the best example of this is stage fright or public speaking, where social cues can trigger anxiety, cloud your thinking, and affect your behavior. But even at less extreme levels this unconscious processing influences your thinking and behavior in ways you’re not aware of.

​By isolating on my remote property, I am effectively shutting down these background processes. I am lowering the “noise floor” of my consciousness. This isn’t about being a hermit to avoid people; it’s about freeing up those cognitive resources so I can focus & concentrate easier. A kind of focus that requires calmness and clarity. And personally, I do have issues with social anxiety, so the sense of remoteness & isolation is an additional benefit that I truly enjoy.

Since moving into my cabin, my average resting heart rate has decreased from 70 beats a minute to 59 beats a minute. And since moving from the congested city to the remote wilderness, my blood oxygen level has increased from an average 94% to 98%. It might not seem like a lot, but every bit helps. I remember going to the emergency room with pneumonia one time, years ago, and my blood-oxygen level was at 60%. The nurse who admitted me said she couldn’t understand how I was even able to walk in. I was in the emergency room for 4 hours, and I was in the hospital for a week recovering. They wouldn’t let me leave until my blood oxygen level was in the ninety percentile range. After that experience, I’ve always been consciously aware of my blood-oxygen level and the effect it has on my ability to function optimally.

​And so by isolating on my remote property, I am effectively lowering the noise surrounding and interfering with my consciousness, and I’m freeing up cognitive resources so I can focus & concentrate easier. Over the last 40 years I’ve continued to journal my observations and I developed a Zettelkasten… a physical collection of research note cards that now contains over 12,000 cards. And I have filing cabinets full of handwritten notes on legal pads and hard copies of papers written on the computer.

My plan was to accumulate these observations, thoughts, and insights and then investigate the patterns I find after a lifetime of work. And that’s where I am now, tucked away in my off-grid cabin on my 40 acres in the remote wilderness.

I think of my 12,000-card Zettelkasten and filing cabinets as a knowledge structure designed for branching. Memory is fallible and subject to interference. Thoughts and memories can be like a jumble of photos in a box or they can be an organized photo album. They can be fleeting glimpses that are damaged or lost over time, or they can be organized and curated. To see the unwavering structure of life that the memories represent, you must preserve the individual snapshots. My system is my way of acknowledging the value of experience by curating it properly. Ensuring the memories aren’t just a jumble of thoughts in a box, but active components in a generative system.

We’ve got limited cognitive resources and a thought can be so labor intensive that it leaves no extra effort available for describing it or writing it down.

You have a thought, or a memory, and its interconnections are there in your mind’s eye, but you lose them in the attempt to capture it all in words and write it down.

I have to read what I wrote, and then compare that to what I see in my mind. See if it matches. Then I refine the mismatch, shaping the written words so they more closely resemble what Im trying to communicate. And through several iterations like that, I shape the writing until it matches the thought in my mind’s eye. Getting thoughts and feelings out of your head is hard.

I like speech to text or just recording the audio while I talk to myself. I can spew and info-dump a stream-of-consciousness and then go back and find my ideas in it. That gets some form of the idea down so that I can use it to remind myself later what I was really thinking about, and I can see the constellation of facts and related ideas that form the idea cloud, instead of the cloud simply dispersing into the wind as I attempt to write it down manually. The strategy really helps me overcome my cognitive processing limitations.

​The Goal: Finding the Unwavering Structure

​What I am looking for in my thoughts & feelings, in science, philosophy, spirituality, and off-grid living, is the unwavering structure underneath the fleeting images of daily life. Sharing these insights on Medium is the Testing Phase of the experiment, and here I can connect with people, read their thoughts and feelings, and get feedback on mine from a like-minded community of writers. I’ve always loved sharing anecdotes and ideas, and Medium is a great place to do that.