Axioms
297 axioms · page 1 of 7
Working Memory Capacity Limit
Human working memory holds approximately 3 to 5 items simultaneously; this limit is architectural and cannot be expanded through training.
Exponential Information Decay
Unrehearsed information decays exponentially, losing approximately 42% within 20 minutes and ~67% within 24 hours; this decay rate is a fixed property of human memory architecture.
Cognitive Defusion: Thoughts Are Objects
Thoughts are discrete cognitive objects that can be separated from the identity of the thinker; a person can observe, craft, version, and evaluate their own thoughts as external material.
Generative Externalization
Externalization through writing is a generative cognitive act that produces new understanding, not a transcription of pre-existing understanding.
Open-Loop Cognitive Cost (Zeigarnik)
Unresolved cognitive commitments — uncaptured thoughts, unfinished tasks, unexternalized plans — consume working memory as persistent background processes until completed or externalized to a trusted system.
Context-Dependent Memory Encoding
Memory retrieval is context-dependent, with recall performance varying systematically based on environmental and emotional state matching between encoding and retrieval contexts.
Extended Cognition Thesis
Cognitive processes can be functionally distributed across external artifacts, tools, and social structures rather than contained solely in individual brains, with external processes constituting genuine parts of cognition itself when they play the same functional role as internal processes.
Automatic Narrative Generation Precedes Conscious Evaluation
Human brains automatically generate causal narratives and explanatory stories between sequential events before conscious evaluation engages, producing fast but often inaccurate causal inferences that arrive in consciousness pre-packaged as facts rather than hypotheses.
Directed Attention as Depletable Resource
Human focused attention and deliberate cognitive processing draw from a finite biological resource that depletes with sustained use across all acts of executive function (decision-making, self-control, effortful processing) and cannot be restored through willpower alone, requiring specific recovery conditions including rest, nature exposure, or low-demand automatic processing.
Perception as Predictive Construction
Perception is active predictive construction shaped by expectations and constrained (not determined) by sensory input; the brain continuously minimizes prediction error by either updating its internal model or filtering incoming data to match existing expectations.
Hindsight Bias and Calibration Necessity
Memory reconstructs rather than faithfully stores prior beliefs, systematically shifting them toward alignment with known outcomes (hindsight bias), making genuine learning from unrecorded predictions impossible and requiring external calibration systems to align subjective confidence with objective accuracy.
Habits as Context-Response Associations
Habits form when repeated behavior in stable contexts produces rewards, creating automatic context-response associations that trigger behavior without conscious deliberation.
Two-Level Metacognitive Architecture
Metacognition consists of two functionally distinct levels: an object level where cognitive processes occur and a meta level that monitors those processes through upward signals and regulates them through downward control.
Illusion of Explanatory Depth
Human self-assessment of understanding is systematically unreliable and inflated until forced to articulate or explain in detail—the gap between felt understanding and ability to generate explanations is diagnostic of confusion masquerading as comprehension.
Expertise Transforms Perceptual Chunking
Expertise fundamentally changes the size and nature of perceptual chunks—experts automatically perceive larger meaningful patterns as single units, enabling them to work with more complex information within the same working memory constraints.
Linguistic Structuring of Thought
Language and verbal labels actively structure and constrain the boundaries of deliberate thought, where assigning labels to concepts changes how those concepts are cognitively processed and what distinctions become salient.
Automatic Fusion of Observation and Interpretation
Humans automatically and unconsciously fuse observation with interpretation in sub-second timeframes, making the phenomenological separation of raw perception from inference cognitively effortful and often impossible without deliberate training.
Complementary Learning Systems Architecture
The hippocampus encodes new memories rapidly using sparse pattern-separated representations while the neocortex learns slowly through overlapping distributed representations; this complementary architecture prevents catastrophic interference where rapid neocortical learning would cause new memories to overwrite existing ones.
Cognitive Dissonance Drives Information Avoidance
Humans experience genuine psychological distress when holding contradictory beliefs (cognitive dissonance) and will actively avoid information that contradicts their existing self-concept to maintain consistency.
Dual Coding Theory: Verbal and Visual Channels
Information processing occurs through two independent cognitive channels—verbal/linguistic and nonverbal/imagistic—with human visual memory capacity for images vastly exceeding verbal memory capacity, while spatial relationships resist accurate sequential text representation.
Conversational Memory Asymmetry From Production Planning
During conversation, working memory bandwidth splits between comprehension and production planning, causing people to retain their own contributions more accurately than their partner's and exhibit systematically poor recall for information presented immediately before their turn to speak.
Ultradian and Circadian Cognitive Rhythms
Human cognition operates in ultradian cycles of arousal (approximately 80-120 minutes of higher capacity followed by a recovery period) nested within circadian rhythms (24-hour cycles), creating predictable multilevel variation in cognitive capacity, with optimal performance for different cognitive tasks occurring at different phases of these biological cycles.
Attention as Gate to Conscious Perception
Attention is capacity-limited such that focus on selected stimuli creates perceptual blindness to unattended information, even when that information is salient and within the sensory field; conscious perception requires directed attention as a necessary precondition.
Subcortical Fast-Pathway Threat Processing
The amygdala processes threat-relevant stimuli via a fast subcortical pathway, enabling automatic evaluative responses within approximately 300 milliseconds before conscious cortical processing and identification can complete.
Neural Plasticity Enables Lifelong Automatic Learning
Adult human brains retain the capacity to reorganize neural pathways throughout life in response to changes in input and behavior, automatically detecting and extracting statistical regularities from repeated input without conscious instruction.
Patterns Exist in Hierarchical Logical Levels
Patterns exist in hierarchical levels across multiple scales, with higher-order patterns (patterns of patterns) representing different logical types than first-order patterns and requiring meta-level cognitive observation to detect, forming causal chains where deeper structures generate surface events.
Expertise Through Deliberate Practice
Expertise develops through deliberate practice that builds sophisticated mental representations and enables perceptual differentiation of domain-specific features that untrained observers cannot detect.
Goals as Perceptual Filters
Goals function as perceptual filters that determine relevance by defining signal-detection criteria before information reaches conscious awareness, making relevance a goal-relative property rather than an intrinsic feature of information.
Encoding Depth Determines Retention
Memory encoding depth, determined by the degree of elaborative processing and integration with existing knowledge structures, directly determines long-term retention and retrievability.
Emotional Hijacking of Judgment
The amygdala evaluates emotional significance of stimuli before conscious awareness, and humans systematically use these pre-conscious emotional evaluations as heuristic substitutes for complex cognitive judgments, producing systematic distortions in probability and severity assessments.
Perceptual Plasticity Through Training
Experience and cultural training shape perceptual processing itself at preconscious levels, enabling the system to make distinctions it previously could not make and causing people from different backgrounds to literally perceive different features of objectively identical stimuli.
Systematic Overconfidence Taxonomy
Humans exhibit systematic overconfidence across domains, with subjective confidence consistently exceeding objective accuracy in three distinct forms—overestimation of absolute performance, overplacement relative to others, and overprecision of confidence intervals—that behave differently across task difficulty levels.
Emotion as Systematic Cognitive Modulator
Emotional states systematically distort perception and judgment in specific, predictable directions (fear increases perceived uncertainty and threat while decreasing control; anger does the opposite), serving as necessary somatic markers that guide attention and activate state-dependent memory networks rather than mere sources of error.
Availability Heuristic Mechanism
People judge frequency and probability based on the subjective ease of mentally retrieving examples rather than the content count of retrieved instances, using retrieval fluency as a proxy for actual frequency in the world.
Glucose-Cognition Dependency Threshold
The brain consumes approximately 20% of resting metabolic energy primarily as glucose, and blood glucose below approximately 54 mg/dL (3.0 mmol/L) consistently impairs cognitive function across attention, working memory, processing speed, executive function, and spatial reasoning.
Natural Frequency Format Advantage
Natural frequency representations of statistical information produce dramatically better Bayesian reasoning than conditional probability representations because frequency tracking matches evolutionarily older cognitive mechanisms.
Domain-Specific Calibration Development
Calibration develops from domain-specific feedback loops that provide rapid, unambiguous outcome information after predictions, and does not transfer automatically across domains.
Meaning as Receiver Construction
Meaning is constructed by receivers using their own mental models rather than transmitted intact from senders, because information contains no inherent meaning—meaning emerges from the interaction between information and context.
Bias Blind Spot Asymmetry
Human observers systematically fail to detect cognitive biases and behavioral patterns in their own judgment while readily identifying them in others (the bias blind spot), because self-evaluation relies on introspection while other-evaluation relies on observable behavior.
Culture Shapes Fundamental Cognition
Cultural context shapes perception, attention allocation, and cognitive processing at a fundamental level, not merely attitudes, preferences, or higher-level reasoning.
Externalization Exposes Hidden Structure
Externalizing thought processes—through writing, explaining, or step-by-step articulation—exposes gaps, logical jumps, and unstated assumptions that remain concealed in internal processing, converting tacit knowledge into explicit, transferable form.
Schemas as Knowledge Organization Structures
Schemas are cognitive structures that organize knowledge at all levels of abstraction by specifying relationships between concepts and guiding information processing.
Automaticity Without Conscious Control
Automatic cognitive processes operate without conscious awareness, voluntary control, or deliberate initiation.
Graded Category Membership Structure
Categories have internal structure with graded membership along a spectrum of typicality rather than binary definitional boundaries.
Belief Perseverance Against Contradictory Evidence
Cognitive systems preferentially maintain existing beliefs and interpretive frameworks even when confronted with contradictory evidence or when the original evidentiary basis is explicitly eliminated.
Expertise as Domain-Specific Schema Organization
Expertise fundamentally consists of accumulated and organized domain-specific schemas rather than superior general processing capacity, and expert knowledge structures do not automatically transfer across domains.
Environmental Installation of Early Schemas
Early cognitive schemas are installed by environmental input during critical developmental periods rather than being self-generated or innately specified in detail.
Cultural Transmission Through Shared Intentionality
Cultural learning enables humans to transmit cognitive schemas across generations through shared intentionality—the uniquely human capacity for collaborative attention and mutual understanding of communicative intent.