Field Notes · Cognitive Endurance
PhD-built tools for scholars who want to train capacity, not outsource thinking. No AI writing your work. No shortcuts that leave you weaker.
Velocity isn't haste... it's speed with direction. Your brain is a muscle. Train it.
Seven modes for scholars: constraints that keep AI from doing your thinking.
Seven cognitive instruments that share one design principle: no cognitive offloading. Each one constrains the machine to a single function... questioning, challenging, diagnosing, mapping, evaluating... and forbids it from handing you the answer. Instruments for resistance, not assistance.
/plugin marketplace add justinneuman-coder/scholar-modes
/plugin install scholar-modes@ultra-normal
Or skip the install entirely. Copy any mode's prompt and paste it at the start of a new conversation in any AI. No setup required.
Apps that build the muscle instead of replacing it. Free on the App Store.
Reading as athletic discipline
Most failures of reading are failures of training. We teach critique and argument but stop teaching reading after elementary school. ReadingVelocity treats attention as a trainable capacity... your cognitive VO₂ max. Prime, Push, Process. Build the stamina to finish the big books.
Scalar thinking for a logarithmic world
Most failures of understanding are failures of scale. Linear minds in a logarithmic world. FractalView is a thinking environment that helps you move between orders of magnitude without losing coherence. From concrete evidence to universal stakes. No AI. Just instruments for insight.
Blank page to skeleton in 30 minutes
Essays aren't hard to start... they feel hard because you're staring at a blank page trying to be profound. EssayVelocity guides you through targeted questions to pull out the stories you already have. Your voice, your work. Zero AI detection risk.
Heartbreak, happiness, and the art of living
A happiness course seemed like dessert-mode education. But real life is not dessert. HappyHumanist braids ancient philosophy with contemporary science, poetry with empirical research. Ten weeks of guided exploration through texts that will break you apart and build you back... plus daily practices drawn from centuries of wisdom about character formation.
The insider's edge on private school applications
Strategic frameworks for ISAAGNY, Gateway, and boarding school applications, from a professor who taught at Yale and Phillips Exeter. The insider's edge without the five-figure consultant fee. Essay tools, parent statement templates, and the guidance that actually moves an admissions file.
Three browser games, side by side. One pulls the color from a masterpiece. Two are perceptual drills from Sensorium, a different discipline entirely. Thirty-second resets that sharpen the instrument instead of dulling it. Play right here, and if one sticks, it's on the App Store.
Pull the color from a masterpiece and watch the canvas fade to a ghost. A quiet game about seeing like a painter.
Get Color Harvest →The word says one color, the ink says another. Pick the match fast, while your reading reflex fights you.
Get Sensorium →Two panels, side by side. One is drifting in hue so slowly your eye wants to miss it. Catch the side that's moving.
Get Sensorium →"People who can't govern their own attention will be governed by someone else's."
Not prohibition, not blind embrace. Teaching students to cross the threshold into consequential space, the way a surgeon scrubs in. On distinctions over rules, and phronesis in the age of AI.
"You cannot will your way to energy security by subtracting your most reliable zero-carbon source."
Vermont shut down its power and now pays among the highest rates in the country. A case for next-generation nuclear and the data centers the AI boom is hunting for sites to build.
"Constraints that keep AI from doing your thinking."
Seven cognitive instruments built on one principle: no cognitive offloading. Socrates, Devil's Advocate, Steel Man, Box-Breaker, Professor, Librarian, Editor. Install in Claude Code, or copy-paste anywhere.
"Slow reading isn't resistance. It's capitulation."
Why we need athletic theory in reading pedagogy. Your brain is a muscle. Train it.
"The point was never the answers. It was always the journey."
AI didn't kill the humanities. It arrived to find a discipline already hollowed out.
"Thinking partners, not thinking replacements."
The copy-paste versions of Scholar Modes. Turn any AI into Socrates, Devil's Advocate, Steel Man, Box-Breaker, Professor, Librarian, or Editor.
For thirty years I've taught in the humanities... Homer and Greek tragedy, Joyce and Woolf. Over that span, something has unmistakably deteriorated. I used to assign Greek tragedy at a play a day. Now it's a play a week.
The dominant response has been elegiac. We mourn attention spans and romanticize slow reading. But slow reading isn't resistance... it's capitulation. Big books require velocity: sustained forward motion inside complexity without fatigue.
These tools are pedagogy, not product. I'm giving most of them away because the protocols I developed to help my students should be available to anyone willing to train.
— Professor of Literary Studies, The New School. Former Yale. Ultramarathon runner.
The big books aren't going anywhere.It's time we finished them.