# Rants & Musings

> A free, evidence-based publication on the mind, intuition, claims of psychic perception, engineering and innovation, read with scholarly care.

Every essay rates the strength of evidence for its central claim (Well established / Promising / Contested / Not supported) and lists full academic references. Content is free to read and may be quoted with attribution and a link.

Full text of every essay in one file: https://www.wikimonk.com/llms-full.txt

## Mind

Consciousness, perception and the neuroscience of thought.

- [Does the Body Know First?](https://www.wikimonk.com/essays/the-body-knows-first.md): A famous card game suggested our bodies sense danger before our minds do. Thirty years on, the somatic marker hypothesis is still fiercely debated. [Evidence: Contested]

## Intuition

When fast, felt knowing is reliable, and when it misleads.

- [When to Trust a Hunch](https://www.wikimonk.com/essays/when-to-trust-a-hunch.md): Two rival camps in decision science, one built on the failures of intuition and one on its triumphs, found they mostly agree. Here's what they agreed on. [Evidence: Well established]

## Psi & Anomalies

Claims of psychic perception, examined by the standards of science.

- [Feeling the Future, and What Followed](https://www.wikimonk.com/essays/feeling-the-future.md): In 2011 a leading social psychology journal published evidence for precognition. The bigger story was what the failed replications revealed about science itself. [Evidence: Not supported]

## Engineering

Building systems, tools and teams that think better.

- [Engineering the Incubation Break](https://www.wikimonk.com/essays/engineering-the-incubation-break.md): Stepping away from a hard problem really does help. A meta-analysis shows when it helps, and what engineering teams can do with that. [Evidence: Well established]

## Innovation

Insight, creativity and how new ideas actually arrive.

- [Anatomy of an Aha](https://www.wikimonk.com/essays/anatomy-of-an-aha.md): Brain recordings show that sudden insight has its own neural signature, and that the mind prepares for it before the answer arrives. [Evidence: Promising]

## Optional

- [A publication for the hard questions about the mind](https://www.wikimonk.com/about): What The Immeasurable is, and how we handle evidence on the mind, intuition and psychic claims.
- [RSS feed](https://www.wikimonk.com/rss.xml)