ESSAYS

Original research and thinking on human development

  • Neurodivergence: Responsibility and Opportunity

    Clinical meaning, personal responsibility, and the practice of deliberate skill.

    Neurodivergence isn’t an excuse, identity, or diagnosis; it’s an umbrella term that matters only when it points toward action. Diagnosis is pursued when symptoms are intense, persistent, and impair daily functioning enough to warrant support. From there the real work begins: stabilizing wellbeing through strategies that make executive skills reliable, often by externalizing the brain into cues, routines, and community.

    By Milo de Prieto

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  • Cultivating Our Cognitive Advantage

    Part 1 – Coherence: Humankind's Advantage and Developmental Imperative

    Humans are not unique in intelligence or cooperation, what is distinctive is how these evolved in our biology: language, metacognition, and the capacity to model reality, revise beliefs, and coordinate at scale. Our challenge is integrating our impulses. Coherence is the trainable coordination of many signals across time, shaped through executive function and social scaffolding into stable, adaptive capability.

    By Milo de Prieto

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  • The Process & Purpose of Purpose

    The Process & Purpose of Purpose

    How the brain composes meaning and why you should participate in the process

    Meaning doesn’t arrive fully formed. It’s composed—moment by moment—by a brain that ranks relevance, encodes emotion, and acts before you’re aware it has chosen a direction. This essay explores how purpose actually emerges, why instinct feels like truth, and what becomes possible when you consciously participate in the process instead of mistaking the map for reality.

    By Milo de Prieto

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  • Rethinking Maslow

    Rethinking Maslow

    Breaking with a hierarchy of scarcity to cultivate neuroecological abundance.

    Maslow’s famous pyramid positions personal meaning as the last stage of a hierarchy of priorities. Neuroscience shows something very different. The brain is a living ecosystem where purpose, connection, and creativity are daily requirements, not luxuries. When we stop climbing a hierarchy of scarcity and start tending our internal ecology, wellbeing becomes generative rather than conditional.

    By Milo de Prieto

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TOP TOPICS

An illustration of a tree showing its roots, trunk, branches, and leaves in harmony with its surroundings of sun, soil, water, and air to illustrate that the brain is an ecosystem, not a machine or computer.

Neuroecology

An illustration of city full of people where the buildings are part tall trees and part stone, metal, and glass to illustrate how society can live and evolve as an ecosystem. The people joyfully living in diverse community.

Quality of Life for All Life

An illustration of a woman (an every person) navigating a schooner by the stars to demonstrate the capacity to connect your cognitive identity and purpose to your work and living.

Cognitive Identity

ASD

ADHD

Human Development & Evolution