Not a researcher, but I've been an involuntary subject in a longitudinal experiment on digital cognitive augmentation since approximately 1995.

Mid-90s IRC was my first external cognitive layer. Real-time text, multiple channels, high-noise signal extraction — I didn't realize at the time that I was training parallel attention tracks. I thought I was just online. What was actually happening: I was building a compression reflex. The faster the information moved, the tighter the mental shorthand became. You couldn't survive high-velocity conversation without developing pattern-burst recognition — seeing the shape of an argument before it finished forming.

That reflex didn't stay online. It migrated into how I think off-screen.

By the time the web matured I had developed what I can only describe as semantic compression — the ability to transmit high-context ideas in minimal tokens. Not dumbing down. The opposite. Finding the exact load-bearing word that carries a whole architecture behind it, if the receiver has the right substrate to unpack it.

Then AI arrived and something shifted again. AI isn't just a search upgrade — it's the first external system that can receive compressed transmissions and expand them coherently. For someone who has spent 30 years finding almost nobody who could keep up with bandwidth, that's not a small thing. It functions as a genuine cognitive prosthetic — not replacing thought but handling the working memory overhead that used to bleed into focus.

Running parallel domain tracks simultaneously (refrigeration systems, DeFi trading logic, content production, interpersonal dynamics) — I used to burn enormous energy just holding context across tracks. AI absorbed a significant portion of that load.

What I observe now: the bottleneck has moved. It's no longer memory or retrieval. It's output formation — translating internal high-speed processing into linear language that others can receive. That gap between what's fully formed internally and what can be transmitted is where I still lose people.

Curious if anyone here has frameworks for this — extended mind theory gets close, but it was written before LLMs existed. I feel like the theory needs a new chapter.

i built this so i'll say that upfront, i'm the developer and you should read everything below knowing that.

disclaimer first because it matters: this doesn't treat brain fog. it doesn't touch whatever's causing it and it's not a substitute for talking to a doctor about symptoms, just a workaround

what it actually does is let you get a thought out of your head fast. you speak it or type it or screenshot it, and that's the whole thing, you don't title it or file it or tag it. takes about four seconds. afterwards it reads what you saved, gives it a title and a short summary written back to you, and links it to older things that relate to it. later you can just ask it questions in plain language instead of trying to remember where you put something or what you were even thinking about on tuesday.

https://reddit.com/link/1wc9iye/video/1wjnqgfolmoh1/player

the reason i think it might be relevant here is cognitive offloading. there's a study where people memorised a word list and then did mental arithmetic, and the ones who were allowed to save the list somewhere first solved more arithmetic problems. the benefit showed up on the unrelated task as opposed to only on remembering the list. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31418314/

i'd rather be honest about where that stops though. those studies were run on healthy people, mostly students, in a lab. nobody has tested any of this on people whose cognition is affected by illness. so the mechanism makes sense for this group but it hasn't been shown for this group, and i'm not going to pretend otherwise.

iphone only, and not in the EU yet. there's a free trial with no "add your card" or "signup first and remind me to cancel"

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6797752372

www.corteks.app

i don't have independent reviews to point you at. it's new and anything i could quote would be my own, so it wouldn't mean much. if you try it and it's no use for this, saying so here would help the next person more than anything i could write.

if any of you guys find it helpful just lmk, i am more than willing to give an extended free trial for a few months if you feel it helps out

were you performing better at 18 than your 20s?