Contemplating Cognition
You, your crew, and the world at large.
Do you ever think … about thinking? This sort of meta-cognition can take various forms. Those of us involved in any sort of meditative practice are involved in various ways, and at a collective level, intelligence analysis is full of cognitive psych. Our society has accepted … for the moment … mass manipulation. I truly worry about what young people are doing to themselves with this attention span wrecking stuff they refer to as “brainrot”.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Broad ranging thought on maintaining our hardware and wetware.
Background:
I got involved in sense making operations back in the tweens and one of the formative things I read was Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, the CIA’s bible for analytical practice. I think that same year I read Thinking, Fast and Slow. Like anything that peaks my interest, I end up with some post-graduate level education in the area.
During July I was laid up from a surgery, a lingering mechanical problem that finally got resolved. Being pained and immobile for several weeks, I chose mastering Anthropic’s Claude as a good way to distract myself. And when I emerged a month later, I had the name of the mysterious condition I’d attributed to Lyme disease, which had largely kept me out of the workforce from 2007 through 2025.
The nature of that outage, fully half of my adult working years, was the endless brain fog that comes with an overactive immune system. The “cognitive prosthetic” of a now archaic LLM, enabled me to self diagnose.
Self Care:
Having been knocked flat in terms of mental capacity, I’ve done all sorts of things to self improve. A significant aspect of my startup is facilitating people micromanaging their condition and nutrition. There’s a lot of nuance to it, but if you’re a mostly healthy adult, you can score significant gains with relatively minor changes.
Dropping bad habits is an excellent place to start - alcohol, marijuana, and anything else that dulls the mind are to be avoided.
“The world went crazy, this is SO stressful, I NEED a drink …”
These things are all thirty years in the rear view mirror for me, human chemistry set is something you get out of your system in your twenties, assuming you survive the process.
There are plenty of sources for health advice, let’s stick to purely the cognitive stuff.
I’ve been nursing a 25 gram container of Noopept since the summer of 2022. The effects were extraordinary. I was a three minute Mahjong solitaire player, a habit I’ve had since the 1980s. A couple days of Noopept knocked fifteen seconds off my average times and I was down to around 2:30 when my old Android tablet died. That’s nipping at the heels of the record setters at the irregular “world championships” that are held here and there.
I go on and off caffeine, at one point extending that run to seven years. These days I’m on it and I really like balancing it with L-theanine. If I’m at my desk but not focused, 200mg and twenty minutes will take care of that. The theanine usage has spread - caffeine arrives in the AM and gets nursed until lunch, theanine has been running to 600 - 800mg/day for some time.
There are many other things that can be done, but those are two big ones, ones where you will likely see nearly immediate results.
Conclusion:
That’s just me. You gotta do you, but take this to heart. Things are going to range somewhere between hard to outright impossible. Bellying up to the bar to numb yourself might seem like the thing to do, but the problems we face are “everybody” problems, and you can not afford to fall behind. If the stress is getting to you, don’t take a drink, try taking a walk instead.
