Field notes from the First Brain.
Page 21 of 27.
How to Heal Screen Brain: Active Cognitive Rehab
How to heal screen brain? Deleting apps stops the harm but rebuilds nothing. Recovery is active rehab: daily node-linking that retrains attention like a muscle.
How to Stop AI From Thinking for You: Sovereignty
How to stop AI from thinking for you? Reverse the order. Form your own view first, then bring in AI to challenge it. Consult it first and you surrender authorship.
Data Privacy and the Exocortex: Feeding AI Your Notes
Is it safe to feed your second brain to AI? Consumer AI often trains on your inputs by default. Reduce the risk, but keep your most private thinking in your First Brain.
Debugging the First Brain: Logic Building in Programming
Logic building is not syntax; it is an accurate mental model of the system. A bug is a broken edge in that model, and offloading code to AI quietly stops you building it.
Can We Survive Without Computers? The 20-Watt Brain
Can humanity survive without computers? Yes, the original one runs on 20 watts of glucose and oxygen, not a power grid. The First Brain is the resilient substrate.
How to Spot Deepfakes in 2026: Check the Story
How to spot deepfakes in 2026? Pixel hunting is a losing arms race. The durable test is narrative: does the video fit the subject's known behavior and context?
Why You're Addicted to Organizing Your Notes
Why am I addicted to organizing notes? Rearranging the vault is productive procrastination: a cheap dopamine hit. Real learning pays out after friction.
How to Interview Retiring Experts: Extract the Graph
How to interview retiring experts? Don't ask for facts; their best judgment is tacit. Use cognitive task analysis to extract the conceptual graph, not the data.
How Do I Know If My Notes Are True? Build a Verifier
How do I know if my notes are true? Not in isolation. A claim is justified by how it coheres with your wider web of knowledge, so you need a built mind to check it.
The Local-First Exocortex: Run a Private LLM on Your Notes
You can run a private LLM over your own notes, fully offline. But RAG only reflects what you wrote, so the answers are capped by how well-structured your notes are.
The Future Entrepreneur: From Operator to Philosopher
Future of the entrepreneur? As AI drives execution to near-zero cost, the founder shifts from managing operations to supplying vision, taste, and judgment.
Gamifying the First Brain: Make Learning Fun for Adults
Adults learn for fun when it meets the needs games do, autonomy, competence, and flow, not empty points. Treat building your First Brain like leveling a skill tree.
What Replaces Notion and Obsidian? Generative UI
What will replace Notion and Obsidian? Not an app, but generative UI: interfaces built on the fly by AI. When the app dissolves, your First Brain steers.
Godlike Intelligence as a Moral Imperative
We built godlike technology while running on Paleolithic instincts. Upgrading the mind that wields the tools is starting to look less like ambition and more like duty.
Governing AI from the First Brain: How to Regulate AI
Regulating AI faces two traps: law moves slower than tech, and you can't write rules for what you don't understand. The deepest lever is upgrading the regulators.
Is Heptabase Good for Studying? Visual Thinking Done Right
Is Heptabase good for studying? For visual learners, yes. Its spatial whiteboard of connected cards mirrors how the First Brain stores knowledge.
High-Context Minds in a Low-Context AI World
AI gives better output with better context because a model is low-context: it knows only what you type. Giving it good context starts with a clearly mapped mind.
How Does the Brain Store Concepts? Like Embeddings
How does the brain store concepts? Not as pixels but as meaning. Concept cells fire for an idea in any form, a sparse pattern much like an AI embedding.
How the Collector's Fallacy Ruins Your PKM System
How does the collector's fallacy ruin personal knowledge management? It makes your system worse as it grows: bloat, search cost, false confidence.
Do Translations Lose Meaning? Read Past the Words
Do translations lose meaning? Some, yes, connotation and wordplay slip. But the conceptual structure survives. Read past the words to the idea your graph can anchor.
How to Use Obsidian to Upgrade Your First Brain
Obsidian is a mirror: it reflects your mind, it does not create it. To use it for thinking, link on capture, write atomic notes, and review by retrieval, not features.
Do Hyperbaric Chambers Improve Intelligence?
Do hyperbaric chambers improve intelligence? Not exactly. HBOT can improve specific cognitive functions via angiogenesis, but it upgrades hardware, not knowledge.
Do Young Employees Need Mentors in the AI Age?
Do young employees need mentors? More than ever. With AI giving instant answers, the mentor's value flips: not facts, but tacit judgment and reasoning pressure.
Does Microdosing Improve Creativity? The Evidence
Does microdosing improve creativity? Controlled trials show a modest, selective effect: better-quality ideas and wider mental search, not more ideas or sharper focus.