Take in nutrient-rich, whole foods. Expend physical energy by loading your body.

Take in creatively rich, human content. Expend cognitive energy by loading your mind.

I find the process of writing frustratingly beautiful or beautifully frustrating, depending on the day (or even the minute).

We offloaded the need for physical work a long time ago (for the bulk of human professions, at least). Now we run in circles and lift heavy weights up and down for no reason other than to keep a slowly-evolving body healthy in a rapidly-evolving world.

Will there be a cognitively superfluous equivalent for the mind?

Distraction is being fed answers to questions you didn't think to ask.

Clear writing: Never use two words when one will do.

Academia: Never use one word when one hedged paragraph will do.

Where do you sit on the Pavlov Scale of phone use?

(Hint: if you're seeing this during a scheduled and bounded scroll session, congrats; you're at Level 1. But if you've whipped out your phone in response to a notification and kept on scrolling, I'm afraid you're at Level 4.)

(More on the Pavlov scale and how to get down to a Level 1 or 0 here if curious: hereisyourbrain.substack.com/p/pavlov-scale…)

It feels like one day soon we'll reach a point where AI contends that it is conscious and demands we prove we are.

People think I despise AI-generated content but that’s not true.

I do think it writes a banger privacy policy.

A prediction for what AI will do (and is already doing) to humanity:

On one end of the spectrum you’ll have the wireheads (except we’ve gone wireless). Their social media and content consumption across platforms will be integrated into a perfectly tailored dopamine-optimised interface that feeds them exactly what they (or their limbic system) wants in order to keep them glued to the screen. Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, X… all their platforms of choice will be absorbed into one Frankenstein’s monster worth of engineered content.

On the other end will be the driven individuals who have exited that mindless system. They will also have a perfectly tailored interface, but it will be one they have actively moulded (rather than one that has grown around their mind like a virus). Only the levers they need exposed will be exposed and all the unnecessary dopamine triggers will be hidden. They’ll appear superhuman in what they can do with their phones and devices.

It's dizzying the amount of custom interfaces I've built (using AI) that have been made obsolete in the past months (by AI). A lot of their functionality has simply been absorbed by current models. The list of things they can't do is shrinking, leaving only the most human of things: build trust, establish reputation and... help others wherever you can.

True creativity comes from stringing together what you have assimilated in a new and insightful way. The result requires a moment of recognition, which means it needs working memory. If your working memory is already maxed out by holding ideas you never assimilated (ahem, second brain), there is quite literally no new room for epiphanies.

Get that knowledge in your first brain.

I would rather know how to ask the right questions than have all the answers.

A day off isn't a day off. It's a day where all the cues that you've meticulously programmed to predict a certain effortful action are suddenly answered with the less effortful, more comfortable option. Relative to the learned effort, this is like a "reward" to the brain, and those are learned fastest. So on that day off, you actually go through rapid reconditioning to *want* to take the easier route. That's why it feels so much harder the next day.

The simple fix is: never let the cue fail. Even if you're dog-tired or completely over it or have nothing left in the tank, still put on your gym shoes and do a 2 minute workout at your usual time. Keep the cue alive.

That's what AI-generated output sounds like to my mind: a flat and perpetually consistent 7.

I would rather a meandering and messy 4 than a soulless 7.

We don’t realise that by letting AI do things for us, we’re not only offloading knowledge, reasoning and critical thinking, but also the propensity to expend effort.

When this willingness-to-expend-effort threshold drops below a certain point, acting on the very thing that drives us at our core (our curiosity) feels insurmountable.

I suspect this is why boredom has come to feel so aversive. It is a sign of a brain craving the pursuit of curiosity with absolutely no will to do it. The aversion arises from this mismatch.

Once you realise that finding yourself isn't a goal but a perpetual state of being, envy turns into gratitude and anxiety into curiosity.

Boredom plus a low threshold for action is the recipe for creativity.

Boredom plus a high threshold for action is the recipe for despondency.

The first used to be the norm, but modern life has made it the exception.

The beauty of the brain's adaptability is that when you pair it with another that is even loosely compatible, both will grow through and around each other, like the inosculation of two trees, their branches fusing together.

(My husband, my inosculated other half, is going to y corny, but I couldn't resist.)

Your brain at the end of the day is noisy and full of traces of the day's activity. It pales in comparison to the one you wake with, which has a restored signal-to-noise ratio and a replenished "store" of neurochemicals. By going to bed earlier, you're trading noise for clarity.