Writing as a thinking tool

In middle school I could not get through long passages no matter how hard I tried. I would read an entire page and find that nothing had registered, so I started taking notes out of desperation. This was the late 80s, and Tony Buzan's mind maps had just reached Turkey. This led me to produce pages and pages of notes that looked like spiderwebs. Creating those notes have helped me tremendously. I made sense of what I was reading by figuring out which branch they would hang off in my mind maps. I realized my pages were not for storing the information as much as they were for processing it.It took me another ten years to understand why this works so well. During a stretch of PhD procrastination, I read Manuel Blum's advice to graduate students:You are all computer scientists.You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do.You know what TURING MACHINES can do.For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply.Turing Machines can compute any computable function.Turing machines are incredibly more…

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