The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 2,888 atoms across 3 types and 2 molecules
Abstraction necessarily discards information from the reality it represents, retaining only selected features deemed relevant while eliminating detail.
No human has direct access to reality; all knowledge is mediated through neurological processing and linguistic abstraction layers that filter and structure experience.
Mental models have structural correspondence (isomorphism) to the situations they represent, with relationships between model elements mapping onto relationships between real-world elements.
The brain operates as a hierarchical prediction machine that continuously generates top-down predictions about expected sensory input and propagates only prediction errors upward for model updating.
Scientific paradigms are incommensurable—proponents of competing paradigms cannot fully communicate because terms carry different meanings within each framework.
Conscious awareness requires that information trigger activation across large-scale prefrontal and parietal networks, making it available for report and deliberate action.
People typically construct a single mental model of a situation and reason from it as if it were complete, without spontaneously generating alternative models.
Conscious deliberation consumes significantly more metabolic resources per unit of information processed than automatic processing.
Human cognition operates through two distinct systems: System 1 (fast, automatic, parallel, effortless pattern recognition) and System 2 (slow, controlled, serial, effortful deliberation), which have fundamentally different operational characteristics and failure modes.
Expert intuition develops validity only in domains with stable environmental regularities and only through prolonged practice with accurate, timely feedback.
Humans can know more than they can articulate in language—tacit knowledge exists as genuine understanding that resists complete linguistic formalization.
Pattern recognition compiled from experience operates orders of magnitude faster than sequential rule-following for equivalent tasks.
Mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, knowledge, emotions) can be systematically imputed to oneself and others through dedicated cognitive mechanisms that generate predictive models of behavior.
Knowledge is actively constructed by learners through engagement with experience, not passively received as transmission from external sources.
Humans exhibit egocentric anchoring when modeling others' perspectives, beginning from their own viewpoint and adjusting insufficiently to account for differing knowledge, beliefs, or perceptual access.
Understanding another person's reasoning structure and mental states (cognitive empathy) is neurologically and functionally distinct from feeling what they feel (affective empathy).
Categories are constructed by humans for specific purposes and contexts, not discovered as objective, mind-independent features of reality.
Classifying people creates feedback loops where the classification changes the behavior of those classified, which in turn changes the category itself in ways that don't occur with classifications of inanimate objects.
The human brain automatically generates and perceives patterns, relationships, and regularities in sensory input prior to and often independent of conscious verification, subject to systematic biases such as confirmation bias that preferentially encode pattern-consistent information while filtering contradictory evidence.
Chunking allows working memory to treat hierarchically organized groups of items as single units, effectively expanding functional processing capacity beyond the raw item limit, and hierarchically organized systems with stable intermediate subsystems evolve faster and demonstrate greater robustness than flat systems.
Abstract representations that lack connection to concrete, embodied, or perceptual experiences become unstable and lose meaning under cognitive load or when transferred to novel contexts.
Humans can maintain approximately 150 stable social relationships simultaneously, representing a cognitive limit on the number of individuals about whom one can track social state and obligations.
The human brain performs transitive inference automatically as a fundamental cognitive operation, computing implied relationships from chains of explicit relationships without conscious effort.
Human visual perception processes global structure before local details.