ideasthesia

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Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Translucent head with topographical probability manifold inside—peaks, valleys, and geodesic paths of belief space

Information Geometry

Your beliefs live on a curved surface you can’t see. Information geometry treats probability distributions as points on a manifold—a mathematical surface with shape, curvature, and distance. When you change your mind, you’re not just swapping one belief for another. You’re moving across a landscape where

Human silhouette of four interlocking puzzle pieces with one cracked and glowing—4E cognition under strain

4E Cognition Extended

The 4E framework—embodied, embedded, enacted, extended—revolutionized cognitive science by getting the mind out of the skull. But it has a problem: it describes where cognition happens without explaining when it fails. 4E theory tells us thinking is body-based, environment-coupled, action-driven, and tool-extended. What it

Human spine as three-stage rocket representing autonomic hierarchy—dorsal vagal freeze, sympathetic fire, ventral vagal social engagement

Polyvagal Embodiment

Your nervous system is running ancient code. Three layers of autonomic response—freeze, fight-or-flight, and social engagement—stack on top of each other, each one a different era’s solution to the problem of staying alive. Stephen Porges calls this the polyvagal hierarchy, and it changes everything about

Expanded personhood network with non-human nodes gaining relational status in coherence web

Neo-Animism

For most of modern anthropology’s history, when indigenous people said the forest was alive, the mountain had intentions, or animals were persons, researchers nodded politely and then explained what they “really meant.” The assumption: obviously only humans have minds, so these claims must be metaphor, projection, or primitive confusion.

Meme propagation network with viral spread dynamics and platform selection pressures

Digital Folklore

Memes spread like myths. Fandoms function like religions. World-building creates coherence when reality feels chaotic. Digital platforms aren’t just communication tools—they’re mythic ecosystems, breeding contemporary folklore at internet speed. This series explores how ancient cognitive machinery meets algorithmic infrastructure. The same neural patterns that made myths

Hero's journey state-transition template with archetypal compression encoding navigational wisdom

Cognitive Mythology

Myths aren’t failed science. They’re successful compression algorithms. Every culture develops stories about heroes descending into underworlds, tricksters disrupting order, mothers protecting children, and cycles of death and rebirth. Not because these narratives describe literal events, but because they encode navigational instructions for human coherence—packaged in forms

Teacher-student transmission chain across time—embodied knowledge flowing through lineage coupling

Esoteric Transmission

You can read every book about swimming. Study biomechanics, fluid dynamics, and training protocols. Memorize perfect technique. But until someone who already swims shows you how in the waterfeeling when to rotate, sensing the catch, learning the rhythmyou’re not swimming. You’re thinking about swimming. Some knowledge