Field notes from the First Brain.
Page 9 of 38.
How to Stay Motivated in a Dark World: Gothic Fuel
How to stay motivated in a dark world: skip the cheer-up industry. Name the dread precisely, give it a build target, and let the feared future set today's reps.
What Is Nostr? The Decentralized Protocol Explained
What is Nostr? An open, decentralized protocol where you own your identity with a cryptographic key and no company controls the network.
What Is a Rhizome in Philosophy? Deleuze for Thinkers
What is a rhizome in philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari's image of knowledge as a connected, non-hierarchical network, any point linking to any other.
How to Stop Doomscrolling: Forage for Nodes Instead
How to stop doomscrolling: the scroll is a foraging instinct on an infinite patch. Redirect the same hunt toward questions and connections, and rig the friction.
Is Dyslexia a Superpower? The Honest, Balanced Answer
Is dyslexia a superpower? Not quite, and not just a deficit. It is a different profile with real visuospatial strengths and real reading costs.
What Is an Egregore? The Group Mind of a Culture
What is an egregore? An occult term for a collective entity created by a group's shared focus, and a useful metaphor for how culture takes on a life of its own.
How to Protect Your Mind Online: Epistemic Security
How to protect your mind online: admit no claim into your head without edges. Provenance, corroboration, coherence: the three checks of epistemic security.
How to Stop Repeating Mistakes: Escape the Time Loop
How to stop repeating mistakes: the loop is structural, not moral. Inject a foreign node, an if-then rule, an outside view, a changed cue, and log every lap.
What Do Eye Movements Mean for Thinking?
What do eye movements mean for thinking? They are a real-time window into cognition: where you look, how your eyes move, and pupil size all track mental work.
How to Think From First Principles: Find Root Nodes
How to think from first principles: trace any inherited conclusion down to its root nodes, keep only what survives "how do we know?", and rebuild from there.
Is Trauma Passed Down Genetically? The Honest Science
Is trauma passed down genetically? Mostly not in the strict sense, but it passes across generations through behavior and environment, and the cycle breaks.
How to Trigger ADHD Hyperfocus (and Aim It Well)
How to trigger ADHD hyperfocus: stack interest, challenge, novelty, and urgency onto one dense problem, then contain the state with hard exits and staged food.
How to Organize Company Data: Wetware Architecture
How to organize company data: design the structure around your employees' mental models, not the filing system or the AI. Wetware architecture, step by step.
Mind Map vs Note-Taking App for Complex Thinking
Mind map or note-taking app for complex thinking? Mind maps win for working out relationships; apps win for storage and retrieval. The real tool is your head.
How to Think Like a Lawyer: Precedent as a Graph
How to think like a lawyer: spot the issue, reason along precedent edges, argue both sides. The law is a citation graph, and the skill is holding it natively.
What Is Ambient Computing? Living in a Computed Room
What is ambient computing? Computing woven invisibly into your environment, sensing and acting in the background. Its promise is calm; its cost is surveillance.
How to Read Your Opponent in Chess and Esports
How to read your opponent in chess and esports: build a parallel graph of their logic, track timing tells, and simulate their next move before they make it.
Should Students Still Memorize Facts? Yes, but Differently
Should students still memorize facts? Yes, but connected ones. You cannot think with knowledge you do not have, but isolated rote facts are the wrong target.
How to Spot Media Manipulation: The Hijack Patterns
How to spot media manipulation: watch for the hijack signature, content built to fire emotion before reasoning engages. Five patterns and their tells.
What Is Nick Land's Meltdown Theory?
What is Nick Land's Meltdown? His essay picturing capitalism and technology as a runaway process dissolving every fixed structure, including the human self.
Nick Land, Cyber-Gothic, and Cognitive Melt Explained
Nick Land's philosophy explained: accelerationism, cyber-gothic dread, and the idea that capital and tech form a runaway intelligence pulling in the future.
What Is Non-Dualism? Reality as a Web, Not Objects
What is non-dualism? The view, across Eastern philosophy, that reality is one undivided whole and the separation between self and world is not ultimately real.
Why Am I Obsessed With Influencers? The Parasocial Bond
Obsessing over influencers is a parasocial bond: a one-sided relationship your social brain treats as real because it evolved before screens existed.
What Will Humans Do in a Post-Scarcity World?
What will humans do in a post-scarcity world? Pursue mastery, creation, and meaning, because intrinsic motivation does not switch off when needs are met.