I am conducting an academic research survey as part of my B.Sc. Psychology thesis, exploring the relationship between cognitive flexibility and ideological rigidity. It would mean a lot if you could take 15-20 minutes to help me out.

The study aims to better understand how individuals process information, adapt their thinking, and form or maintain beliefs in a complex and changing world.

https://www.soscisurvey.de/RigidMindsRigidBeliefs/

"By getting thoughts about wanted things, we can solve problems early. So, is getting thoughts about wanted things intelligence? Is it trained by focusing on mental things?"

Hello, I’ve been thinking about whether the type of information we repeatedly process can shape our cognitive abilities.

I believe gossip, whether viewed as positive or negative, can be considered a form of cognitive skill because it requires encoding, retrieving, and evaluating social information about people, relationships, emotions, and events. From a neuroscience perspective, repeated social information processing may strengthen networks involved in social cognition, emotional processing, and episodic memory through neuroplasticity.

I have some questions:

**1- If a person spends most of their cognitive effort processing social information through gossip while rarely engaging in abstract learning, how does the brain adapt? Does it reduce the efficiency of less used abstract reasoning networks, or does the brain maintain the ability to develop them when new demands appear?**

**2- Are our daily patterns of attention, environment and information processing shaping the cognitive systems we rely on the most?**

**3- To what extent do genetic predispositions influence an individual’s tendency toward social information processing, memory, and cognitive specialization?**

Thanks for reading!

I’ve been working on a Toastmasters speech, and I stumbled onto an idea that has become an obsession for me.
I’m calling it orientation.
By orientation, I don’t mean political orientation or sexual orientation. I mean the direction of the mind—the stance you choose to take toward reality at any given moment.
For example:
Seeking vs. believing
Being open vs. being closed
Independent thinking vs. conformity
Identifying with what you don’t know vs. identifying with what you know
Being present vs. being distracted
Taking full responsibility vs. blaming circumstances
Being goal-oriented vs. drifting without direction
Choosing what truly matters vs. treating everything as equally important
The more I think about it, the more I feel that orientation may be one of the very few things that is completely under our control.
Whether I become rich or poor isn’t fully under my control.
Whether I get promoted isn’t fully under my control.
Whether people like me isn’t under my control.
Whether I achieve every goal isn’t completely under my control.
But whether I orient myself toward seeking instead of believing… toward openness instead of defensiveness… toward presence instead of distraction… that seems to be 100% my decision in every moment.
Even in extremely difficult situations, while I may not control what happens to me, I still have some ability to choose how I orient my mind toward what is happening.
I’m starting to think orientation may be more fundamental than motivation, intelligence, talent, or personality, because it determines how those qualities are expressed.
I’m considering spending the next few years researching this idea, reading philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and interviewing people from different disciplines. Eventually I’d like to write a book that answers questions like:
What exactly is orientation?
How many different orientations exist?
Which orientations lead to wiser decisions?
Can orientations be practiced like habits?
Can they be deliberately changed?
What does science say about this?
What are the limits of our ability to choose our orientation?
I’m curious:
Has anyone encountered a similar framework in psychology, philosophy, or neuroscience?
Are there books or researchers who explore something close to this idea?
Does the term “orientation” already have an established meaning in academic literature that I’m unaware of?
I’d love recommendations, criticisms, or even reasons why you think this idea is flawed. I’m genuinely trying to understand whether I’m discovering something interesting or simply rediscovering concepts that already exist under different names

Hey everyone,

In our latest reading group session (Observers' Circle), we tackled the Extended Mind Thesis—the idea that our cognitive processes don't stop at our skulls, but include the tools we use (like smartphones and notebooks).

But that led us to a darker follow-up question: If our "extended mind" is designed by algorithms whose sole job is to capture attention, are we actually expanding our minds, or just outsourcing them to corporations?

We had our members break this down, and some fascinating insights came up:

The Scarcity Flip: One member pointed out that technology abundance actually creates attention scarcity, referencing data on how digital distractions multiply task times.

The Cost of Convenience: Another member gave an honest look at cognitive atrophy—relying so heavily on devices that basic math or long-form reading feels harder, while schools ban AI instead of teaching integration.

The Attention Trap: A pushback noted that "change blindness" happens with anything that captures deep focus, meaning screens might just be a modern symptom of an old human trait.

The Real Conclusion we reached: Material progress gives us better cognitive tools, but the digital ecosystem around them drains our internal bandwidth.

We hold discussions like this regularly to break down cognitive science and behavioral frameworks together. If you're someone who likes diving deep into questions like this and want to join our next live session or active discussions, drop a comment.

**Disclaimers! Everything here is speculative, but my understanding of a lot of things here come from some good sources such as the recent study on the thalamus. I am not formally trained, but i am very interested in everything about the brain. This is a very long post and may be hard to read, but if you are even a little bit interested after 2 minutes, please try and continue. I am somebody who is deeply passionate for neuroscience and consciousness, and I am very curious what other people think of my ideas. I am 100% serious as well. Everything below is something ive genuinely considered** ENJOY!

I think that consciousness may be the result of the integration of all active "threads" in the brain into a space where some system is able to directly influence the processing of information / "threads". This system would likely be partially the result of the attention system/whatever system governs what is consciously accessible.

When I say thread I refer to a model I call the recurrent thread model of cognition. Essentially. Imagine the restart button. A circle with an arrow on the end circling itself. This model proposes that every arrow corresponds to some form of structured data from the nervous system being presented. Such as. A strong sensation. A thought. An emotion. Or a concept. (Side note: i think a "concept" is expressed by physical neural circuits being active or fired off across the brain. Like, the concept of red. Seeing a red ball. When seeing that, the brain may light up an area corresponding ti the color. Maybe an area for the shape. Maybe an area for the word ball. Maybe the area for the word ball is closely related ti the area that processes or understands shape. Maybe the area for the word red is closely related to visual processing, specifically red. Something like that lol, i dont have it translated into words yet).

Anyways, I imagine that there are multiple arrows at any given moment. Arrows for thoughts or concepts or sensations. I then imagine all of these arrows spinning around the same axis. Now. Imagine 12 o clock.... my model proposes that when an arrow turns towards 12, and is within the window, that is when that "thread" becomes consciously accessible. All the arrows are rotating at their own speeds for their own reasons, likely a bunch of other really technical and not known yet by me things going on under the hood too, but this model is just to conceptualize the phenomenological experience of cognition. Now. I also believe that certain input can trigger certain threads to immediately snap to 12. Say the thread related to your package arriving has periodically been coming into 12 randomly throughout the day, but is currently not active. Then you get a notification from your phone. All of a sudden, that thread pops right back into 12, and you start thinking about the package again. Apply that same idea to emotions, sensations, feelings, internal thoughts, literally like, a bunch of different internal processes. Thats the basic idea of my recurrent thread model, its a whole thing and I gotta also write out an official draft of it to better explain it. I believe that this model though, is useful in conceptualizing and thinking about the mind. I also think that this model may tie into the following, very nicely, although I haven't fully explored it yet.

The thalamus was revently discovered to produce a frequency of some kind(i forgot the details) which was pulsing during conscious awareness as well as rem sleep. The entire time conscious its pulsing. The time during specifically rem stages of sleep had this pulsing. Interestingly.... when the studied individuals entered other phases of sleep, the activity and pulsing in the thalamus ceased.... or diminished, I dont remember exactly. But. Maybe consciousness is in part directly related to that structure and its ability to take in and route all the incoming sensory and internal data.

I think that consciousness is something that occurs when specifically all of the active things(threads) happening in the brain such as senses, thoughts, emotions, intuition, memory, and everything else, are integrated together into some level of ability to directly control or work with them.

Maybe there are additional systems such as memory or something that work alongside the thalamus to produce the conscious stream, and maybe there is a system that exists inside the brain which is specifically to cause cascading signals that propagate into this conscious stream system. Possibly thalamus and a few other things as well?

No clue lol.

I think that consciousness and thoughts and ideas and sensations and everything that makes humans what they are exist as physical arrangements of neurons and structures that physically interact with eachother through extremely complex systems. I think that concepts and thoughts are distributed across the mind, not just existing in one place which is the mf concept system with a list of all the concepts in it. Lol. I think that the culmination and integration of everything, unconscious, conscious, automatic, chemical, outside of neuronal control such as intracellular systems, as well as the complex power supplying and modulation of neuronal cells by the mitochondria. Everything put tigether and integrated as per the design of the human brain, is what produces conscious experience. I think it is a very \*very\* physical thing, but I think that we have some level of genuine control over it. The debates that go deep into the philosophy of consciousness and the ones that go into freewill and determinism and allat are definitely still something ti consider, but it would be a good idea to consider deeply the actual physical systems that exist inside the nervous system and how they could come together to produce consciousness under different mental frameworks. I work sometimes under the idea that I might be onto something with my thoughts surrounding everything ive discussed as well as more that I havent. I do this intentionally though in order to not lock myself into thinking rigidly. Its more fun and imo more iseful to sometimes decide or feel like you might be onto something and then explore deeply how that could work, and then go from there. Not locking in every idea, but also not treating some of the more outlandish ones as immediately wrong.

I love to explore to the best of my abilities, everything I can about the human brain, and I especially love to cross connect different seemingly unrelated domains or borrow concepts and terminology or analogies from sometimes places that literally arent even anything such as observations about personal subjective experience. I like to pull all of those tigether and then try ti figure out how they can relate considering what im tryna do. Its a while thing lol but..... idk.

I am a 20 year old who failed social 30 and didnt technically graduate because of that so.... idk lol. I am a very curious person, and all these ideas come from the culmination of everything ive sought out related to the human nervous system, but i dont follow any curriculum or path or anything, I kinda just think and learn and pick up random stuff.

I am curious what people here think actually, itd be nice to have other peoples thoughts about my ideas to ground myself in. Im also curious if and where my ideas connect to or are similar to existing research or models/ understandings within the fields associated with the brain.

Also, please dont be rude. Im a very curious person and ive done all of this out of sheer pure interest in consciousness and the human brain at every single level down to atomic. I am posting this here because I would like to hear what ither people think. Im open to critique, corrections, questions, opinions, just dont be a dick about it lol. Cheers!

Context: STEM researcher (+ experience in cognitive psych) trying to get a handle on how narratives, cognition, and culture shape each other.

I have been trying to read up on existing perspectives about the cultural evolution of narratives--how narratives (and the written word, in inter-related ways) have played an important role in our history (e.g., this Forbes article (not peer-reviewed, obviously) on Angus Fletcher's Storythinking), the cognitive processes that allow us to process and engage with narratives, and how culture shapes both narratives and these cognitive processes (and vice-versa). The goal is to make a cohesive argument about why understanding narratives and their evolution over time is important and interesting, from a scholarly/scientific perspective, in a way that is rooted in existing scholarship in social sciences and the humanities.

Unfortunately, I am completely lost in the technical terms associated with these ideas, and I would very much appreciate any pointers towards introductory literature that is accessible to someone without formal training in relevant humanities and social science domains, etc. Also happy to be told that I am not looking in the right places and/or using the right keywords (narratives, narrative engagement, cognition, culture, co-evolution, etc.).

Some sources I have (tried to) read so far:

• Narrative Explanation in the Evolution of Human Cognition

• Narratives in Cognitive Evolution

• Narrative and Cognition in Literature and Science

• Notes on narrative, cognition, and cultural evolution

Also, a decent bit of work by Kristoffer Nielbo.

(I'd like to attempt do this without immediately resorting to Gemini/Claude/etc. because the cognitive effort of figuring out new concepts/ideas sufficiently removed from my formal training has, in my experience, been valuable for retention and more robust understanding, ergo the ask here)

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read and/or respond!

#cognitivescience

This survey is for women 18+ to determine the impact of context on dating preferences

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScgxjHwHqIx5aE45BiGoqTlwBiCI7CNuf3xq5U4MJx5y6zuaw/viewform?usp=dialog

Right now, humans, AIs, synthetic agents, and emerging multi‑agent systems all operate in the same digital environment — but they don’t share:

• representational formats
• epistemic norms
• influence ceilings
• identity classes
• action grammars
• temporal assumptions

From a cognitive‑science perspective, that’s a recipe for coordination breakdown.
We’re basically running a multi‑mind society on infrastructure designed for single‑mind communication.

The substrate as a shared representational layer

The substrate I’m building is essentially a neutral cognitive environment — a shared layer where different agents can act without stepping on each other.

And:

In cognitive‑science terms, that’s a multi‑agent compatibility architecture.

Why this is fundamentally a cognitive problem

The instability we’re seeing online isn’t just a governance failure — it’s a representational mismatch problem.

Humans, AIs, and synthetic agents don’t share the same:

• perceptual priors
• representational formats
• epistemic norms
• action grammars
• temporal assumptions

When different kinds of minds operate in the same environment without a shared representational substrate, you get predictable cognitive‑system failures:

• signals interpreted in incompatible ways
• actions that don’t map cleanly across agents
• feedback loops that amplify noise instead of information
• coordination attempts that collapse because participants aren’t “seeing” the same thing

This is the same issue you get in multi‑agent cognitive architectures:
if the agents don’t share a common representational layer, they can’t coordinate, no matter how well‑intentioned or well‑designed they are.

The substrate is my attempt to build that missing layer — a neutral cognitive‑civic environment where contributions from different kinds of minds pass through the same interpretive physics (identity classes, influence ceilings, schema consistency, vector mapping).

In other words:
before you can govern a multi‑intelligence society, you need a space where all the minds involved can actually understand each other’s actions.

🏛️ The components (translated for cognitive science)

• Gatekeeper — identity classes, rights, influence ceilings (agent differentiation).
• Physics Layer — the “laws of motion” for signals, actions, and time (shared temporal + causal model).
• Schema Evolution — keeps representational formats compatible across updates.
• Vector Engine — interprets contributions along civic axes (a cognitive‑semantic mapping layer).
• Ecology Layer — the verbs of the system (signal, propose, evaluate, resolve).
• Runtime — the environment that boots agents into a shared cognitive space.

🌱 Why I’m posting this here

I’m trying to understand whether cognitive‑science people see the same gap I do:

We’re entering a multi‑intelligence era without a shared representational substrate.

If that’s true, then the substrate isn’t just a governance tool —
it’s a cognitive architecture for civilization, the missing layer that prevents multi‑agent epistemic collapse.

Curious how people here think about this idea of a shared cognitive‑civic physics layer.

wco9.wco.workers.dev

The more I try to converge my thoughts, narrowing down options, picking a clear direction, refining a plan or strategy, the harder and more draining the effort feels. Not just mentally taxing, but progressively harder with each layer of focus.

Why does that happen?

Anyone else experience this in creativity, decision-making, productivity, or building something? How do you personally handle the "convergence" phase?

Really don't need clarity advice guidance but rather the understanding on vision alignment.

what is the right explanation for when a person is curious , but his problem is whenever he reads something or learn something new he questions everything about it not in a debating way but knowing that he actually have gaps of knoweledge but the thing is those questions are many and so overwhelming and this person doesnt know how to direct his energy and what question should he try answering first .

moreover , this person has many contradicting beliefs meaning that when he thinks of something and express an opinion he can literally contradict himself by generating more questions that support the contradicting side of his opinion and lose words because he doesnt know how to explain things.

is this person sabotaging himself or doin this as a coping mechanism?

how do you explain this psychollogically and scientifically if it has a term

If anyone has experience in these domains, heck even if you don’t, I’d enjoy a good conversation and welcome new insights.

Hi everyone,

​I have been working on a new framework for consciousness called Recursive Information Growth (RIG).

​While existing theories like IIT and GWT provide a great foundation, I’ve found they often struggle to account for the dynamic, self-evolving, and adaptive nature of conscious systems. My research posits that consciousness emerges from a recursive loop driven by entropy minimization.

​I’ve developed a mathematical model to formalize this, where the growth function \\Phi(R) = \\Phi_0 \\cdot \\sum_{i=1}\^{R} \\lambda\^i illustrates how information density increases with recursion depth.

​I am sharing this because I would greatly value feedback from researchers, students, or anyone interested in computational neuroscience. I am looking for honest critique to help refine the model and identify potential limitations.

​You can read the full paper here : \[ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zBRz-wOIyWloI8snw5a9RO4N6hKF4cbe/view?usp=drivesdk \]

​Looking forward to your thoughts and any discussion you might have!

28M 5'10, 188 lbs, South Asian

Some Context: During college. I was in a town about 1.5 hours away from home. My dad lost his job and we were short on funds.

I had a psycho roommate who was making my life living hell so I slowly started sleeping in the library at night.

Eventually he forced me out and I didn't have the heart to tell my parents to get me a new place especially as my grades were dropping. So I just slept in the library under bright fluorescent lights on a small dirty couch for 4 nights a week (I used to come home for weekends). Sometimes I used to find random places to stay up, and I used to sleep in the library on the couch during the day even though it was loud and raucous.

Sometimes I just used to sleep on a chair.

I used to use a laptop with no blue light filter either so I'm sure my sleep was fucked.

Eventually I just stayed up all night in the library, and found another couch in a quieter part of another building where I used to sleep during the day.

I did this for about 2 years intermittently. Sometimes I slept in a friend's bed in their dorm. I think I always managed to get about 4-5 hours of sleep and definitely slept a lot on the weekends when I was home.

I never slept outside on a park bench or anything... even for a day.

I want to know how this would have impacted my cognition and my brain.

To be fair, my long term memory is solid and phenomenal. My biggest achievements have all come after this episode. My salary was also decent over 120k.

But I'm failing to perform at my job. I'm having extreme anger at those who mistreated me to the point where I start flailing my arms in public imagining me standing up to them even though it's been 10 years.

I routinely forget where I kept my phone, wallet or keys. I'm bad with following step by step instructions.

How do I know if there was any impact to my cognitive faculties and to my brain? And more importantly how can I be sharp and recover? Is there any chance for recovery?

Since this happened 10 years ago there hasn't been a website I haven't read or anything I wouldn't do fix the damage to feel intelligent. Willing to do anything it takes.

Thank you so much for your help!