Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
Human cognition operates through schemas — structured…
Human cognition operates through schemas — structured interpretive systems that organize incoming experience into coherent patterns before conscious awareness.
Understanding always involves the meeting…
Understanding always involves the meeting of the interpreter's horizon with what is being interpreted, producing meanings that neither contains alone.
Sense of coherence (comprehensibility, manageability…
Sense of coherence (comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness) predicts health and resilience independently of specific life circumstances.
Action that springs from autonomous volition satisfies basic
Action that springs from autonomous volition satisfies basic psychological needs in ways that coerced action cannot.
Retrospective memory of experience diverges systematically…
Retrospective memory of experience diverges systematically from real-time experience, with meaning shaped by peaks, endings, and narrative coherence.
Thoughts are objects, not identity
discrete cognitive entities that can be separated from the identity of the thinker; a person can observe, craft, version, and evaluate their own thoughts as external material
Uncaptured thoughts
novel cognitive signals that arrive as fleeting signals and systematically degrade in memory within seconds without a capture practice, with 42% degradation occurring within 20 minutes according to Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve
Externalization
the act of transforming internal emotional states from vague, unmanageable experiences into precise, labeled, written objects that can be examined, tracked, and acted upon deliberately
WYSIATI
the cognitive bias where people treat available information as complete and determine confidence based on the coherence of the available story rather than the quantity or quality of supporting evidence, with the system that would detect gaps being the same system that has the gaps
Capture
the cognitive process of externalizing thoughts and ideas from working memory into an external medium for preservation and future processing
Monitoring
the upward communication channel in metacognition where cognition about cognition is perceived, representing the signal that tells you 'I don't actually understand this' or 'I'm getting emotional about this decision'
Control
the downward communication channel in metacognition where actions are taken in response to monitoring signals, such as 'I need to re-read this more carefully' or 'Let me step back and separate my feelings from the facts'
Cognitive offloading
the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand
Shelf life of a thought
the rate at which a thought decays and becomes unrecoverable, which varies from minutes for contextual insights to weeks or permanent for reference facts
Zeigarnik residue
the persistent sense that you had something important (a task-specific tension) without the actual content of the insight, which continues consuming working memory without delivering usable information
Capture habit
the reflexive, automatic behavior that externalizes ideas the moment they arrive, consisting of a cue (trigger), routine (behavior), and reward (reinforcement) that forms a neural pathway requiring no willpower or decision-making
Keystone habit
a foundational behavior that, once established, cascades into other behavioral changes across seemingly unrelated areas by restructuring the conditions that make other outcomes possible, rather than just producing its own outcome
Internal monologue
the compressed, lossy cognitive process that represents thoughts through abbreviated, predicative, semantically condensed fragments rather than faithful recordings, systematically omitting subjects, context, nuance, counterarguments, emotional metadata, and uncertainty markers while running known distortion patterns that make it unreliable as a high-fidelity representation of actual thinking
Self-observation: metacognitive monitoring
Observation: the cognitive act of attending to and monitoring one's own thinking that necessarily alters the content and emotional charge of the thought being observed through the engagement of prefrontal regulatory circuits that modulate limbic activation, making the observer and observed part of the same system rather than separate entities
Confusion
the gap between what you think you understand and what you can write down clearly, which reveals the exact contours of your misunderstanding and serves as diagnostic information
The illusion of explanatory depth
the phenomenon where people rate their understanding of everyday devices highly but experience a significant drop in self-assessment when forced to articulate detailed explanations, revealing shallow knowledge that was masked by the feeling of understanding
Review
the cognitive operation that transforms captured material into usable knowledge through evaluation, connection, and decision-making processes
Capture system
the integrated infrastructure of multiple capture channels and a single consolidation point that prevents loss of cognitive raw material
Atomic note
a note that captures exactly one idea, is self-contained enough to be understood without its original context, makes one assertion, develops one concept, or captures one argument, and can be linked to, referenced from, and embedded in any context where its single idea is relevant