Now imagine how it must have felt to grow up in that world, and then to see pen and paper in use for the first time, making baffling ideas simple, defying memory’s inherent slipperiness, and allowing for complicated sums, lifelike drawings, gripping verse, lengthy memoirs, and surprising harmonies. You could say that the arrival of the notebook

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My starting point for this book was not Leonardo’s art masterpieces but his notebooks. His mind, I think, is best revealed in the more than 7,200 pages of his notes and scribbles that, miraculously, survive to this day. Paper turns out to be a superb information-storage technology, still readable after five hundred years, which our own tweets

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sited in the notebook or in the brain doesn’t, therefore, matter. So long as one trusts the information stored in the notebook, relies upon it, and uses it, there is – philosophically speaking – no meaningful difference between the notebook and the mind. Therefore, Otto’s mind has expanded to include his notebook, and your notebook – if you use it

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