What does it mean that uncaptured thoughts decay in seconds?

Your most novel thinking arrives as fleeting signals. Without a capture practice, you are systematically destroying your own cognitive raw material.

Example: You're walking to a meeting and a connection fires between two problems your team has been stuck on separately. By the time you sit down, you remember you had an insight — but not what it was. The connection is gone. It's not coming back. Your default mode network generated something genuinely novel, and you let it evaporate because there was no capture tool within reach.

Try this: Set a timer for 2 hours during normal work. Every time a thought feels worth keeping, capture it immediately — voice memo, phone note, napkin. At the end, count what you caught. Then try to remember what you lost. The gap between those numbers is your daily signal loss.