Anchoring information to knowledge
Back in 2004, I designed an app called Musicmap. It helped with finding new albums based on the ones you already liked. As you explored the network of albums, they would neatly arrange themselves on the screen with this physics-based pull and push mechanism. And if you removed an album that connected another to the rest, that detached album would drift away and become literally lost, unreachable.
The drifting album now reminds me of the idea that “neurons that fire together wire together”. If we don’t stop to think why a new idea is relevant and where it connects—anchoring it to what we already know in the process—it will drift away and be forgotten.
