# IA for PKM — Crows, Camels, Concepts, and the Cognitive Divide **Covers**:: **Source**:: [IA for PKM — Crows, Camels, Concepts, and the Cognitive Divide](https://cody-burleson.medium.com/ia-for-pkm-crows-camels-concepts-and-the-cognitive-divide-7523c0bfa5eb) **Creator**:: [[Cody Burleson]] # Highlights ##### ^292190321 ###### ^292190321q With personal knowledge management (PKM), we seek to learn and grow, to understand and communicate, and to influence behavior (especially our own) so that we achieve better outcomes for ourselves and others. ^292190321 ##### ^292190331 ###### ^292190331q See, crows are actually pretty smart. They knew that whenever people entered those woods they always came out. So, the crows waited for that third dude and when he finally showed up and left the way he came, the crows knew the coast was clear. ... When five guys went in and only four returned, the crows came out of hiding. Evidently, they couldn’t discriminate beyond the level of three units and their perceptual-mathematical ability consisted of a sequence such as one-two-three-many. ... Now, you might think that a man’s perceptual ability is greater than that of a crow, but as it turns out, it’s not by much: we may hold five or six units at most. ^292190331 ##### ^292190325 highlight_tags:: [[perception]], [[language]] ###### ^292190325q Words are the things that transform concepts into mental entities. And even though most words are abstractions, they ultimately represent concretes in reality — the things we perceive directly with our senses: percepts. ^292190325 ##### ^292190326 from [[Ayn Rand]] ###### ^292190326q A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted. ^292190326 ##### ^292190332 highlight_tags:: [[language]] ###### ^292190332q Conceptualizing this view begins with differentiating one thing from another. ... The next step of the process involves integration, wherein we blend similar units into a single new mental entity based on something or several things similar about them. ... Finally, we replace the concept with a single, specific, perceptual concrete — a placeholder that differentiates it from all other concretes and all other concepts: a word. This is the function of language. ^292190332 ##### ^292190330 ###### ^292190330q Just as words serve as the utilitarian representation of real-world concepts, deep and wide, your personal knowledge base is a living representation of your ever-evolving mind, deep and wide. ^292190330