Field notes from the First Brain.
Page 20 of 38.
How to Read Non-Fiction Faster and Remember It
Read non-fiction relationally, not line by line: map each chapter's concepts onto what you know, and you finish faster with a structure you keep.
How to Improve Spatial Awareness in a 2D Feed World
Endless flat feeds shrink the brain's 3D engine. Rebuild spatial awareness by reconstructing real space: the room behind the camera, the route without GPS.
Is TikTok a Weapon? Attention as a Strategic Asset
Whether or not any state aims it, short-form algorithmic media degrades the deep attention a population thinks with, and that vulnerability is yours to close.
What Happens if the Internet Is Shut Down? Mind Without the Feed
Cut the feed and an unfurnished mind panics within minutes. A richly stocked one has decades of material to wander through. The difference is what you built inside.
What Happens if AI Runs Out of Power? The Compute Crunch
AI's electricity demand is growing fast enough to be rationed. When compute gets metered, the people who already think well in their own heads win.
Should I Ask AI for Life Advice? The Oracle Problem
Use AI to map your options and stress-test your reasoning. The moment you let it choose, you are outsourcing the judgment that big decisions exist to build.
How to Remember Your Life Better: Build the Architecture
Years blur because episodes fade without structure. Anchor your days to places, people, and themes, and review them on purpose: the life you keep is built.
Should I Let AI Organize My Notion? Files Yes, Ideas No
Let AI file, tag, and summarize your notes. Never let it draw the connections between ideas, because that act of connecting is the thinking you cannot outsource.
How to Prepare for AGI: Format Your Own Mind First
Nobody can time AGI. But one prep pays off whether it lands in two years or twenty: upgrading your own cognition so you can direct AI, not dissolve into it.
New Corporate Roles for AI: The Chief Ontology Officer
Every AI initiative dies in the data swamp for the same reason: nobody owns the company's concepts. The defining new role structures the master graph.
How to Understand Cryptocurrency: Think in Graphs
Crypto stays confusing while you picture a bank with no building. It clicks when you swap the central-ledger model for a shared graph nobody owns.
How to Protect Your Intellectual Property: Own the Logic
Lawyers and encryption protect the file. Your deepest, un-stealable intellectual property is the logic in your head, the understanding no one can copy or extract.
How to Outsmart a Gaslighter: Anchor Your Memory
Gaslighting attacks your memory of what is real. You defend against it not by out-arguing the manipulator but by anchoring reality in records they cannot rewrite.
How to Remember What You Read: From Storing to Knowing
Highlights, bookmarks, and saved summaries are storage. Memory needs translation: rebuild what you read in your own words and wire it to what you know.
Is Cognitive Enhancement Fair? The Real Divide
The fairness debate fixates on pills and implants the rich might buy. The divide already widening is structural: minds organized to think versus minds left to drift.
How to Stay in Flow State Longer: Match Skill to Task
Flow is a readout, not magic: it appears when challenge sits just above skill and dies with every interruption. Calibrate the task and guard the session.
How to Start Homesteading: Skills, Soil, and Mind
Start a homestead with skills, not acreage: grow something, cook, preserve, compost. Then apply the same self-sufficiency to the most outsourced asset you own.
How to Get a Photographic Memory: The Useful Illusion
Photographic memory is a myth, but the structural, spatial memory that powers every memory champion is real and trainable. Here is what to build instead.
How to Memorize Numbers Fast: The Major System
Numbers are abstract and forgettable. The Major System turns each digit into a sound, then a vivid image, so your brain stores them with its powerful visual memory.
Is Technology Making Us Dumber? The Outsourcing Audit
Raw intelligence is not shrinking; practiced capacity is. We outsourced memory, navigation, and now reasoning, and the unused faculties are going frail.
Is Photography Dead? Value in the Post-Camera Age
Generated images made generic photos worthless, not photography. What survives is the picture anchored to a real moment: witnessed, provenanced, and remembered.
How Will Couples Communicate in the Future?
Speech is a lossy channel for two minds sharing a life. The future widens the pipe, from shared context tools to BCIs, and honesty scales with the bandwidth.
Transhumanism Language: Building a Posthuman Lexicon
You cannot manage a cognitive state you cannot name. The future of mind needs new vocabulary, and naming a state is the first step to controlling it.
How to Learn Multiple Skills at Once: Build a Root Node
Do not learn skills as separate silos. Plant one deep mental model as a root node and branch each new skill off it, so they share edges and reinforce each other.