@@ofeliazambrana3011 El nombre CaGa fue desarrollado por Vera F. Birkenbihl (escrito KaGa en alemán). Pero su trabajo no es muy conocido fuera de los países de habla alemana.
I failed over 25 interviews while applying for grad schemes and it was horrible. I used techniques from your videos to try and improve. Most didn’t help but Categorisation did. It was useful in letting me improve my communication skills. I now have above average interview skills and work for a competitive tech company. Keep up the good work!
That's awesome feedback, thanks! Im really glad categorisation could help you so much. Yes, not every tool helps in every case. But as long as you can find at least one tool that helps you, I consider my job a success.
Just found your channel...wow. Thank you for thinking about thinking :) I'm an educator and I think a lot about how to teach children to become thinkers (not something most schools are very adept at). Should I pursue a Ph.D, it would be in the area of educational neuroscience. So, basic question...what does CaGa stand for?
You're absolutely right, traditional education still relies too much on memorisation alone. Even though there is a strong link between so called "deep processing" and memory. The deeper you process information (the more you really think it through), the better your subsequent recall will be. CaGa was coined by Vera F. Birkenbihl in German, but the acronym also works in English. Although the acronym is quite a mouthful, that's why I usually don't say what it stands for - most people aren't interested anyway. CaGa means "creative analografitti graphical association". Analografitti is a portmanteau of analogical (not logical - i.e. the aim is not to logically arrange ideas, but to generate ideas by associations) and grafitti (originally a word from art history, that means writing, painting or drawing on a wall or other surface). Birkenbihl often said it means "non-logical (associative) thinking with a pen in your hand".
Oh, that is unfortunate. At least the stress is on a different syllable when you speak it. In Spanish the acronym would need to be different anyway, simply due to how Spanish orders its words. It would be AGCA or ACGA, but you can't pronounce that as a word.
Love you channel, please do not stop. Might I ask some offtopic question - where can I order cards and boxes for paper-based handwritten Zettelkasten? Thanks.
Wonderful that you like my videos! Yeah, finding cards and boxes can be a real challenge nowadays. I bought the HAN 956-11 A6 card filing box on Amazon (if you look on Amazon, you'll find some other options as well). I also bought some blank, A6 index cards on Amazon (140 or 160 gsm, if I remember correctly), though I'm thinking about changing to 140gsm A4 paper in the future and investing in a paper cutter to cut them to A6 myself. That should be cheaper in the long run.
I always love your content. In this case I think it does make a whole lot of sense to map out what you know, identify areas with gaps and make a research question out of it. I have tried this and I have a question, is a CaGa something you do once or do you keep on refining and adding to the image? If it's the first, don't the drawings start resemblinv each other too much as you make more and more temporary documents? For the latter can you know beforehand what will be important? If not how do you manage to continue editing the document when new knowledge and understanding may affect parts of the CaGa but not all of it?
Great that you like it! Yes, identifying the gaps, that's the challenging bit. That's what most students struggle with. Whether you do a CaGa once or keep refining it over time needs to be decided on a case by case basis. I guess, most of my CaGas so far are probably one offs, but there are some I come back to again and again to refine or where I draw multiple ones from different angles as my understanding grows. Vera F. Birkenbihl, who cojned the term CaGa, had some CaGas she kept refining over decades and for which she developed many variations. Some of them are so iconic that you immediately connect these CaGas with her. There will be some repetition between CaGas, sure. And over time everyone will develop some favourite types of CaGas. But the important part is the content, so it doesn't matter that many CaGas might look similar on first glance. Remember that a CaGa is not to hang in a gallery, but it can be read like a text - even if it contains no actual text. If your understanding grows over time you can go back and add comments to your CaGas or cross out portions that are no longer right (in a way that the original CaGa is still visible). If its something more substantial, you can draw a new CaGa. You can also draw new CaGas if you want to explore a topic or question or idea from different angles. Don't worry too much about correcting your old CaGas, though, because drawing and redrawing CaGas is such an active thinking process, you'll likely remember your later understanding whenever you see an old ("incorrect") CaGa again. In fact that happened to me all the time as I was filming the video.
This is a very open-ended question. Here're just my first thoughts. Let me know if they cover what you're interested in. There're two levels here. First, the cognitive level (where he talks a lot about encoding and so on). Second, the actual doing. I've only watched some of his videos, so I comment with those in mind. He might add other things in some of his other videos. There is pretty solid evidence now that our ability to remember information is based on how much attention we pay when encounter it, how deeply we process it and how often we retrieve it. There's also other evidence from creativity research, that deeper processing enables us to use our knowledge more creatively. Btw, when people hear retrieval, they usually think of flashcards but whenever we process the information we also need to retrieve it - a fact most people don't know about. So, I think his emphasis on deep processing is spot on (but there're other aspects as well). There're great tools that help us with encoding and there're also tools that help us focus on retrieval. They help by avoiding cognitive overload. A hammer doesn't increase the strength of our muscles, but it multiplies the force exerted on the workpiece (which has the same effect as if we had become stronger). In the same way, thinking tools (of which learning tools are a subset) don't increase our mental capacity - but we can still tackle mental challenges that would have otherwise led to cognitive overload. So, I also agree with him here. His definition of a mind map differs from that of most other people. He takes it literally and says it should be a map of your mind. I also entertained this definition a few years back (before I started this TH-cam channel) but ultimately decided against it. What most people picture when they hear mind map is one of a few very similar things. I think, now that this image has already been deeply ingrained in people's minds, redefining what a mind map is confusing more than it helps. That's why I no longer use mind map in the way Justin does. He says that grouping concepts is a very good way to engage with a topic deeply and that there is not any real benefit of putting it in graphical over a list form. I agree with both statements. Grouping is used extensively in many fields of science and it saved my butt more than once when I was still working as a systems engineer in the automotive industry. I'm using grouping extensively, but usually in a list format. There are cases in which a graphical representation is better when you need to consult your grouping later. In that case, a form of the mind map that uses less space is normally preferred - depending on the field, people call it a tree map, tree diagram or dendrogram. Any mind-mapping software can routinely translate outlines, tree diagrams and mind maps into one another - because they are equivalent. Rewriting an outline as a tree diagram or vice versa doesn't result in deeper processing. Then there are the "mind maps" that Justin prefers over the classical form. The end products might look very similar, but they are an entirely different family of tools. The reason is that they help you with a different type of mental processing. Specifically, they help you to chart different types of relationships: spatial, temporal, causal and more. I also use them extensively. As I showed in this video. Now, Justin says that it doesn't matter how you graph the information, the important things is the deep processing it triggers. In fact, there are many correct ways of representing the information depending on your background knowledge. Again, I agree with him. I would add, though, that for certain problems, certain types of diagrams are more likely to help you. So, it makes sense to use them as a starting point when you can (and there are many many diagram types people find useful so they have given them special names - such as flow charts, sequence diagrams, causal loop diagrams, state machines and many more). For me, they are a subgroup of a CaGa (see how I use grouping here?). You can learn more about CaGas here: th-cam.com/video/zaCZex2IzfA/w-d-xo.html
How can you use Cagas for something that’s less image based, like math? I feel like Cagas would make it easier to understand hard math topics,but im having trouble using it that way.
Why do you think that maths is less image based? I think your intuition is absolutely correct. Maths can best be understood by solving problems. And drawing CaGas can help us to solve problems. Sometimes we can only draw simplified versions of the problem (e.g. because we can't draw in 5D), but even these can help. If it's a geometry problem you should be able to draw it (or a simplified version of it) anyway. And if it can be expressed as a function (many things can) it can be graphed. If it has to do with set theory you can use Venn diagrams or something similar. In fact, before electronic calculators became ubiquitous, many maths problems had methods to solve them graphically because they were quicker to execute than calculations. But now they stopped teaching those methods for the largest part. I recommend reading George Polya's "How to solve it" where he shows many examples how drawings can make solving maths problems easier.
I wouldn't say it's great for taking notes as such. It's great for accumulating thoughts over a long time. I personally prefer using ABC- or CaWa-active most of the times for notetaking which I then post-process using CaGas, ranking, grouping and so on: th-cam.com/video/RXhQnKSFgUA/w-d-xo.html It is then the ideas I get when doing this that I integrate into my zettelkasten: th-cam.com/video/cwxRqmTpffY/w-d-xo.html Whether these work for you depends on your specific needs. Every tool has its limitations and works well for some use cases and not so much for others.
Wow thanks, I'm spanish-speaking so I was searching the methods that you mentioned on internet and i don't find nothing. Where can i get all that information?, and thanks for your vids i'm gonna see them. Nice
@@dannescastaneda6317 Unfortunately, I don't know the Spanish zettelkasten community, so I don't know about good resources in Spanish (in fact there aren't many great resources in English either). The best source of information about the zettelkasten that I know of, is Scott Scheper: www.youtube.com/@scottscheper
And what about these methods? CaGas ABC- CaWa-active Where can I find more information such as a book or youtube channels (apart from yours) that talk to me about those topics. PD: I thought that the English community would have more information on the subject xd, I think that here in Latin America not everyone knows about the zettelkasten, much less in dept¡¡ thanks for your help
@@dannescastaneda6317 CaGas, ABC-Lists, CaWas, ABC-/CaWa-active and a lot of the techniques I'm presenting on my channel were developed by Vera F. Birkenbihl. Unfortunately, she published mainly in German and very few of them have been translated to other languages. She was a fan of puns which she used to great effect to explain points or make them easier to understand - but it also makes translating her work really hard. On top of that she used CaWas a lot to summarise her points and they can't simply be translated, you need to recreate the CaWa in another language, just like a poem. Which further reduces her translatability. There was once an audio course "The Memory Optimizer" produced by Birkenbihl at the end of the 90s. Maybe you can still pick up a second hand copy somewhere. A few websites introduce the ABC-list or Cawa, but only give you the bare minimum you need to know to get started. I don't really know of any great source in English, which is part of the reason why I started the channel in the first place.
@@mktsp2 It stands for "Creative analografitti Graphical association". Analografitti is made up of analog (not logical) and grafitti (something drawn or written). The reason why it's called "not logical" is that it is not intended to facilitate logical thinking (structured, cause-and-effect and so on), but rather associative thinking.
How do you use pictures and diagrams when learning new topics? What do you do to help you build mental models?
Es un metodo no lo halle, es tu metodo particular o tienen otros nombres gracias
@@ofeliazambrana3011 El nombre CaGa fue desarrollado por Vera F. Birkenbihl (escrito KaGa en alemán). Pero su trabajo no es muy conocido fuera de los países de habla alemana.
@@ofeliazambrana3011 Puede obtener más información sobre CaGas en este vídeo: th-cam.com/video/zaCZex2IzfA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=fUVcoQbtretMou08
I love this guy, unique different, honest , a thinker and enthusiastic about contributing not clout.
Awesome that you like it! I hope it's helpful.
Very useful info!
I failed over 25 interviews while applying for grad schemes and it was horrible.
I used techniques from your videos to try and improve.
Most didn’t help but Categorisation did.
It was useful in letting me improve my communication skills.
I now have above average interview skills and work for a competitive tech company.
Keep up the good work!
That's awesome feedback, thanks! Im really glad categorisation could help you so much.
Yes, not every tool helps in every case. But as long as you can find at least one tool that helps you, I consider my job a success.
Just found your channel...wow. Thank you for thinking about thinking :) I'm an educator and I think a lot about how to teach children to become thinkers (not something most schools are very adept at). Should I pursue a Ph.D, it would be in the area of educational neuroscience. So, basic question...what does CaGa stand for?
You're absolutely right, traditional education still relies too much on memorisation alone. Even though there is a strong link between so called "deep processing" and memory. The deeper you process information (the more you really think it through), the better your subsequent recall will be.
CaGa was coined by Vera F. Birkenbihl in German, but the acronym also works in English. Although the acronym is quite a mouthful, that's why I usually don't say what it stands for - most people aren't interested anyway. CaGa means "creative analografitti graphical association".
Analografitti is a portmanteau of analogical (not logical - i.e. the aim is not to logically arrange ideas, but to generate ideas by associations) and grafitti (originally a word from art history, that means writing, painting or drawing on a wall or other surface). Birkenbihl often said it means "non-logical (associative) thinking with a pen in your hand".
@@bf-thinking Thank you. I will be following along whenever you post.
CaGa or CaGas is an unfortunate name when you think and speak spanish
Oh, that is unfortunate. At least the stress is on a different syllable when you speak it.
In Spanish the acronym would need to be different anyway, simply due to how Spanish orders its words. It would be AGCA or ACGA, but you can't pronounce that as a word.
Glad to see your video after long time ♥️♥️♥️
I hope it was worth waiting for. The next one is also already in the making.
Love you channel, please do not stop. Might I ask some offtopic question - where can I order cards and boxes for paper-based handwritten Zettelkasten? Thanks.
Wonderful that you like my videos! Yeah, finding cards and boxes can be a real challenge nowadays. I bought the HAN 956-11 A6 card filing box on Amazon (if you look on Amazon, you'll find some other options as well). I also bought some blank, A6 index cards on Amazon (140 or 160 gsm, if I remember correctly), though I'm thinking about changing to 140gsm A4 paper in the future and investing in a paper cutter to cut them to A6 myself. That should be cheaper in the long run.
I always love your content. In this case I think it does make a whole lot of sense to map out what you know, identify areas with gaps and make a research question out of it.
I have tried this and I have a question, is a CaGa something you do once or do you keep on refining and adding to the image?
If it's the first, don't the drawings start resemblinv each other too much as you make more and more temporary documents?
For the latter can you know beforehand what will be important? If not how do you manage to continue editing the document when new knowledge and understanding may affect parts of the CaGa but not all of it?
Great that you like it! Yes, identifying the gaps, that's the challenging bit. That's what most students struggle with.
Whether you do a CaGa once or keep refining it over time needs to be decided on a case by case basis. I guess, most of my CaGas so far are probably one offs, but there are some I come back to again and again to refine or where I draw multiple ones from different angles as my understanding grows. Vera F. Birkenbihl, who cojned the term CaGa, had some CaGas she kept refining over decades and for which she developed many variations. Some of them are so iconic that you immediately connect these CaGas with her.
There will be some repetition between CaGas, sure. And over time everyone will develop some favourite types of CaGas. But the important part is the content, so it doesn't matter that many CaGas might look similar on first glance. Remember that a CaGa is not to hang in a gallery, but it can be read like a text - even if it contains no actual text.
If your understanding grows over time you can go back and add comments to your CaGas or cross out portions that are no longer right (in a way that the original CaGa is still visible). If its something more substantial, you can draw a new CaGa. You can also draw new CaGas if you want to explore a topic or question or idea from different angles.
Don't worry too much about correcting your old CaGas, though, because drawing and redrawing CaGas is such an active thinking process, you'll likely remember your later understanding whenever you see an old ("incorrect") CaGa again. In fact that happened to me all the time as I was filming the video.
What do you think about Justin Sung's ideas on mind mapping?
This is a very open-ended question. Here're just my first thoughts. Let me know if they cover what you're interested in.
There're two levels here. First, the cognitive level (where he talks a lot about encoding and so on). Second, the actual doing. I've only watched some of his videos, so I comment with those in mind. He might add other things in some of his other videos.
There is pretty solid evidence now that our ability to remember information is based on how much attention we pay when encounter it, how deeply we process it and how often we retrieve it. There's also other evidence from creativity research, that deeper processing enables us to use our knowledge more creatively. Btw, when people hear retrieval, they usually think of flashcards but whenever we process the information we also need to retrieve it - a fact most people don't know about. So, I think his emphasis on deep processing is spot on (but there're other aspects as well).
There're great tools that help us with encoding and there're also tools that help us focus on retrieval. They help by avoiding cognitive overload. A hammer doesn't increase the strength of our muscles, but it multiplies the force exerted on the workpiece (which has the same effect as if we had become stronger). In the same way, thinking tools (of which learning tools are a subset) don't increase our mental capacity - but we can still tackle mental challenges that would have otherwise led to cognitive overload. So, I also agree with him here.
His definition of a mind map differs from that of most other people. He takes it literally and says it should be a map of your mind. I also entertained this definition a few years back (before I started this TH-cam channel) but ultimately decided against it. What most people picture when they hear mind map is one of a few very similar things. I think, now that this image has already been deeply ingrained in people's minds, redefining what a mind map is confusing more than it helps. That's why I no longer use mind map in the way Justin does.
He says that grouping concepts is a very good way to engage with a topic deeply and that there is not any real benefit of putting it in graphical over a list form. I agree with both statements. Grouping is used extensively in many fields of science and it saved my butt more than once when I was still working as a systems engineer in the automotive industry. I'm using grouping extensively, but usually in a list format. There are cases in which a graphical representation is better when you need to consult your grouping later. In that case, a form of the mind map that uses less space is normally preferred - depending on the field, people call it a tree map, tree diagram or dendrogram. Any mind-mapping software can routinely translate outlines, tree diagrams and mind maps into one another - because they are equivalent. Rewriting an outline as a tree diagram or vice versa doesn't result in deeper processing.
Then there are the "mind maps" that Justin prefers over the classical form. The end products might look very similar, but they are an entirely different family of tools. The reason is that they help you with a different type of mental processing. Specifically, they help you to chart different types of relationships: spatial, temporal, causal and more. I also use them extensively. As I showed in this video.
Now, Justin says that it doesn't matter how you graph the information, the important things is the deep processing it triggers. In fact, there are many correct ways of representing the information depending on your background knowledge. Again, I agree with him. I would add, though, that for certain problems, certain types of diagrams are more likely to help you. So, it makes sense to use them as a starting point when you can (and there are many many diagram types people find useful so they have given them special names - such as flow charts, sequence diagrams, causal loop diagrams, state machines and many more).
For me, they are a subgroup of a CaGa (see how I use grouping here?). You can learn more about CaGas here: th-cam.com/video/zaCZex2IzfA/w-d-xo.html
How can you use Cagas for something that’s less image based, like math? I feel like Cagas would make it easier to understand hard math topics,but im having trouble using it that way.
Why do you think that maths is less image based? I think your intuition is absolutely correct. Maths can best be understood by solving problems. And drawing CaGas can help us to solve problems. Sometimes we can only draw simplified versions of the problem (e.g. because we can't draw in 5D), but even these can help.
If it's a geometry problem you should be able to draw it (or a simplified version of it) anyway. And if it can be expressed as a function (many things can) it can be graphed. If it has to do with set theory you can use Venn diagrams or something similar. In fact, before electronic calculators became ubiquitous, many maths problems had methods to solve them graphically because they were quicker to execute than calculations. But now they stopped teaching those methods for the largest part.
I recommend reading George Polya's "How to solve it" where he shows many examples how drawings can make solving maths problems easier.
I hope that reply helps. It's a bit difficult to talk about this without a specific problem. And you can't attach drawings in the comments.
Always waiting for a new content. Great work!!!
Thanks, man!
Nice video guy, What you know about Zettelkasten method? ¿Is it good for take notes?
I wouldn't say it's great for taking notes as such. It's great for accumulating thoughts over a long time.
I personally prefer using ABC- or CaWa-active most of the times for notetaking which I then post-process using CaGas, ranking, grouping and so on: th-cam.com/video/RXhQnKSFgUA/w-d-xo.html
It is then the ideas I get when doing this that I integrate into my zettelkasten: th-cam.com/video/cwxRqmTpffY/w-d-xo.html
Whether these work for you depends on your specific needs. Every tool has its limitations and works well for some use cases and not so much for others.
Wow thanks, I'm spanish-speaking so I was searching the methods that you mentioned on internet and i don't find nothing. Where can i get all that information?, and thanks for your vids i'm gonna see them. Nice
@@dannescastaneda6317 Unfortunately, I don't know the Spanish zettelkasten community, so I don't know about good resources in Spanish (in fact there aren't many great resources in English either).
The best source of information about the zettelkasten that I know of, is Scott Scheper: www.youtube.com/@scottscheper
And what about these methods?
CaGas
ABC-
CaWa-active
Where can I find more information such as a book or youtube channels (apart from yours) that talk to me about those topics.
PD: I thought that the English community would have more information on the subject xd, I think that here in Latin America not everyone knows about the zettelkasten, much less in dept¡¡
thanks for your help
@@dannescastaneda6317 CaGas, ABC-Lists, CaWas, ABC-/CaWa-active and a lot of the techniques I'm presenting on my channel were developed by Vera F. Birkenbihl. Unfortunately, she published mainly in German and very few of them have been translated to other languages.
She was a fan of puns which she used to great effect to explain points or make them easier to understand - but it also makes translating her work really hard. On top of that she used CaWas a lot to summarise her points and they can't simply be translated, you need to recreate the CaWa in another language, just like a poem. Which further reduces her translatability.
There was once an audio course "The Memory Optimizer" produced by Birkenbihl at the end of the 90s. Maybe you can still pick up a second hand copy somewhere.
A few websites introduce the ABC-list or Cawa, but only give you the bare minimum you need to know to get started. I don't really know of any great source in English, which is part of the reason why I started the channel in the first place.
𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓶 😉
What does promosm mean?
@@bf-thinking What does CaGa mean?
@@mktsp2 It stands for "Creative analografitti Graphical association". Analografitti is made up of analog (not logical) and grafitti (something drawn or written).
The reason why it's called "not logical" is that it is not intended to facilitate logical thinking (structured, cause-and-effect and so on), but rather associative thinking.