Hypermap

Hypermap

This vault is a Hypermap of my mind.

Not a map of a territory, but a map of the connections between ideas that bounce around in my mind.

It's one of the ways that I augment my mind - my newsletter Our Augmented Minds is all about exploring that. Your Mind Doesn't Stop At Your Skull - it extends not just into the body, but beyond it. Losing a notebook feels like losing a part of yourself because our brains are so adept at using our environment to extend and augment our minds.

I get an idea, I make a note, I start to write my thoughts about the idea, then I head off to other tools to dig into the idea. Google searches, chats with bots, and deep dives into the University Library archives and databases. [Jstor] is my bestie.

One of the tangents I'm exploring is Meme Economics and the Attention Economy - how Capitalism seems to be morphing before our eyes from a system built on the exploitation of physical and mental labor to generate value to one that is built on the exploitation of our attention through algorithms as both consumers and creators. It's not an urgent topic of interest for me, but I know I need to get a baseline in economic theory that I don't currently have, so I turn to Crash Course Economics, watch the videos at my own pace, making brief notes as I go that might later connect to something else.

All those links in the above paragraphs show up as nodes in the Graph view of this Obsidian vault. One idea connecting to another and another and another.

This public view is actually only a tiny portion of the hypermap of my mind residing across multiple Obsidian vaults, some Notion databases, and decades worth of handwritten notebooks.

Some links are bright and some are dark. The bright links have a note connected to them. The dark links don't have a note connected at the moment (or at least not one that's published), but I can add that note by just clicking it in my Obsidian vault.

Others might call it a Second Brain. But it's not really a second brain - it's an extension of the first. Without it, my brain works differently than it can with it. I have ADHD and I'm Autistic so my brain already works a bit different from the norm (although the idea of a "norm" is laughable the deeper you dig into it - neurodiversity is the default, there is no such thing as neurotypical, only those who can perform the personhood acceptable to the status quo and those who cannot). I learned how to read and write at a very early age and I never stopped. I fell in love with computers at a young age and also fell in love with the idea of productivity - an idea that I continue to work on decolonizing because eww Capitalism.

Our memories are not coded like data. They're not images stored in a hard drive.

Our memories are connections, clusters of neurons firing simultaneously to simulate the past.

Which means our memories are really faulty and prone to corruption.

Not in a brainwashing sort of way, but in a complicated tangle of ways.

Like, I have aphantasia - no visual imagination. I feel ideas in my body and they flow up into descriptions in my mind, but I don't have mental pictures at all. Well... except when I'm dreaming... then it's full blockbuster cinematic masterpieces... and niche indie experimental narratives involving constantly switching perspectives between omniscient and first person views.

But I have multiple non-stop verbal trains of thought. Moving WAY to fast to code into my long-term memory.

So I've always used external tools to capture them.

Pretty notebooks picked up at the bookstore as a teen and young adult.
Franklin Covey Planner as an admin assistant to a team of engineers in my early 20s.
Hipster PDAs.
Bullet Journals.
Evernote.
Google Keep.
Notion.
And now Obsidian which I fell in love with several years ago and keep returning to because I can just pour the thoughts out of my head - my fingers going 120 words per minute after a decade-long career as a transcriptionist from my mid-20s to my mid-30s.

Obsidian because it maps to the way the brain works - making connections.

As a vault grows, the graph grows, and you can see which ideas are getting bigger - as they collect more tangents, their gravity grows, and eventually, they might become something.

An essay for a Substack.
An independent research project.
A thesis project for a crowdfunded graduate degree.

I can come back to them again and again, exploring more, adding more ghost links, creating notes from ghost links that are ready to be explored more, and seeing if an idea has gotten big enough to start something new.

The Obsidian vault isn't a map in the traditional sense - that's why I'm calling it a Hypermap. I first encountered the idea of hyperreality when I was working on a semester-long study of Jediism for an Anthropology of Religion class. The professor didn't think I'd find enough resources to do the serious academic survey he wanted, but turns out I did, I got an A, and it led me to realize that All Religions Are Fan Fiction and that doesn't diminish their power in the way that cynical old white dudes performing as pompous professors seem to think it does, it just puts the power back in human hands, not divine ones. Spiritual Anarchy is my way.

If I wasn't already almost all the way through the requirements for my philosophy degree, I'd have switched to an anthropology degree and focused on digital anthropology because that is ripe territory, but it's still possible to do those explorations in grad school - time will tell.

It's a hypermap - it's not an actual map. An Obsidian vault is a collection of files organized in aesthetically pleasing and pragmatically functional ways, customizable with ease for even the digital layperson and endlessly flexible for the digital native. It lets us take the thoughts in our head and give them a form that we can then consume and rework as little or as much as we desire. It's not the original thought - those electrical impulse have long since been released from the neural cluster that spawned them. But by being able to reread what I wrote - what I was thinking - I can light those clusters up again and see where they lead. Again and again and again.

Each time I learn something new, it creates new connections in my mind - and then I can also add to the hypermap that is this Obsidian vault - and others. My fiction is in a different vault, and I've got vaults for solo ttrpg gaming and for language learning as well. Hypermaps of different mental territories.

It doesn't replace writing in notebooks for me - I find I process things differently when writing by hand on paper and that sort of processing is better for journaling for me. Venting and dreaming are the sort of thinking I do on paper because those come more from the body than the brain. Whereas typing on a keyboard puts me more in my head, for that big brain kind of thinking and metacognition. It's not a strict distinction - if all tech went poof, I could still write with a stick in dirt and I would adapt, but I'm miss both the feel of a pen gliding across a page and my fingers flying over a keyboard.

The Hypermap is more than a map because it helps me to redesign the territory that it serves as a map of. I think through my fingers, then reread my thoughts, revising them - this is where digital wins over paper - and connecting those thoughts to other through that handy Obsidian linking mechanism.

It's a place for half-formed thoughts, incubating ideas, and cultivating cross-pollination to birth new projects.

My Hypermap is a part of my Extended Mind - the idea from Andy Clark and David Chalmers that our mind extends beyond our brain and even beyond our body. It's not just a place to store words, it's a way to actively engage in thinking.

What is a Hypermap?

A Hypermap is more than a mind map. It’s a nonlinear, interlinked, living cartography of thought.
It's part garden, part archive, part dream-logic directory.

A Hypermap is:

I use the word "Hypermap" to signal both hypertext and hyperreality—two core themes of my research and life.