Field notes from the First Brain.
Page 9 of 38.
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.
How to Process Mental Trauma: Post-Traumatic Growth
How to process mental trauma: evidence-based therapy first, then integration. A graph model of why healing means wiring the memory back into your story.
How to Use Journaling for Anxiety: Map, Don't Dump
How to use journaling for anxiety: stop venting in circles. Use structured prompts to name the fear, find its root, and separate the controllable from the not.
Should I Post My Kids Online? A Clear Framework
Should you post your kids online? Default to caution: every photo builds a permanent profile your child never consented to. A practical framework for deciding.
What Books to Save for the Apocalypse: Save Your Mind
What books should you save for the apocalypse? Practical how-to references on food, medicine, and tools, plus the deeper truth about using them.
How to Preserve Family History: The Knowledge Tree
How to preserve family history: capture the why behind decisions, not just photos and dates. Build a family knowledge tree of stories, edges, and philosophies.