© 2025, Angela Madsen All rights reserved.

For Violet.

This book was written by a human mind with no AI assistance at any point in the process.

All confabulation is my own. All research gaps are my own. All interpretive thinking is my own. Annotations are the best I could manage with the timescapes involved, and will be continued to be worked for a while.

Three Buckminster Fuller structures are used in the Systems flow page; Manoogian & Benson's Cognitive Bias Codex is used on the Cognitive bias page; otherwise all images are created myself using either Affinity Design or sketching in Concept. This book has been through multiple versions, multiple software, and multiple structures through the five years I worked on articulating it. Tools have included Ulysses, Powerpoint, and Affinity Publisher.

• Environment 
• Reaction
• Response

So…people are complex

We are not simple creatures

We’re not talking “complex” along the lines of a multiplicity of if-then statements rolled up and with a variable outcome. 

We’re talking “complex” along the lines of a multiplicity of variable inputs, each with its own system attached that can sometimes borrow resources from abutting systems, that form a grounding foundation of the environment. That, then, is filtered through a biological response system that won’t necessarily react to everything and can be offset by the primary consciousness, but could become so strong that even the primary consciousness has to roll with it. It depends on a layer of preconceived yet variable trust points to allow at-hand immediate decision making while pushing questionable or more gnarly decisions-to-be-made into higher consciousness.

In other words, we can’t separate people from their environment, emotions, and cognition.

That’s just the beginning.

Variable upon variable, system upon system. Process a

The physical and social environment

What we’re aiming for

This aspect of the model is intrinsically defined by hope: each quadrant is named for the broadly beneficial, non-disruptive held quality, not the lack, nor the power dynamic.

This a reflection of a humanist credo: that our best case scenario is to aim for the whole to attain a sense of wholeness and wellbeing, and that our differences will become a source of wonder and diversity that will promote our long-term survivability. 

To make a tool that already assumes that everyone already has attained this hopeful model is hubris. Our current win/lose cant in our economic system literally assumes that this hope cannot exist. The first step — and it is faintingly, gut-wrenchingly a drop in an ocean — is to look at our tools and try to build in latch points for those who are lacking in particular aspects of the quadrants.  We can't even do safety and health, the quadrants on the 'survive' side of the 'survive/thrive' spectrum, in a wa

Quadrants of social and physical environments

Targeted by two crossed spectrum nodes

If there were a way to elegantly and with robust coherency represent four dimensions in a two dimensional format, this is one of the spots where I would use it. 

Our entire environment is deeply intertwingled. Each of these quadrants are affected by countless systems, and each o

Toxins and tonics

Environmental flip sides

The environmental factors are where we most easily and deeply affect one another. I like to think its mostly because we’re focused on our own paths, and not paying attention to how our decisions affect others. I like to believe that, but sometimes it’s clear that the harm is intentional. 

Our butting heads isn’t an easy thing to understand or manage. There

Safety

High functioning survival

Key complexities

• Safety flips into ‘danger’ far before there is the tell-tale blood from aggression, so it cannot be scanned in another at a distance
• Safety is physical, social, and emotional
• Sense of safety is reflective of both environment and individual

Core directives

• Communicate our learnings without resorting to dogma
• Find patterns to improve survivability

Sample awry states

• When learnings are held for opportunistic leverage
• When ‘safety’ is used to control
• Allowing for everyone to feel safe deemed ‘politics’
• Survivability

Health

Baseline survival

Key complexities 

• There are basics in health that we all need (e.g., water, oxygen, food)
• And every individual biological body is similar, but so complex that hiccups happen in our systems that need to be managed by the individual on a tailored scale

Core directives

• eat
• drink
• breathe
• sleep
• light the dark
• warm the cold
• avoid pain
• fix the source of pain

Sample awry states

• When health-contributing functions are actively suppressed
• When what makes us healthy is used as leverage to control others
• When what supports health is profi

Expression

Baseline thriving

Key complexities

• Expression is a muscle that can atrophy
• Expression can be nonconformist, which reads to some as unpredictable

Core directives

• Learning and experimenting
• Developing and questioning understanding
• Improved tools, to make things to a higher standard
• Finding/creating beauty/balance in your environment

Sample awry states

• When learning is considered a dangerous freedom when uncontrolled by the state
• When an authority understands that thinking might lead to action
• When tools are used for weapons
• When the key

Flow state

High functioning thriving

Key complexities

• What hits as a flow state is as complex and unique as each person’s who-ness
• Flow state is highly affected by the other quadrants

Core directives

Be meaningful according to yourself, without harming others (sensibility not withstanding).

Sample awry states

• When our jobs lack purpose, don't support living, and/or are hated without exit potential
• When what has historically been accepted is the only possible future 
• When we’re told what and how we should think
• When repercussions are predicated on nonconformi

Reactions

Our semi-autonomic states that impact thinking

I’ve put emotions and trust in this first nested space because they are our semi-autonomic states. Emotions and trust tend to kick in before a single conscious thought has sparked. Emotions start as an entirely internal state; trust starts as an acceptance of an entirely external source.

What they both do, though, is set the groundwork for thinking. They are the first lenses through which we assimilate our environment. They run automatically, but can be regulated by our conscious minds. They are still happening first, then regulated predicated on when and if the conscious mind decided to modulate them, to the extent that they can be modulated.

They are a reaction to environment. An emotional reaction will still happen in an unsafe environment regardless of how much an individual can ‘manage their psychological state’.

Even when it comes to emotions and trust, we cannot assume the nuances of one are the reflection of everyone. Nor ca

Reactive factors

The semi-autonomic state of mind

We can’t wait for a tiger to bite to consider it dangerous

We have ‘set stage’ responses

Stress responses:

• Fight
• Flight
• Freeze

Non-stress responses

• Ignore
• Wait and see
• Negotiate
• Study

The real wonder is that we differentiate between a stress and non-stress response for absolutely everything.

The sad part? Many people l

Emotions

Biologically based response to information

Emotions are a hard-coded aspect of our bodies.

• Our assumptions of reasonable emotional expression are both cultural and individual
• Emotions exist even when there is no expression of them; they cannot be turned off
• Emotions are a product of neurotransmitters and certain mechanical structures of the brain. Neurotransmitters affect biology broadly and are, in turn, affected broadly by biology. Emotions can be sparked by reaction, thought, biology, environment.
  • Which means that emotions are a complex system that we’ve rendered to simple nodes for communication, e.g., “I am

The future-sense of fear and desire

Sparking potentiality

Fear and desire both engage the same synaptic pathways as imaged by an MRI. 

The are the source for some of our funkier decision making, and for some of the more

• **They are emotions. **They have a neurotransmitter underpinning that floods us with emotions and mechanical changes. Our hearts beat faster, our breath becomes more shallow. Our skin might flush, or pale, or sweat. 
• We know that fear is a big part of us. It’s there in our fight/flight response. It’s in our stories. We have an entire story genre predicated on sparking fear. 
• And we know that desire is a big part of us. Catholics remove the acceptance of desire from their clergy; Buddhism sees the ability to accept it without giving in to it as the single biggest step to achieving nirvana. Marketing tries to spark it in us every single day. 

The unspoken bit of fear and desire? Both are primarily instigated by imagined future states.

Think about the diffe

Trust

Beliefs and ideas we don’t question

AKA Faith

AKA, belief

• We all have them. In some, it’s expressed in religion. In others, it’s expressed in the certainty the sun will rise — even if we believe in a flat earth or have little understanding of orbital mechanics.
• Most of our faith is the result of trusting a source entity.
• It helps us get through our chaos.
  • Trust A for recipes
  • Trust B for car maintenance
  • Trust C to keep a good eye on politics
  • Trust D for reasonable ethics and precepts
  • But when A becomes fervent about politics, based on our

Response

Remember: we’re still in snap

Response happens when we take a more considered approach. Our goal is in mind, and we’re working towards it.

It doesn’t include any kind of reevaluation. There’s no time (or, in longer timescales, no allotted bandwidth) to think about ethics, morals, how the process and outcomes might affect an ouruborus of perception, let alone how it might bubble up into group dynamics or culture. 

We see what we want. We aim. We go, and (more or less) nimbly manage hiccups and speedbumps, and capture opportunity.

This is business in a nutshell. Productivity. We do. We achieve.

It’s also how many of us get through most days. Our days are so tight with all our to-do’s, marketing-stolen cognitive load, and maintaining our digital social ties. It’s what we have: getting through as best we can with what we know.

It’s also entirely based on what we know. When we know what we know, we can’t change our minds and grow. We stay the same, running the same patterns that

Processing chain

Introduction

**The ouruborus of perception is based on movement through time. What happens and how we respond to it is thoroughly intertwingled in time.

Core precepts

Gravity points in our thinking, behavior, and actions

Core precepts are the primary beliefs of a person that are applied as a grounding step to any experience, whether quietly reading a book alone or dancing in a crowd. It’s their where-ness that is agnostic to actual, physical place — abstract viewpoints into sundry matters and potential trailheads for any new path.

They are more like gravitational pulls than outright, simply defined beliefs. They can be hard to suss out, and people have to do deep-dive thinking over a long period of time to get to them, and usually have to pay attention to behavior and the subtle internal patter of thinking.

They can be understood. It takes time, self-awareness, and brutal self honesty. Core precepts can be part of any agreement made with a group of people, including on cultural and social levels.

When cultures define them (e.g., justice for all) they help to shortcut people’s experiential agreement — but they can also be co-opted and me

Cognitive biases

Shortcuts from data acceptance to passed-on information

Cognitive biases are shortcuts in thinking that a person has found successful in the past and which they lean into going forward. We need them. They started as a survival tool, and helps us efficiently get through our days.

Remember Chutes and Ladders, the children’s board game? A cognitive bias acts like a chute, getting you that much further down the board without having to go through the thinking that would be involved if you had to start from scratch. It’s tempting to write, “with all the data,” but that itself is a cognitive bias (information bias — one that I leverage frequently).

The concept of cognitive biases is relatively recent in our cultural lexicon. New patterns are being added regularly. I mostly agree with broad categories that Buster Benson organized them in as John Manoogian III designed into the Cognitive Bias Codex, and it’s definitely a useful jumping-off point:

What should we remember?

Memory

Aka, leveraging what’s come before to moderate and forecast

Memory is important. It affects our decisions, help us make sense of the world, and provide a window into meaning and context regardless of the density of information available or consumable. Our stories, laws, and religious and mythological texts are shared deep memory.

How memory is constructed biologically is fascinating. How it’s used, abused, skewed and shared might be one of the cornerstones of what builds our cultures. But when it comes to the nitty gritty, single-entity use?

The big thing to remember about memory as we move through the world is that what memory is pinged is the memory that’s leveraged to make sense of life in a snap. Where and when and how those memories surface when, how, where, and with whom they do is something we're bare able to approach.

Just in terms of this book, memory is complicit in 25 other concepts, from ideas as intuitive as learning, to confounding as being part of our future-sense.

Cognitive information architecture

AKA internalized contextualization and sense-making

We each of us keep information architectures in mind all the time. They help us frame what we’re experiencing in the moment, provide a way to shortcut conversations and know what behavioral expectations are in place.

We don’t act the same way with our spouse and with our coworkers, and with our doctors, or the police. We don’t lean into the same ideas with our spiritual community as we do with our coworkers, unless they happen to be the same or very strongly intertwingled.

Every time we switch gears — whether what we’re doing, who we’re talking with, or even, sometimes, just the project we’re talking about with most of the same people we were in a meeting with half an hour ago — we’re changing information architectures.

I’m writing about the mental tooling of information architecture in a book describing information architecture, and predicated on information architecture. There is a part of me that wa

Mental models

AKA the architecture we use to relay understanding to similar objectives

When we learn how to do something we create a mental model of it. 

Mental models are a sense of how a process functions. It can be as organized as a geopolitical map, or as simple as opening the toothpaste, or as complex as the mechanisms used to study particle physics.

The key is that we now have a process we understand. We can pull it apart and reorganize it so it flows better for a certain situation. We can teach it to someone else. We can even apply it, in part or in whole, to something that seems to work somewhat the same, but maybe not, but let’s try?

When you are checking out a shopping cart on a new-to-you website, you’re using a mental model.

When you’re looking for lost keys, you’re using a mental model.

Trying to apply information gleaned from a video or book? Mental model.

We hold within our minds a vast array of models, and transfer them into novel use all the time. They help us

Nuggetization

AKA hyper-contextualized/meaning-filled encapsulated nodes

Nuggetization is what I call when we wrap up and set aside information for use in a particular context. Watching myself and the people around me, I think it's something we do all the time.

It's a little bit chunking, which means it's a bit of memory management. It's a little bit compartmentalization, so a bit of emotions management. It leverages dimensional information, so it's a bit of information architecture.

Nuggets can be filled with emotions, history, goals, desires, smells, physical context. It’s basically anything and everything that we experience, compacted and set to open for use when memory is triggered.

“Triggered” is a high-potency word in our culture these days. It brings up visions of distress and anger. What people are opening during their triggered moments is a nugget – a learning that they’ve encapsulated, in this instance to more easily set aside while they meet the criteria of socially accepted b

Prioritization

Some aspects are more important than others

Infinitely variable

You need to do X. You need to do Y. You must complete Z. You must not  say A to D; you must say A to B; D is always with B. 

Life happens all at once. It doesn’t fall into neat order. To get through, a person has to make decisions — even if the decision is to multitask and do everything at once. 

People will define priorities, and those priorities will make the decisions easier. 

Money. Family. Health. Job. Professional reputation. Being g

Weighting

How priorities stay the same, but the decision skews

Comparative and fungible

While the processes are in a prioritized order, they are ultimately jostling, weighted by the data and associated metadata provided by experience and enculturation.

If we apply that weighting to the prioritization load, it becomes possible that a processing node that becomes highly weighted could short-circuit the inclusion of other processing factors, even if they are higher in prioritization and especially if there is a time factor/urgency involved. 

In other words, a pe

Linking

Not every link is leveraged with every decision

Infinite, comparative, multivariate, adaptable, and fungible

If you could turn the chain to see a ‘backend’, it would be filled with an intertwingled connectome that would align adjacencies according to highest prioritized nodes and exigent qualities in play, modifiable according to the situation at hand.

In other words, a person’s highest ultimate priority may be self preservation, but if they aren’t impacted in a situation their processing network will jostle it off the links as moot in this particular environment. They might stop their car to save a tortoise in the middle of

Trauma’s impact

Perception skewed

Possible exceptions and heighten-to-transformations

Trauma can be as “irrefutable” as a broken bone breaking through skin…or as “dismissible” as that span of time with no money. Irrefutability and dismissibility are often culturally attributed.

The truth: trauma is trauma, regardless of its source. Experiencing it:

• Solidifies cognitive biases
• Strengthens core precepts and extends their ripple effect
• Bends mental models to avoid the repetition
• More easily finds novel use cases to apply even non-mental-model factors
• At it’s extreme

Our fungible processing chain

The embedded potential of our cognition

The variability, prioritization, weighting, linking, trauma, and reality adhesion act on the processing links agnostically. The processing chain is part of the entire internalized environment; it doesn't coalesce on its own, but it's important to understand it's form:

Any processing link can be subject to any, singular or multiple, of the qualifiers. 

Any processing link type, and multiple processing links, can be associated with any aspect of cognition. 

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Reality Adhesion Threshold

A novel framework for what leads to cognitive dissonance

Further constraint to the data pool as part of experience

I said way back at the beginning that there was nothing new in here. I still believe that. However, I've yet to find anyone trying to model and make sense of the full group of potential interactions that makes one person decide to hate someone for an arbitrary characteristic — like being LGBTQ+ — and another person just, simply, accepting it, without the the pre-qualifier of being somewhere in that group.

We've studied the negative aspect. There's more writing about that than I can easily track down; and there's more articulation and studies around it all the time. Love is love; but it's also true that hate is hate, and it makes our world a violent, disgusting place.

Information is my hammer in the "everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer" cognitive bias (aka the Law of the Instrument). I know it; anyone this deep into this book know

Internalized experience

What happens in the individual’s mind

Our brains are built as fuzzy networks, connected through a complex geometry of neurons and specialized processes. When mechanical, chemical, or electrical aspects of the brain skitters sideways, it affects thinking; thinking can also change the chemical (and thus electrical) aspects of a brain. But more than anything else, it is our processing of information that determines what

Who-ness, longform

None of us have access to the everything of someone else, and this is more beneficial than dangerous.

We're all figuring out our lives. As outside observers, we tend to look to moments of magnitude to decide someone is a "good" person or "bad" person, but it's also in every decision — or lack.

Part of why I started here, in the snap, is that this is where our patterns accumulate. That "good/bad" person label doesn't come from tests of magnitude. The outcome isn't the defining happening, but the accumulation of decisions-made that find a stressful moment of expression.

The definition comes from all the little decisions someone makes every day, that get set in their various cognitive links and cascade at moments of magnitude.

What we don't seem to appreciate culturally is that the thing we learn the deepest, is the thing we regret the most. It is not a practice of always-perfect that makes us respond at points of magnitude in ways that ripple out with the least amount of i

Movements is a book in six parts

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Information

Part 3: Who-ness

Part 4: People and time

Part 5: Fractal implications

Part 6: Appendix

Anyone interested in defraying costs, buying me a coffee for my expertise/time, or otherwise supporting me are welcome to do so via a pay-what-you-want model.

An email drop has been set up at movements. I have no idea what my cadence for checking it will be, or how done I'll get how fast with the inevitable spam and trolls. It's still the best way to potentially get in touch with