If a Thing Doesn’t Transit Your Neurons...
You're unaware it exists.
Cognitive surrender is about giving over our work to AI, and it’s veeeery tempting.
Shifting into System 2 Thinking — setting aside your knee-jerk first response and engaging your neurons in actual thought — is annoying, time-consuming, and difficult. Unless you love it. But it's the path out of cognitive surrender toward appropriate cognitive offloading.
Awareness is key.
For example, one of the problems with me making my external Brain available publicly is that nobody knows what it contains, or what it might be particularly good at. What should they ask of it? Where should they start? I offer a nexus called Useful Starting Points, but that's pretty random.
How are you to know I have strong feelings about the word Consumer? A fascination with modern Japanese culture? A GOAT collection? A surprisingly long list of Variants of Capitalism? Never mind how some of these connect to one another.
This is why I'll be telling more stories that are trails in my Brain — and constructing narratives (looking backward and forward), too. All posted across the Web, partly to increase my discoverability.
Over time, a few of my friends learned to use my online Brain without me being present. They grooved a habit, when entering a field unfamiliar to them, to take a look at what I've curated on the subject.
Because I'm crazy curious and I've been curating the same map for almost three decades, I have resources in my Brain that no longer show up on Google searches because they didn't get enough inbound link love (or use SEO to stay in view). Sometimes the Wayback Machine has to help restore that content, but just because the articles were written a few years ago, doesn't make them less useful. Some analyses age really well.
I report all this because the very manual act of curating my external Brain forces me into System 2 thinking, which gets my neurons engaged and connected. Later, when I demo a section of my Brain I haven't visited for a long time, that act refreshes my neural pathways. And I know where the hidden trails in my Brain are that tell stories, a thing that is not easily evident until I make those stories explicit.
Find your equivalent joyful manual act (saucy pun intended) to engage your neurons. If it's not fun, you won't keep doing it.
Beware of handing things over to AIs to the point where you're completely out of the loop, and don't know how to break back in.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.