Relevance realization and cognition
Relationships involving trauma or dysfunction
The experts we follow agree on this.
To think properly, you must ask yourself a question, wait for the answer, and critically assess it by imagining multiple perspectives arguing internally.
Who is behind it
Voices including a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus of psychology, a human connection specialist and a consultant psychiatrist and former Oxford fellow.
How strong the research is
Mostly expert experience so far, with published research still catching up.
In their words
“To think properly, you must ask yourself a question, wait for the answer, and critically assess it by imagining multiple perspectives arguing internally.”
a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus of psychology
Returning to truth in relationships is the ultimate form of recognition and liberation, enabling deeper connection and healing.
Reason is extraordinarily important but must be recognized as having limits and must be supplemented by other ways of knowing such as intuition, emotion, and imagination to be fully effective.
Reason includes rationality but supplements it with wisdom from experience, intuition, emotion, and imagination, whereas rationality alone is an abstract, context-independent algorithmic process.
Reason requires axioms or starting points that are accepted without proof (intuition) and must be reintegrated into a holistic understanding to be meaningful, otherwise it fragments reality.
Physical dynamical systems with elastic or stress-giving connections can learn in ways smarter than natural selection, indicating intelligent optimization arises spontaneously in such networks.
Reasoning cannot function properly without intuition; both are intertwined and necessary, as pure reason without intuition leads to bizarre conclusions as seen in psychotic patients.
The kind of attention we pay changes what we see and find in the world and also changes us morally and existentially, highlighting that perception is a relational process rather than a simple registration of objective reality.
human motivation includes feeling relevant not just to oneself but to others, the world, and a grounding good, which supports connectedness and agency
The expert emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between knowledge as information and knowing as lived experience, advocating for reintegrating embodied, emotional understanding with intellectual knowledge.
Truths are rarely all or nothing; their validity depends on context and degree, which the left hemisphere tends to ignore in favor of equality and symmetry.
Understanding wholes, infinity, consciousness, and motion requires a leap beyond the left hemisphere's additive and serial approach, which cannot reconstruct wholes by summing parts.
Intelligence is defined as a very general mental capacity involving reasoning, planning, problem solving, abstract thinking, comprehending complex ideas, learning quickly and from experience, not just book learning or test-taking skills.
The decline in intelligence is most pronounced at the high end of the distribution, which is critical because society depends disproportionately on highly intelligent individuals for research and teaching.
Attention creates the world we experience; how we attend to others can bring healing or alienation, making attention a moral and creative act.
Attention is not passive but a creative act that shapes what comes into being in experience, fundamentally influencing perception and consciousness.
Learning multiple languages enriches perspective and thinking by activating the right hemisphere and embodying different ways of understanding the world.
Our vision has been hijacked by a brain system evolved to manipulate the world rather than to understand it, which blinds us to a profound and beautiful reality accessible if we open our eyes.
Creative insight arises when intense left hemisphere focus is relaxed, allowing the right hemisphere to integrate diverse ideas and produce new understanding.
Following William James and pragmatism, the better hemisphere is judged by which keeps us 'in the air longer', the right hemisphere's approach is more adaptive and sustainable.
Perception is an active, embodied process involving the whole body and is not passive reception of sensory input; it is a virtual action or opportunity for action, consistent with the embodied mind and extended cognition frameworks.
Rather than suppressing the mind, effective practice involves collaboration between executive verbal planning and intuitive reflexive awareness to avoid letting one mode dominate and cause dysfunction.
The expert critiques the reduction of reason to purely propositional, instrumental logic and advocates for rehabilitating a broader, richer notion of reason that includes procedural, perspectival, and participatory dimensions.
Cognition operates dynamically with bottom-up feature processing and top-down gestalt influence, exemplified in recursive relevance realization and predictive processing models.
The intelligibility of the world and cognition share the same form or generative grammar, enabling participatory knowing and mutual shaping between agent and environment.
Modern rationality is monological, mono epistemic, monophasic, and bound to a magnetic self, whereas Socratic rationality is dialogical, polyepistemic, polyphasic, and involves a dialogical self including inner dialogue and altered states.
Inner speech involves proposing and responding within oneself, indicating multiple 'parties' with different information, thus challenging the idea of a unified monologic self and supporting a dialogical self model.
Different brain areas form generative models of each other to reduce working at cross purposes and metabolic costs, supporting dialogical processes within cognition and challenging the notion of a self-enclosed magnetic self.
The cognitive light cone concept maps the scale of an agent's goals in space and time, providing a framework to understand diverse intelligences from bacteria to humans and beyond.
Teleology as goal directedness is necessary for understanding cognition, and tonomy as apparent goal directedness reminds us that goal attribution depends on an observer's perspective.
Relevance realization is the process of selecting what information matters among exponentially many possibilities, crucial for adaptive problem solving and intertwined with anticipation.
Predictive processing requires modeling oneself interacting with the world to reduce conflation errors, leading to intertwined self and world models.
With care
Some of the minds attach conditions. These are worth reading before you begin.
Evolutionary selection and learning share an equivalence but also a disanalogy, as learning systems show intelligent optimization beyond the 'dumb' process of natural selection.
IQ tests measure the general intelligence factor g, which correlates with many cognitive abilities, but do not capture social and emotional intelligence and have socio-political controversies.
IQ scores rose from 1930s to 1990s due to environmental factors but have declined since mid-1990s, especially at the high end of the distribution, indicating complex changes in intelligence measures over time.
The brain may not cause consciousness but rather transduces or mediates it, shaping and constraining experience without fully explaining it.
While bilateral (two-part) architectures are natural and evolutionarily grounded, alternative architectures with more parts (e.g., three) may be possible and relevant, as suggested by mathematical models like period doubling and logistic maps.
The brain and mind are closely related but the nature of their relationship is disputable; the brain may not emit consciousness but rather transmit or permit it, acting as a filter or sculptor of consciousness rather than its creator.
Life can be defined as systems that scale up their cognitive light cones, multiplexing goal-directed systems to achieve larger spatial and temporal goals, though this is a non-traditional view.
Where they disagree
Both sides
For
Returning to truth in relationships is the ultimate form of recognition and liberation, enabling deeper connection and healing.
a human connection specialistAgainst
Current societal crises including environmental destruction, social polarization, and loss of empathy stem from an overemphasis on left hemisphere cognition leading to simplification, intolerance, and greed.
a consultant psychiatrist and former Oxford fellowMost of the minds come down in favour, and the dissent is worth knowing.
Talk it through
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How this reading was made
Every line here comes from a doctor, scientist or coach speaking publicly, and links to the moment they said it. Entrain listens for where independent experts arrive at the same place on their own, and shows where they part ways. Mostly expert experience so far, with published research still catching up.
None of the statements here come with a declared commercial interest. Last refreshed 19 August 2026.
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