AI can't replace this part of your brain yet (and how to exercise it)

I recently saw this gadget floating around Instagram called the Mark II.

It’s a bookmark that scans physical books you’ve read, then stores them in a system for easy referencing.

I was tempted to pre-order it, but then I looked around at all the useless crap in my home office.

An Apple Watch is collecting dust, waiting to be picked up from a Facebook Marketplace buyer.

A typewriter keyboard rests in a cupboard. I thought it would motivate me to write more.

And I rarely pick up that Kindle on my coffee table.

Whereas all the things I own that actually make a difference have disappeared into my life.

I rarely notice this 2-year-old MacBook Air when I’m writing every week.

I scribble down ideas on my ReMarkable tablet without thinking.

And I certainly don’t think about the handmade karate uniforms I ordered from Japan whenever I head to practice.

This leads us to a paradox I’ve been thinking about: when something works, it disappears.

Whereas if something’s too flashy or too trendy, they will add more burden than functionality.

And once we start to think about our lifelong learning journeys in this way, some pretty uncomfortable conclusions will bubble up.

You only need 2 things to become a formidable reader/writer

My social media feed is dominated by gadgets & tools that will help me learn better or read more. Maybe it’s a new Notion template. Maybe it’s a new Claude agent that’ll record all my 2 am thoughts, or maybe it’s a new notebook system that promises to change my life.

But when I take a look at my daily workflow, I use none of them. In fact, after almost a decade of coming up with ideas for a living, there are only two things I need to keep expanding my learning:

1: Read a shit ton

2: Space to think about the shit ton I’ve read

It’s so simple, yet these are the two parts of being a lifelong learner that need the most amount of attention. And all our writing/learning troubles can be boiled down to skimping on one of these two things.

If we don’t find time to read a lot, our minds will default to crappy entertainment.

Then, if we don’t find the space to think through all the ideas we’ve consumed, we’ll become what Alexander Pope called ‘bookful blockheads’ with nothing but empty ideas.

In fact, if we practice these two skills, we’ll soon tap a core quality that no AI can replace yet:

The ability to let multiple streams of ideas gel and combust into something fresh.

In other words, we should stop seeing reading as information collection. That part was already replaced by LLMs yesterday.

Instead, we should see reading + writing as fermentation.

You don’t need to write down the idea you’ve read today because no one remembers the shape of the grapes when they’re stuffed into a barrel to ferment. But one day, the right components will bubble up and turn into something unexpected.

But Robin… AI can already do that, right?

That’s a fair objection, because AI is great at rolling existing ideas into a new blob. But there is one thing it can’t do yet.

Let’s return to the wine analogy. Fermentation isn’t just about keeping a jar of grape juice in the fridge. No, it chemically changes the grapes and turns them into a prelude to a good time.

The same is happening with our minds.

When we read something great, we only have the raw information. We haven’t fermented it by clashing it against life experience and other ideas.

But if we let some ideas sit for a while, life experiences & other books we’ve read will ferment them into something chemically different. Whereas if we’re too quick to throw it in an archive, we’ll halt the fermentation process too soon.

In other words, we need to get comfortable with letting ideas linger in our minds without noting them down. If an idea you’ve read has enough traction, trust that it will keep sticking if it’s meant to be there.

What about all the ‘freeing up your cognitive load’ BS?

This makes a lot of us nervous, because it goes against everything that productivity culture tells you to do. ‘Reduce your cognitive load and write everything down’, they say, but why should we free up that cognitive load if we’re thinking about something important?

If what we’re really looking for is a thoughtful life, then letting ideas occupy your mind should be the norm. You should take an idea to lunch, to a mini golf date night, to a work lunch, to a morning drive, to a café… everywhere.

And in fact, we should be afraid of a life when we’ve offloaded all our best cognitive abilities to systems. Sure, systems are great for remembering trivial errands, but all the space that’s left should be dedicated to contemplation.

I think I really had to find this out the hard way recently. Between a full-time job and writing a book, I’m left with very little time to tinker with knowledge systems.

Yet, I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised at how well my mind works on its own without relying on too many external systems.

So, when in doubt, let your mind cook, and you’ll start to grasp ideas that were impossible to conceive even with the most advanced knowledge archive system.

And here is a set of tools & protocols for you to put this new philosophy of reading/thinking into your life:

1: Forget about copying down passages from books.