How the Mind Constructs Reality
Examine the internal architecture behind how your brain processes, stores, and distorts the world around you. Move past basic psychological terms to understand the mechanics of attention, working memory limits, reconstructive recall, and heuristic decision-making.
Like Duolingo, but for How the Mind Constructs Reality. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Managing Attention and Processing Bandwidth and Debugging Memory and Decision Architecture. It assumes you already know the basics.
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Key ideas in How the Mind Constructs Reality
- Selective attention filters out the semantic meaning of unattended auditory streams
- Low-level sensory features like pitch or volume pass through the attentional filter
- Listeners typically fail to notice foreign languages or repeated words in an ignored ear
- Visual perception relies on sparse representations focused only on attended elements
- The brain fabricates an illusion of full detail by sampling the external scene on demand
- Major visual changes go unnoticed across brief flickers or saccades without directed focus
- Isolated primitive features like color or shape are registered preattentively across the visual field
- Conjunction searches require focused spatial attention to bind multiple distinct features to an object
- Overloading attention causes illusory conjunctions, where features from different objects miscombine
- Bottom-up capture is triggered by high sensory salience, sudden onsets, and abrupt motion
- Top-down attention guides focus toward task-relevant features based on current intentions
- Abrupt visual onsets override top-down visual search templates by drawing exogenous attention
- Dividing attention across complex cognitive tasks produces measurable switching costs
- The cognitive system rapidly toggles mental task sets rather than running parallel processing
- Reconfiguring cognitive rules on each switch incurs a time penalty and increases error rates
- Verbal rehearsal and auditory processing compete exclusively within the phonological loop.
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives How the Mind Constructs Reality the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
If you focus on one conversation in a loud room, what change in background noise will you still easily catch?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where How the Mind Constructs Reality takes you
- 1
Managing Attention and Processing Bandwidth
- Auditing Attentional Bottlenecks and Perceptual Blindness
- Working Memory Architecture and Cognitive Load
- 2
Debugging Memory and Decision Architecture
- Reconstructive Memory and Predictive Storage
- Dual-Process Reasoning and Heuristic Overrides
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
How the Mind Constructs Reality is taught in the Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start How the Mind Constructs Reality today.
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