As We May Think

Summary

As We May Think is a speculative essay about the problem of intellectual abundance. Written at the end of World War II, it asks what scientists should do when their wartime energies turn toward peace and when the record of human knowledge has grown too large for traditional methods of indexing, filing, and retrieval. Bush surveys existing and imagined technologies: photography, microfilm, speech transcription, mechanized calculation, and compact storage. His central invention is the Memex, a desk-like personal machine that would let a scholar store books, records, and communications, then build associative trails through them. The device is not a digital computer in the later sense, and Bush's technical details belong to an analog world of levers, screens, and microfilm. Yet the conceptual leap is striking. He argues that the human mind works by association rather than alphabetical indexing, so external memory systems should let users connect one item to another in meaningful sequences. In retrospect, the essay looks like an ancestor of hypertext, personal computing, web browsing, bookmarking, and knowledge management. Its continuing force comes from the way it makes information overload feel both technological and cognitive. The essay does not merely ask for faster filing; it asks for tools that fit habits of attention, memory, curiosity, and collaboration. Its medical interest comes through memory and the nervous system: Bush's model of association borrows from ideas about mental linkage, while his postwar optimism imagines devices that could extend human recall and judgment. The essay is also politically charged. It assumes the enormous mobilization of science during war and tries to redirect that machinery toward discovery, communication, and cultural memory. As We May Think therefore stands with Turing, Shannon, and Wiener as a founding document of information culture, but its emotional center is humane: it imagines technology as a companion to thought rather than a replacement for it.

Plot or Argument

• Wartime science seeks a peaceable task

  Bush frames the essay by asking how scientific organization can serve knowledge after the emergency of war.

• The record overwhelms old retrieval

  He diagnoses a mismatch between proliferating research and the slow, rigid systems used to store and locate it.

• The Memex externalizes association

  The imagined machine lets users create linked trails through documents, imitating the associative movement of thought.

• Knowledge becomes a shared trail

  Bush extends the device from private memory to collaborative scholarship, where useful paths can be saved and transmitted.

Lessons

• Information overload is an old modern problem

  Bush shows that abundance can become a form of scarcity when retrieval fails. More knowledge helps only if people can find, connect, and use it without drowning in the archive.

  • What parts of Bush's diagnosis still feel current?
  • How does overload change the meaning of expertise?

• Tools should honor human association

  The Memex matters because it begins from how people link ideas, not from how filing systems prefer to sort them. Design becomes humane when it follows the grain of thought.

  • Is association a reliable model of thinking?
  • What does the web inherit from Bush's imagined trails?

• Peace can inherit wartime machinery

  The essay tries to redirect the organization and ambition of wartime science toward civil intellectual life. Its optimism is inspiring, but it also shows how deeply peacetime technology can be shaped by military mobilization.

  • Can tools born in war be made fully peaceful?
  • What responsibilities come with large-scale scientific administration?

Context

Published in 1945, the essay appeared when the United States was moving from wartime research to a new peacetime science policy. Bush was a central figure in that transition and in the argument for public investment in research.

Composition

Bush developed ideas about information storage and retrieval before and during the war, then presented them for a general magazine audience. The essay's analog machinery reflects the microfilm and photographic technologies available to his imagination.

Reception

As We May Think influenced later hypertext pioneers, including Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. Readers now see the Memex as a conceptual ancestor of linked digital media, despite its non-digital technical basis.

Comparisons

• notes-on-menabreas-sketch-of-the-analytical-engine

  Lovelace imagines symbolic engines beyond arithmetic; Bush imagines personal information machinery beyond filing and indexing.

• mathematical-theory-of-communication

  Shannon measures information abstractly, while Bush asks how a working scholar might navigate information meaningfully.

• an-essay-concerning-human-understanding

  Locke's account of association and ideas offers an early philosophical background for Bush's claim that memory works by links.

• cybernetics

  Wiener emphasizes feedback in action; Bush emphasizes associative retrieval in memory and intellectual work.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening question of what scientists, mobilized for war, should turn to once the war is over. Bush's answer is that they should make the human record more accessible.
• Bush's diagnosis that research is published faster than anyone can find or use it, with his example of Mendel's work on heredity lying unnoticed for a generation.
• The survey of existing technologies, such as photography, microfilm, voice transcription, and calculating machines, and how Bush imagines each being shrunk, sped up, or joined to others.
• The description of the Memex itself, a desk with screens, levers, and stored microfilm, and the moment Bush explains that its essential feature is tying two items together.
• The worked example of a user building a trail on why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the Crusades, and Bush's prediction of a new profession of trail blazers.

Key terms and names

Memex

Bush's imagined desk-sized machine in which a person stores books, records, and letters on microfilm and consults them quickly. It is meant to be an enlarged, intimate supplement to the owner's own memory.

Associative trail

A chain of linked items that a Memex user builds by joining one record to another. Bush thinks trails mirror the way the mind actually moves from thought to thought, and that they can be saved, named, and shared.

Associative indexing

Bush's alternative to alphabetical or numerical filing, in which any item can lead directly to any other the user has tied to it. He argues that rigid indexes, where an item sits in only one place, fail the way minds work.

Microfilm

Photographic film on which pages can be reduced to tiny size. Bush imagines it compressing a whole encyclopedia into a very small space, which is what makes a personal library inside a desk thinkable.

Trail blazers

The new profession Bush foresees of people who find pleasure in establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record, so that others can follow them.

The Mendel example

Bush's case of Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity going unnoticed for a generation because the right people never found the publication. It stands for knowledge lost not through ignorance but through poor retrieval.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What problem does Bush say scientists face as the war ends, and why does he think the existing methods of publishing and filing cannot solve it?
2. Comprehension How does the Memex work as Bush describes it, and what does he call its essential feature?
3. Comprehension Walk through Bush's example of a user researching the Turkish and English bows. What does the user do, and what can a friend later do with the trail?
4. Interpretation Bush claims the mind works by association rather than by alphabetical indexing. What evidence or reasoning does he offer, and does the Memex really imitate the mind or only one habit of it?
5. Interpretation Bush imagines the physician, the lawyer, and the historian each using stored trails from earlier cases. What kinds of judgment can a trail preserve, and what kinds must still be supplied by the person who follows it?
6. Interpretation Why does Bush frame his proposal as a peacetime task for scientists who served in war? How does that frame shape what he hopes the machine will do for humanity?
7. Big Question Does having a vast, well-linked external memory make a person wiser, or only better informed? What is the difference, and where does Bush stand?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 12:12 (Scripture)

  The Preacher warns that of making many books there is no end and that much study wearies the flesh. Bush begins from the same weariness at the growing record, but answers it with a machine for finding and linking rather than with the Preacher's turn to fearing God and keeping his commandments.

• Joshua 4:1-7 (Scripture)

  Israel sets up twelve stones from the Jordan so that when children ask what they mean, the story of God's deliverance will be told. Scripture treats memory as something a people must build and hand on, much as Bush wants trails that can be passed from one scholar to another.

• Augustine, Confessions X (Church Fathers)

  Augustine marvels at the fields and vast palaces of memory, where images and knowledge are stored and called up, and finally asks where in his memory God is found. His meditation sets Bush's external memory beside a much older question about what memory is for.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The record of human knowledge has grown faster than our ability to consult it, so valuable work is lost or ignored. The mind works by association, moving from one item to another, while our filing systems force each item into one rigid place. New technologies of photography, microfilm, and mechanical selection make it possible to store vast records compactly and retrieve them quickly. Therefore scientists, freed from war work, should build personal machines that let each person link records by association, preserve those trails, and share them, so that humanity can use the knowledge it already has.

Rhetorical device: extended hypothetical illustration. In the essay's later sections Bush makes the abstract Memex concrete by narrating one user's research on the Turkish short bow and the English long bow, step by step, from consulting an encyclopedia to building a trail and passing it to a friend. The imagined scene lets a magazine reader see a machine that did not exist.

Debate: Resolved: A machine that stores and links our records will strengthen human memory rather than weaken it.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Bush argues that the Memex will fit the way the mind actually works because it indexes by association. Using his account of the mind, his description of the machine, and the example of the bow trail, evaluate whether associative linking serves understanding or merely speeds up searching.

Comparison with On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery: Bush imagines a machine that extends a person's memory, while Turing asks whether a machine might itself think. Compare the picture of the human mind behind each essay, and argue which vision of computing better honours what is distinctive about human understanding.

Medical Lens

The essay matters medically as a document in the externalization of memory. Its associative model resonates with psychology and neurology, while its dream of augmentation anticipates clinical information systems, decision support, and the ethical question of how tools shape attention.

• Memex description

  The proposed desk extends memory by preserving linked trails through documents and records.

  Dementia Memory
• Discussion of associative indexing

  Bush's claim about mental association connects technology design to a theory of cognition.

  Mind Body
• Opening postwar frame

  The redirection of wartime research toward peaceful knowledge raises questions about scientific responsibility.

  Medical Ethics

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare the Memex with a modern electronic health record as two systems that promise memory and risk clutter.

• Fiction

  Write a story about a scholar who inherits someone else's associative trails and begins to think in their patterns.

Further Reading

• Endless Frontier, G. Pascal Zachary

  A biography of Bush and his role in American science policy.

• Tools for Thought, Howard Rheingold

  A history of personal computing and intellectual augmentation.