Feynman's Favorite Problems 💡Practical Obsidian NotebookLM Use 📝

Richard Feman was a genius. It's literally the title of his biography. His work in quantum physics forever altered our understanding of reality. From working on the Manhattan Project to receiving the Nobel Prize for the Fineman diagram, simplifying some of the most complex quantum scientific concepts into ways that others could actually understand. Fineman didn't just stick to quantum physics. He explored any concept or idea that inspired his curiosity, leveraging what he learned across many disciplines to generate incredible insights on the nature of reality. He used a simple framework for tracking and mapping these insights and ideas

to solve his greatest problems. This framework has become known as Fineman's favorite problems. Hello, my name is Callum, also known as Waterloots, and welcome to today's video on Fineman's favorite problems. Building an intuition filter for your personal knowledge management system. a creative engine for your second brain. Today, I'll be exploring what it means to use intuition to solve your greatest problems. I'll walk through how you can use Fineman's favorite problem, a framework, to test out new insights and ideas against your favorite topics so that you can continue building out your knowledge system in an intuitive

way that's customized to you, a personal knowledge management filter. Feman was a Nobel laureate who used this system to achieve his Nobel Prize. He had a list of his favorite problems that he used as a filter to test all new insights against and eventually combined them into what was a novel quantum physics system, the Fineman diagram. In this video, I'll show you how you can use various tools like Obsidian and Notebook LM to build out your own list of favorite problems and structure a personal algorithm for using them as you come up with new insights

and ideas. I'll build out my system in real time, showing you how I'm practically using Obsidian to improve my intuition system while researching ways to improve my understanding of this method. I'll also show you how I expand my favorite topic mapping using new AI tools to deepen my understanding of my favorite problems and simplify complex topics so they're in a more understandable format for myself and for you. As I teach you about Fman's favorite problems and map it to my favorite topics to generate my own list of questions of my favorite things to look into,

I'll be using the Fman technique, another system developed by Fman to help improve teaching where we can improve our own understanding, our learning by teaching other people by identifying knowledge gaps that can be filled through further research. I talked about this a lot more in the last video. So, if you're interested in learning more about Fman technique, I recommend checking that one out. By understanding both the Fman technique, how you can master learning through teaching, and Fman's favorite problems, an intuition filter for your second brain for your personal knowledge management system, you'll be well on

your way to constructing a second brain that actually is personalized to you that allows you to tap into your intuition to research and deepen your understanding on your favorite topics or your favorite problems. constructing the perfect learning system in Obsidian. One that is customized to how you think and what you care about most so you can follow your curiosities and optimize your learning and writing. A system that allows you to trust your intuition and find your flow so you can answer your deepest problems. Now, let's dive into Fman's favorite problems. Okay, so now that you

understand a little bit more about why I'm doing this, why I'm exploring Fman's favorite problems, let's get into actually implementing this system. this idea of exploring your curiosity to identify what you want to capture and test it against your existing ideas. Let's put it into obsidian. As always with my atoms, with my singular concept notes, I include a reference where possible. So the first time I had actually heard of this came from the book Building a Second Brain. So what we can do is we can open up Building a Second Brain and I can search

in here for favorite problems. My 12 favorite problems, a Nobel Prize winner's approach by Richard Fineman. Keep your top 12 problems in mind at all times. It's mostly dormant, but when a new idea or trick comes to mind, test it against the problems to see if it helps. So, this is a quote from one of Richard Feman's friends who kind of explained this concept. And the quote goes, "You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you

hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your 12 problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit and people will say how did he do it? He must be a genius. So that's kind of funny because the biography on Richard Feman is actually called genius. But I really resonated with this concept. You can see I've got a ton of notes in here. I've got lots of concepts and a lot of these things are varied across many disciplines. If you go take

a look at my topic folder, this is just in my index note where I have a list of all of my topics. You can see that my topics kind of range quite a lot from mindfulness, artificial intelligence, personal knowledge management, flow, second brain building, generative art, neuroscience, psychology. I've got a lot of different things, a lot of different topics that I like to pursue. And effectively what Fman did was he took different disciplines. He took different concepts, different questions that he left open-ended and he made a list. And every time he had a new idea,

he tested that new idea or trick against the problems to see if it helped. So, the way that I think of this, let's create a new note here just to kind of organize this all. Going to make this an alloy template. And I'm going to be putting this my digital garden. So, I'm going to apply my digital garden template. Let's just minimize this for now. I'm just going to stack my tabs so that I can scroll through them a little bit more easily and split this one to the right so that I can just keep

this one open all the time. So when I first read this, what comes to mind is that this is a way of applied intuition because what's happening here is I am taking 12 questions, testing new ideas against them. If something resonates, there's probably a reason. So the way I kind of think of this is if something is bothering me, if I have a problem that I cannot solve, I'll go back and reflect on all of the different things that could be causing this problem. Eventually once I think of a particular problem it comes to mind

there's a certain feeling associated with it and I recognize that what's truly causing that problem in the first place what's causing me to have this current feeling this emotion is associated with that problem because there's some resonance there so the same thing can be applied to these ideas if I have a list of 12 questions or major topics we can think of it as anytime a new idea comes to mind I can see if it resonates against that topic and then I know oh okay something about this new thing that I learned is applicable. So

another component is that the question should be open and the goal is to follow your intuition across disciplines. So we want the questions to be open-ended and we want them to be cross-disciplinary. The open-ended component I think that just lets you always be on the lookout for something that could apply. If it's a very closedended question, then it becomes hard to find different ways that intuition can come into play because it either is applicable or it's not. it's not somewhat applicable. But by keeping things open-ended, then we can evoke questions of awe and wonder and

curiosity. So open-ended questions leads to curiosity. And by keeping it cross-disciplinary, we can start to take the teachings of one topic and apply it to another topic. And that's something we'll get into more in a moment. But one thing I want to note here is that this is under the capture notes that I have for my building a second brain book. And that's where I left off last time. So if I embed this note here just for some additional context, we can see here that under building a second brain there's capture, organize, distill, and express.

Now in the last video, I talked a lot more about the organization, the distillation, and the expression. I talked about how you can use the Fman technique to once you're trying to explain something to someone, express it to identify knowledge gaps. The Fman technique allows us to turn teaching and learning into a cycle. After we capture something, we organize it, we distill it, we express it. Then we recognize that we're actually missing something. So we need to go capture more information, organize it, distill it, and express it again. We can reduce uncertainty through teaching by

identifying blind spots, unknown unknowns, and then work to make them known known. We can identify blind spots and convert them into knowledge gaps, do more research, and convert them into known knowns that we're able to better explain to other people. But all of this concept that I talked about with the Fineman technique, it focused more on the expression side of things. how we can use expression to get feedback to identify those knowledge gaps and then fill them in with more research. It doesn't really explore how to capture in the first place, how to be inspired

to capture anything to keep what resonates. And that word there, resonates, is really key because that's kind of what Feman was doing with his favorite problems. Testing the new idea against the 12 favorite problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while, there will be a hit. That there will be a hit to me is intuition. It's understanding that something has intuitively resonated within. And even if your conscious mind is unaware of it, you're still able to take that hit, take the resonance that occurs internally and then try to make it conscious, raise

it from the subconscious and make it conscious. So effectively what the goal of Fman's favorite problems is to be able to make intuition a more conscious process, a more repeatable process where I can test new pieces of information that resonate with me against my favorite topics, my favorite questions, my favorite problems and then see what intuitively resonates and then go and do something about it. Make it actionable. So another goal I would say would be to turn ideas into action. So now that you have a bit of an idea on what the favorite problems are

and why they're useful, the goal of making intuition more conscious so we can repeat it. I thought that I would show you how I would set this up. So effectively what I've done so far is I've created this Fman's favorite problems note with that specific quote, but an atom is not meant to just purely be a quote, though it can be. I like to put it into my own words. This brings in what's called the generation effect where you learn better and understand things more deeply when you put them into your own words. Okay, so

just to briefly reiterate, Fman's favorite problems is a technique and organizing principle for systemizing intuition. By factoring out favorite problems, questions or topics, new inspiration and ideas can be tested against the favorite problems for resonance. Resonance exists for a reason, but can be hard to identify consciously. Leveraging the favorite problems technique enables this testing process to be more systematic and therefore repeatable. So again, the goal here is to make intuition a more conscious process so that when something new comes to mind and we get that aha moment, there's that epiphany. We sometimes don't know why

we had it. It can be a little difficult to find out. But if we have a list of all of our favorite things that we ever think about, it can be a lot easier to apply that intuition against these major topics or problems and identify which one it's resonating with. And then that allows us to explore that topic more deeply through the perspective of that new idea. So, let's create a note. I've actually done this uh in a couple different spots. Cal's curriculum and my 12 favorite problems. So, these are the two notes that I've

previously used to organize my favorite forms of thinking. Okay. So, the first note I want to look at, I've called Cal's 2025 curriculum. And basically what I did was I went through and I identified my favorite topics. So, let's start a process over here. Identify favorite topics. And the reason I identified these favorite topics is because the 12 questions that I have, my favorite problems are likely going to arise from one of these major topics or many of these major topics. To help start that process, I wanted to keep it as broad as possible, keep

it open-ended, and I wanted to keep it cross-disciplinary. So, I just listed out my favorite things that I would be interested in learning more about across 2025, especially with using AI tools like Notebook LM or Perplexity or Gemini 2.5. There's a lot of ways that I can explore these concepts much more deeply using artificial intelligence to boost my research. I just wanted to organize this in a way that would allow me to continue leveling up over time as I introduced certain elements, as I began to give myself lessons and explore this. That's the first way

that I've done this is just by identifying my favorite topics and adding them to a data view table. So effectively what we've done here is rather than just sticking within the capture component, we're using an organization to systemize the capture component so that we can go through and then make this learning process more practical, more tangible. And the other note I wanted to show you is called my favorite problems. And this was meant to be in my digital garden. The way I've framed it is that it's my current problems that form the investigative foundation of

my digital garden. My digital garden is at waterloops.xyz and effectively what I've done with this is it has become a place where I just publish things with low friction. I just share things whenever they come to mind. For example, I've been reading the book the creative act and I've been sharing quotes related to the creative act. So as I go through and read and I come across things that resonate with me, I share the quote as an atom and then add it to my digital garden. I can then create an index here, an organization principle

that pulls in all of the quotes that I've been adding from this book. And I just make them all public as I go. So, this really reduces the friction, but also provides an organizational system for me to share what I'm learning as I'm learning it, so I can build them public. It can be really easy to get overwhelmed with all this, which is why I've introduced topics. So, you can see I've got topics on the side here. And my goal with my favorite problems is that I want to go through and take a few concepts,

for example, AI, and I want to be able to explore this a lot more. I want to create a map of content for this particular topic so that I have, for example, my key questions will be at the top here and then all of the subtopics that could explore it more in depth will be listed. So I end up having a launchpad for a particular concept or particular topic or a particular favorite problem. So effectively what I mean by all this is that as a new idea comes to mind, as something resonates with me, I

can then action it by testing it against my map of content within Obsidian based on my favorite problems that I have and my list of key topics that I've included under my curriculum for the year. I have my organizing principles with my topic list here. And then I have my rough list of my favorite questions that I'll be working through and adding to here. and then some private notes that I'm just not going to show you right now. So, another way to think of this is kind of like a commonplace book, which if you're not

familiar with this, a commonplace book is basically a collection of research notes across various topics culminated in one book. So, historically, this was a way that you could go to different places where you perhaps weren't allowed to take out the resource, like a library back in the day when there were only few books. we had to share them by having a library and then you would go through and write down your own favorite quotes and ideas into this book that you could then take with you from different library to different library. So over time people

would be using commonplace books to store their favorite notes, quotes and ideas in a single common area place which is why it's a commonplace book. So my goal is to create a digital commonplace book system that helps me solve my favorite problems. So this ends up being effectively my commonplace books for these different topics. And then my favorite problems are the questions that I try to answer as a result of new information that comes in stored inside of my commonplace book, but through the lens of these favorite problems so that I know which book to

put it in. This will make more sense as we go through. So this is still a work in progress here, but effectively we have our favorite topics and we add them into a data view table. So we get these map of topics or maps of content. We need to create some kind of commonplace book for storing those ideas or quotes. So for example, that might be just this note here on AI. This could be my commonplace book where I write everything related to AI or at least use it as a map to organize these. A

map of content effectively ends up being a type of commonplace book index, you could say. And then we have my favorite problems, which will be for testing new ideas. But just before we get into this, I want to show you how I would research a little bit more. This is all just based off of one note that I had in my building a second brain book. So there's I'm sure a lot more information out there on how this could all work and for example how the fiveman's favorite problems has been used in practice. So there's

two ways we can do this. The first would be to go check out the initial resource itself 12 favorite problems how to spark genius with the power of open questions. So this is by Forte Labs. Tego Forte is the author of building a second brain. And honestly this is a great article so I recommend reading through it. I particularly like this phrasing here. The favorite problems allow you to dedicate your time and attention to ideas that truly spark your curiosity. They allow you to see how a piece of information might be useful and why it's

worth keeping. You can see insightful patterns across multiple subjects that may seem unrelated but actually share a common thread. You can focus the impact of your work on problems where you can make a real difference. You can prime your subconscious to notice helpful solutions to your biggest challenges in the world around you. And you can attract like-minded people who have the same interests and goals as you. So, these all sound like a great organizing principle for why this system works. So, I'll go add this to my Obsidian vault. So, for this, I would create a

new source. So, I'm going to give this a source template, include the reference here, and put in Thiego Forte as the author. And then I added these to my notes here. So, now I just have a record of where I got this from. Let's move this over to this stack. So, let's add this in under benefits. So, I'm going to paraphrase here into my own words. The key here is that you can save time and attention for things that matter. You can identify patterns of intuition, prioritize for high impact actions, you can prime your subconscious

based on your goals, and you can build community. So looking at this, I actually think that saving time and attention is effectively the same as high impact because if you can do things more impactfully, you're probably saving time and attention. Identifying patterns of intuition, I think that actually falls under priming the subconscious. And we can also add in here identifying common threads across disciplines because both of these have to do with perhaps subconscious elements that we might recognize. For example, an idea resonates for some reason, but it stays within our subconscious. And we're trying to

make our subconscious point us to our conscious goals, which are our high impact actions so that we can end up spending more time and energy and attention on things that matter. building a community. That's where we start to get into I would say the fineman technique where we're actually sharing and expressing. So this is an a portion of the express part of code. I would say prioritizing for high impact and actions that is for organization and then priming the subconscious based on goals. This is to me more of the capture element where we are trying

to be inspired and we could also say that this is the distillation component. So you can kind of see how code fits into this system here of the Fman technique which is the expression component so that we can identify knowledge gaps and then we can fill them in but also for Fman's favorite problem. So we can have an organization system on what to try and capture in the first place the things that we would potentially want to express with the Fman technique. So it's kind of interesting because I originally thought that this was going to

be almost entirely under the capture component of code but I'm realizing that the Fman's favorite problems is really more of an organizational principle. It's something that helps us go through and hone our time, energy, and attention to focus on the things that actually matter so that we can identify patterns and common threads across disciplines and increase the impact of our actions. So again, the goal here is to turn ideas into action. And by having this system here, by having Fman's favorite problems, we can save a lot of energy on the organizational side of things because

whenever something comes in and resonates, we can just instantly turn it into action by testing it against our favorite problems. Okay, so now just before we get into this, I wanted to do a little bit more research because this is all based off of just that one article that I had read and building a second brain book. So it's all from one spot. So I want to actually use Notebook LM today, which I mentioned that I was going to be bringing in more research tools. Notebook actually just got a new feature called discover sources. So

this makes it much more similar to perplexity where you can search the web and do deep research to identify sources based on specific topics. So you describe something that you'd like to learn or click on I'm feeling curious to explore a new topic which could be an interesting way to find information to capture. But today, I want to do a little bit more focused deep dive on this particular concept of Fineman's favorite problems to see if there's anything else that I'm missing in my system here before I begin actually listing out what my favorite problems

are based on those key topics that I talked about. And just briefly, I want to note that I do have a full video that goes much more into depth on notebook's discover sources feature and the mindmap feature. These are both new and I'm going to show you what these are in a second here. But if you're interested in doing more of a deep dive and understanding on how this all fits together, I recommend checking out those videos. Okay, let's describe what I would like to learn. What is Fineman's favorite problems and why is it so

effective? So I can click submit and now Google will go through and find a bunch of sources that relate to that particular prompt. Oh, cool. So it's bringing in Nestlabs, which is one of my favorite creators and Lord of the Com. I didn't realize that she had an article on this. So right away I can just click on it and open it and cool. There we go. There's more information on Fman's favorite problems that comes from her article here. something from Zealcasten, The Art of Manliness. To be honest, I just don't like that framing. So,

I'm going to remove that one. And it brings in a YouTube video here. So, it's actually really interesting to me that it didn't bring in Tegofores, but honestly, that's fine because I had discovered that one on my own. So, let's click import. Okay. And we had two sources here that failed, probably because they're behind a payw wall or prevent AI scraping. So, we can just remove those. The core idea is to maintain a set of intriguing open-ended questions that remain at the back of one's mind. By constantly testing new information against these problems, individuals can

uncover unexpected connections and generate creative solutions. So that's pretty cool. That would be the exact summary of how I would frame the goal of this. But now we're looking for a little bit more practical output. So let's see using the mindmap feature how Fman's favorite problems is organized as a principle. You can see here it's got this core feature. Fineman's favorite problems which can be expanded. Concept benefits. How to find or create implementation related concepts. Examples of problems. Emphasis. Interesting. Ordinary people can be brilliant. There's importance in asking questions. Solving worthwhile contributable problems. There's courage

in tackling hard problems. So I like that framing. Let's go over to implementation. Keep problems in mind. Revisit regularly. Integrate into workflow. Use casten. Interesting. filter for permanent notes, connect new notes to problems, and use in task management. So now, because I'm using my molecular zealcasten system to build here, I'm looking for ways for me to take this Fman's favorite problems, build out atoms as I learn new concepts that can be put into my commonplace book like quotes and key ideas, and then I want to be able to link those together to create those permanent

notes, the molecules. So to me, the zetocasting component is really interesting. Let's click on that and that will automatically do a search for what do these sources say about zettocasten in the larger context of implementation. So integrating favorites into your workflow. It's the process of connection which is one of the key elements of zettocasten. So that makes sense and one of the whole points of using obsidian is for connection. So that's a good point here using favorites as a filter. I like that a lot because that's kind of how I envision this is that a

new piece of information appears. An idea comes to mind and then we know it resonates with us but we don't know why. So we filter it through our favorite problems and that will leave us with one or two that seem the most relevant that are probably why that idea fits which we can then go through and connect and then produce a zetle or a molecule. Turning consumption into contribution that's a key element of zettocassin. What resonates the most is using favorites as a filter. So we can see it comes from this source here. So we

can go check that out if we want to. Cool. So I'd say that worked really well. But now I'm looking for a practical implementation, a few process based on how other people have been doing this in a way that can be applied to my own system so that I can start generating those questions and create that filtration so that I can process my connections a little bit more effectively and more consistently. So let's try discovering a few more sources. And I want to research a little bit more deeply here. I'm interested specifically like I mentioned

before, how does this applied intuition? How do we map this to our subconscious to bring it to our conscious? How do we make this intuition more impactful on us? How do we find flow with these ideas and don't get caught up in the filtration process? So, as you may remember in my Cal's curriculum, this is actually starting to bring this in a little bit more. I'm interested in the concept of flow, mindfulness, neuroscience, and intuition. So to me, Fman's favorite problems are kind of an overlap of all of these elements because it's applied intuition that

hopefully by building out this system, I can identify patterns of intuition while I'm in a flow state and be more aware of what is actually contributing this intuitive resonance. So that's the mindfulness, being aware, being mindful rather than mindless. So maybe I will take a few of these concepts and this can start to build out my favorite problems. If you're not quite sure on how to get started with Fman's favorite problems, here's a list of tips and tricks that can help you build out your questions based on your favorite topics. What were your favorite things

as a child? What have been the most impactful moments in your life? What have you always wanted to learn but haven't? By taking some time to reflect on these problems, especially what you cared about most as a child, what you found the most fascinating, you'll be able to slowly iterate and build out these questions over time. It's not about getting them right off the bat. It's about cultivating these questions over time so that you can continue honing in on what your favorite things to learn are and how you can test out your intuition and ideas

against those favorite problems. I've been asking myself these questions for years as I built out this list of favorite topics. The more I've allowed myself to follow my intuition, the happier I've been, the more fulfilled I've felt, and the more success I've achieved in life. Mindfulness has been one of the best ways I've ever found to improve my attention, focus, and happiness in life. Neuroscience fascinates me because it's at the basis of all experience. Quantum confuses me, which makes me want to learn more about it since it effectively shows that our world is non-dualistic or

non-binary. Artificial intelligence, AI, and emergence are topics that'll get much more into depth in future videos, but I'm fascinated in the ability to use AI to improve our lives without replacing our humanity. I've used these topics to build out my digital garden system using my molecular zealcasten workflow. I talk a lot more about this in the Fman technique video. So, if you're interested in seeing more practical implementation on how I generate atoms, how I build out molecules by linking those atoms and then sequence those molecules together to produce an alloy, my final output. I recommend

watching the Fman technique video because today is more focused on building out the framework that will then be able to integrate with our molecular zettocasting system. Just a quick reminder that if you're finding this video valuable, I would love if you would please consider liking and subscribing. Your support is what enables me to continue making these videos. So, I really appreciate it a lot. If you're interested in getting a templated version of the molecular zetto castin system, the one that I'm using in this video and that I went through more in the Fman technique video,

then please consider joining my paid membership as I make this templated kit available to all of my paying members. Now, as we go forward, I'm going to start diving deeper into integrating Fman's favorite problems with my favorite topics, the list that I just showed you and that I've been talking about. If any of these topics resonate with you and you want to learn more about them or want to see me explore them more deeply, please let me know in the comments. By getting your feedback, I can then use the Fman technique to improve my explanation

of these topics and generate a really positive feedback loop that helps you learn, helps me teach, which helps me learn. It's the best of both worlds. Effectively, I'm going to continue recalibrating these problems over time as I iterate based on the new information and knowledge that I'm receiving. As I test out those new insights and ideas against my existing system, I'll recalibrate it over and over and over again, helping me go deeper and deeper into the topics that I care most about. Now, let's explore more on how these topics relate to Fman's favorite problems. So,

let's try Fman's favorite problems explained through the lens of flow states, intuition, neuroscience, and mindfulness. And click submit. Here we go. Flow and intuition, a systems neuroscience comparison. I like the thought of that. Go with the flow and neuroscientific view on being engaged. Improve cognition through mindfulness and mindfulness exercises. Sure. So these all seem good. I will import them. Okay. So you can see again that there's a couple sources that are blocked here. So honestly this one here sounds pretty interesting. Flow and intuition as systems neuroscience comparison. So there was a block because it prevents

automatic scraping. But now what I'm going to do is get the PDF and I'm going to go over to my Zotterero plugin. Going to make sure Zotterero is running. Okay. So here's my Zotterero. And this is for more academic research for keeping track of PDFs. So then I can click this button here. So tarot save it. I'm going to take a look here. I have consciousness mindfulness flow. This applies to a couple. Um but because I'm looking at this specifically from the lens of intuition, I'm going to put it in the intuition one for now.

And let's see if I can actually add this directly to notebook lm. Okay, cool. So going through and getting the actual PDF seems to work. So now I can remove this. So, now that we just added a few more sources here, what I'm kind of looking for is a way for me to begin understanding how these concepts fit together to build in that uh common thread across disciplines so that I can start to frame my questions in an open-ended way that leads to more curiosity because I'm genuinely interested in flow states and intuition and mindfulness

and neuroscience and a cross-disciplinary way. These are all related to slightly different fields even if they have that common thread of overlap. the process we have now so far is to build a filter out of the favorite problems and then we need to apply the filter to new ideas and concepts. So just before I show you that new mind map, what this is kind of making me think of is perhaps my first favorite problem. So let's open up my 12 favorite problems. Update this a bit. Major topic list in Kel's curriculum. And let's just put

some rep nodes at the bottom here. So this is the first question that comes to mind is how can I use my intuition to enter flow states more regularly. So for those of you that don't know flow is often considered the state of optimal experience. So let's just go over to flow for a second. So you can see that flow is connected to a ton of topics. This is just a single dimension one degree of freedom. If I expand it further I have tons and tons of notes that are all related to flow states. So,

I'm looking for a way to make sense of this a little bit more practically to apply my filter to new ideas, quotes, and concepts so that I can find flow more regularly. That's kind of one of my favorite problems here is how can I build intuition systems so I can enter flow states more regularly? When I'm in a flow state, I tend to be most fulfilled and most effective, most impactful. So, that's prioritizing for high impact actions. Here would be putting myself in a flow state because I'm conserving time and attention. So, by asking for

this neuroscientific explanation of flow states and intuition, I've now brought in some of my core elements of my favorite problems. And I'm curious to see how a new mind map is created that brings in Fineman's favorite problems so that hopefully I can understand why Fineman's favorite problems actually works from an intuitive and neuroscientific perspective. So, let's build another mind map. Cool. Problem solving, intuition, and mindfulness. That sounds like a good overlap. So now rather than just Fineman's favorite problems, we have problem solving and intuition. Honestly, that sounds pretty obvious that Fineman's favorite problems are for

the purpose of problem solving. But I honestly hadn't really thought of it in terms of that way. I was just thinking of it as questions being asked rather than problems to be solved. Okay, so this splits it up into three different elements. We have problem solving, which is Fineman's approach, intuition, aha moments, the neuroscience of flow, intuitive processes, and mindfulness, which is paying attention, living in the moment, and improved cognition. and hippocampus postural medial cortex connectivity. So honestly that sounds pretty interesting. I have no idea what that is. And this is why perhaps using something

like notebook LM can really help with this problem solving and question building filter because it can do that quick research for you across the internet. Do that deep research coalesce all the research into one spot and then give you these core topics that can be expanded into other avenues that I can go explore. I also don't know what dual process theory is. So that's interesting. can expand it. Oh, okay. This is thinking fast and slow. That makes sense. That's very relevant. The neuroscience of flow, brain networks, embodied expertise, prediction errors, the default mode network. That's

something I'm also fascinated with. If you uh see here, I have consciousness, mindfulness, and the default mode network. I think that's a fascinating concept, which is basically when your brain turns off problem solving mode, what happens when your mind wanders, which is one of the most effective ways to surface insights. So, I hope that just my rambling here pointing out what jumps out at me, what's exciting is actually kind of the point of this. The point here is to see when there's that hit, when something pops into my mind because I've learned something new. There's

a new idea here and it intuitively resonates with me. That's kind of what was happening right here. There's these terms that sound very familiar, but I don't know enough about them. So then by framing it in this way, I find I'm a pretty visual learner. I can map out how these different concepts fit together, how my favorite problems overlap, and then I can start doing deep research into each of these concepts to learn more and to start bringing in atoms into my system. So I guess the next step here is apply the filters to new

ideas, quotes, and concepts. So part of that is I guess this is actually step three, which would be explore curiosities and find new atoms. I'm just going to put that because those are the singular concepts. extract the atoms into notes as part of my second brain or my Obsidian PKM, personal knowledge management. And now I have raw material to apply to the filter. As I go through and come up with new problems and test these new concepts against those problems, I'll start making more connections throughout my digital garden, throughout my second brain in Obsidian, my

personal knowledge management system, and I'll begin turning those atoms into molecules. So for example, I could take something that's specifically related to mindfulness and a new concept comes in like improving cognition through mindfulness. That brings in a neuroscientific element which I notice is actually somewhat missing from this. We have the neuroscience of flow, but neuroscience on its own isn't a major topic. So that kind of points to me that maybe I need some more resources that are more related to neuroscience. So by going back here and checking like, oh, hey, I have these major topic

headings like intuition and flow and mindfulness. All of those made it into these major topics for the most part except the neuroscience of flow. They were combined together. So that could be an insight in and of itself or that could tell me that I need to do some more research based on the Fman technique trying to explain this to you that I'm missing some knowledge. I have a knowledge gap and I need to go explore a little bit more. So this is a very nonlinear process. Effectively our process now is that we build this organizational

problems filter. the favorite problems based on our favorite topics. Uh based on where those topics overlap in specific questions or problems like the 12 favorite problems that can be stored for example in something like a commonplace book where you take related information and layer it all together in one place collect those quotes and ideas in one spot like a map of content for example like this AI uh commonplace book that I've just started building. And then once that system is in place, once I have these major topics, the maps of content, I can start exploring

curiosities to find new atoms. I can go over to something like Perplexity or Notebook LM or research rabbit and I can start searching and trying to find things that resonate with me. I can capture what resonates as part of that research. This is the the C in code. And then I can start to extract atoms into notes, which would be the distillation part of code. Then I can connect and combine those atoms into molecules and then share the ideas which brings in the finement technique and then the process can be repeated. I can go find

more information. I can express something get feedback and we end up getting this really nice cyclic loop that I talked about in the finement technique video. So just looking at this now I realize that it didn't bring in quite a lot of neuroscience. It didn't bring in artificial intelligence. Didn't bring in quantum or personal knowledge management. So now let's go back here and let's add those in. So, let's find sources related to neuroscience, quantum physics, and personal knowledge management through the lens of Fineman's favorite problems. Click submit and let's see what comes up. Oh, here

we go. This brings in that take a Forte article that I was reading from the beginning. Quantum behavior from Fineman's lectures on physics, quantum physics and neuroscience and psychology, the role of intuition and interdisciplinary insight. That sounds interesting. Cool. Let's click import. There we go. Now, you can see that we have we have 26 sources here. So, let's generate a new mind map and see how it updated. And again, kind of what I'm trying to do here is find the overlap, the common thread between all of my different systems. Okay, perfect. This is starting to

look much better, I would say. We now have Fman's problem solving and thinking, which brings in Fman's favorite problems, the Fman technique, problem solving strategies, intuition, and insights, connecting quantum physics, flow states, and mindfulness, which I would imagine starts to get into neuroscience, metacognition. Yeah, I talked about that in the Fman technique video. Quantum physics, cool. The observer effect. That's something I've been thinking about a lot. Notebook of things I don't know. That actually sounds very related to Fman's favorite problems. Cool. So, this is looking much better in terms of an organizational principle for this

particular concept of Fman's favorite problems because it's bringing in the Fman technique, which is what I explored a lot more in the last video. And then it gets more into Fman's favorite problems. But we also start to bring in things like flow state, intuition, mindfulness, and problemsolving strategies. Cool. So I would say from everything I looked at, this is just missing one element which was more neuroscience-based. So let's go discover one more time. So kind of the goal of the fineman's favorite problems technique is I think trying to find those aha moments, epiphies. So let's

try and bring in some neuroscience of intuition and epiphies specifically. Cool. Insight problem solving with neuroscientific methods. That sounds very relevant. The neuroscience of intuition. Cool. Let's import those. Okay. Okay, so now that I've added a few more sources here, you can see I have now 32 sources. Let's generate another mindm. As you can tell, I really like using this mindm feature because it helps instantly create a visual organization of something like this table here. And I find breaking it down into the subtopics and then how there's these different common threads across the disciplines to

be really helpful for understanding what my questions are going to be. Okay, interesting. So you can see now it just brings in cognitive processes, insight, intuition, flow, fineman's problem solving, and then quantum physics and mindb brain interaction. So that sounds really interesting to me. So we have the Fman technique, the Fman's favorite problems. So I really like that it's bringing in insight as a separate component from intuition rather than lumping them together because I do think they're related. Intuition is that system that you are internally training. It's that filter that you're building with those favorite

problems. Whereas insight is that aha moment that happens. So intuition is almost more of the system that's ingrained within you. Whereas insight is what happens when you bring some external source into contact with that intuition system. So that's really interesting to me. So I'm going to keep exploring this and I'm going to build out some of my favorite problems. But let's see what notebook LM has to say. So let's ask it to suggest an algorithm for leveraging Fman's favorite problems and the Fman technique to learn effectively and efficiently with the greatest impact. Okay, so I'm

just going to compare this to what I had just built out here as a process. Phase one, establish your curiosity engine. Find my favorite problems. That's kind of like building my favorite problems filter. Open-ended questions of deep curiosity. Create a list of favorites 5 to 12 and make them in an easily visible place. That's a good idea. Maybe write them down on a notepad. Deepen understanding with the fineman technique. So learn and explain it simply. Identify knowledge gaps and return to the source material. Refine and simplify. So that to me feels more like actually phase

four rather than the phase two because it involves the expression component but I appreciate the framing here. Then phase three integrate and connect for impact test new knowledge against favorite problems. So that's here document connections and knowledge management system like zetto casten. So phase three is kind of integrate and connect. That's exploring the curiosity to find new atoms and then applying it to the filter. Cool. And here are some benefits. It increases motivation, deepens understanding, enhances connection making. So that's a key of trying to use Obsidian here. Improves focused learning, gives you long-term knowledge building,

and has greater impact. So that's a great answer. I'm going to click save to notes so I don't lose that because if you refresh the page in Notebook LM, you would lose it. So now that we've gone through and identified the goals and tested out the key features of the different questions, identified the benefits of it, and then built out an algorithm or a process for how to do it, really the next step is to start actually creating the list of questions. So to help me identify that list of questions, what I might do is

create an AI podcast, a conversation between two different AIs that goes through all of these different concepts, maybe add a few more sources, and then just listen to this conversation to see what resonates in terms of the questions that I'm actually trying to solve. So I could go in and type in, for example, explore the deep questions I might be interested in based on these sources. Click generate, and this will generate a podcast based on all of these sources and the notes that we've included in here. So that could be a cool way for me

to go through and start reflecting on why I'm doing this in the first place and what I find the most interesting. But let's in the meantime ask it what is the best and simplest way to identify my favorite problems. Reflect on what sparks curiosity. Formulate open-ended questions. Listen to the questions you already ask yourself. Consider what you want to learn about. Focus on the problems you can contribute to. So for myself, this whole framework that I've been going through has been considering what I want to learn about. So for myself, I have the CL's curriculum

which are my favorite topics that I'm interested in exploring. So I have a bunch of additional concepts, initial thoughts that I want to explore on why these particular topics resonate with me. I'm going to go through and expand these into questions and then I'm going to use these topics that I want to learn more about to build that filter for myself that I can test new ideas against so I can use them as a framework. And I'm not going to go through that right now because it's going to take me a while to build out

all of these different concepts. And I might add a few more topics as I go because I think I only have eight major topics at the moment. So I might add a couple more. But my plan for moving forward in this series is to go through and continue finessing these favorite problems that I'm going to try and solve while I do research into these different topics. So, if you're interested in learning more about any of these topics in particular, please let me know in the comments and I'll use that as an indicator that people are

interested in hearing what I have to say as I explore these concepts in more depth. So, this was really the setup phase to apply Fman's favorite problems and then I'm going to go through and actually start exploring the list of questions. So, that'll be what I get into more in the next part of the video and maybe I'll do it after downloading this 12-minute podcast and I'll go for a walk. So, if you're interested in learning more about the Fman technique, I talk a lot more about that in this video here that gives some more

context on this series. And if you want to learn more on how you can use different tools to start to surface those insights uh and overlap and generate that mind map using, for example, notebook LM, the discover sources in the mind map feature, I recommend checking out those videos. And also, I've been teaching people how to run AI locally. So, that was one more thing I wanted to show you here. For example, I have all of these topics here, like I have AI as a part of my digital garden. So, I'm going to be writing

and adding more information to this particular topic that expands my digital garden, builds out this graph. But in Obsidian, for example, I can open up what's called smart connections on the side here. And this has used an embedding model to create an index of my entire vault and then suggest related connections here. So, the more I build out my favorite problems, for example, if I click on this here, you can see it starts to pull up different concepts that might relate to it. So if I go and add, for example, that initial question that I

put in here at the bottom, how can I build intuition systems so I can enter flow states more regularly? Let's actually add that in as a question. And I'm going to list this as intuition, which is its own topic here. And I can add in flow. So it's interesting that you can see it brings in instinct. It brings in five men's favorite problems, mastery of fear, a few concepts here. So, the more I build out this list of questions that I add in my favorite problems here, the more this AI analysis of my entire vault

is going to be able to give me more informed sources. So, I'm going to go through and clean this up a little bit and then turn it into a blog post on my digital garden. So, this ends up becoming a form of expression and alloy. And then based on your feedback from the YouTube video, I will be able to apply the Fman technique to understand where I need to go explain more about this concept and the other concepts that I've included here. So, I hope that you find this helpful for understanding how you can kind

of build out this filter for yourself, leveraging things like the commonplace book, the code method, your favorite problems, and the Fman technique to begin building a system that allows you to actually leverage your intuition to explore your deepest curiosities. And there you have it. How to construct an intuition filter within your personal knowledge management system in Obsidian. Our final workflow is build out your favorite problems filter, the intuition system. Explore our curiosities to find new insights. Capture what resonates and track them with atoms. Test these insights against your filter, the intuition system. Form molecules between

these atoms, insights, and ideas. Share the knowledge and ideas by expressing it to others with alloys, sequenced molecules. And then finally, use the feedback that you get from that expression as part of the Fman technique to understand where you need to learn more about how to dive deeper into the topics that you've been researching based on that feedback. And then you just recalibrate. You continuously repeat the system over and over again, going deeper and deeper into what you care about most. If you found this video helpful, I would love if you would please consider liking

and subscribing. I'm really working on making YouTube my full-time career, so any support you can give is very much appreciated. If you're interested in getting a copy of the templated zetocasten system, the molecular zealcasten system that I talk about in this video and in the fman technique video, please consider joining my paid membership. My members are those who have been supporting me and enabling me to continue making these videos. So, thank you very much for supporting me. A reminder to please let me know if any of the topics that I talked about today resonated with

you, if these mapped to your intuition system based on topics that you would like to learn more about. If you can let me know in the comments what your favorite topics are or what you would like to see me look into further, then that really helps calibrate my system and helps me know how I can continue providing value through these videos through my natural expression and natural exploration. If you'd like to learn more about how Obsidian works, including organizing your second brain and how you can use artificial intelligence in a local, private, and free way

to augment your personal knowledge management system, I recommend checking out my Obsidian PKM and digital garden playlist. If you're interested in learning more about Notebook LM and how it can be used to augment your research, to augment your second brain, I have an AI learning playlist that goes into many more features of this incredible tool. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video where I outline my favorite questions a little bit more concretely and then begin exploring them to add depth to my knowledge base in Obsidian and then continue expanding that

into my digital garden.