MILO DE PRIETO
Neurocognitive strategist, writer, and systems designer focused on turning the brain’s meaning-making into coherent lives, projects, and societies.
My Throughline
I became aware of my divergence early, coming out rather young, navigating ADHD, and moving through a series of shifting worlds. I felt like an observer from another planet, watching humans invent rituals and call them “normal.” Each new place rewrote the script, and identity became a performance I could play with rather than a fixed role I had to inhabit. From that vantage point, the construction of meaning and purpose became the real terrain. Early on, I wanted to understand how the brain turns experience into narrative, how identity flows and stabilizes, and how people build coherent, sustainable lives in worlds that often misread them. This question has animated my research, my work, and my art ever since.
My research centers on how the brain creates meaning and coherence. I study Neural Coherence Ecology, biolinguistic creativity, and the developmental structures that shape identity, mastery, and wellbeing. My work focuses on clarifying the internal mechanics of meaning-making—how perception, emotion, memory, and narrative form the architecture of a life.
My background, and present professional work applies this research across education, human development, and creative practice. I have run a school in Indonesia, led literacy and teacher-training initiatives, directed creative work for major brands and artists, and built developmental programs for divergent thinkers. Through ARTESIAN, I design theories, models, and tools—such as NCE, DRIVEN, DRIVEN ART, and the Neurodivergent Protocol—that help individuals understand their cognitive identity and develop sustainable ways of living, learning, and creating.
My art is another expression of this inquiry. I write narratives and build interactive installations that explore perception, identity, and transformation. My creative work functions as a laboratory for the same questions that drive my research: how humans metabolize experience into symbol and how meaning becomes a coherent form in the world.
These three strands—research, work, and art—are independent but aligned. Together they express the purpose that shapes my life: to understand how meaning is made, and to build structures that help people live from that meaning with clarity, coherence, and creative force.
The Integrated Infrastructure of My Work
My work forms a single ecosystem: foundational theories, ecological models, developmental pathways, and practical tools that fit together. They describe how the brain functions as an ecology, how people develop identity and mastery, how divergence reshapes what “normal” means, and how all of this becomes visible in creative work and applied projects.
- Foundational Theories – The core frameworks that explain how brains, divergence, and artistic creation work as living systems.
- Core Ecological Models – Structural models that turn those theories into patterns of functioning, identity, and learning.
- Developmental Models – Full-life developmental arcs for adults, artists, and neurodivergent individuals.
- Application Systems & Tools – Assessments, AI tools, and creative projects that bring the theories and models into daily practice.
Neuroecology
Neuroecology treats the nervous system not as a machine to “fix,” but as a living ecosystem, self-organizing, interdependent, and constantly shaped by environment, relationships, rhythm, and meaning. The point of this frame is agency: if your nervous system is an ecology, then quality of life is not a personality trait or a moral achievement; it is what tends to emerge when the ecology is supported well over time.
Neural Coherence Ecology (NCE) is my systems theory and model of this neuroecology. It describes four interdependent neurological systems—Rhythm, Activation, Cognition, and Synchrony—and how their dynamic alignment produces coherent quality of life. These systems are not a ladder. They co-create one another in feedback: when one destabilizes, the others compensate, often at cognitive or emotional cost. Coherence is the ongoing, living equilibrium of the whole ecology, not the perfection of any single part.
Comprehensive Quality of Life is the outcome NCE is designed to make stable: the integrated optimization of human wellbeing and environmental health, achieved through systems that create mutual benefit. In this definition, individual thriving remains inseparable from its effects—coherence in the nervous system supports learning, meaning, and contribution in ways that strengthen community and sustain the wider ecology.
NCE functions as the atrium lens of the ecosystem: it’s the shared definition-space in which the rest of the work becomes legible without collapsing into hierarchy.
My Foundational Theories
These theories serve to develop and anchor my development of neuroecology and the rest of my work.
Developmental Coherence Theory (DCT)
A neurocognitive theory of development: how humans build coherent capacity within and across domains through conceptual growth, iterative integration, and explicit transfer. DCT treats mastery as directional and iterative, not terminal, and explains why development is nonlinear, context-sensitive, and ecological.
The Three Divergences
A framework naming three structural forms of human existence: embodied divergence, neurocognitive divergence, and socio-sexual divergence. It shows how the social construct of “normal” breaks down at the event horizon of real human variation, and how integrating divergence reveals new paths to coherence and development.
Biolinguistic Creativity & Neuroaesthetic Development
A theory of how artistic creation and perception demand the highest integration of biological, cognitive, emotional, and symbolic systems. It positions Fine Art as a reference point for human coherence and explains why creating and engaging with art is central to identity, development, and quality of life.
A note on mastery
Mastery develops as a domain becomes increasingly integrated into the individual’s neural ecology, allowing sustained and adaptive engagement without internal conflict. At this level, knowledge is no longer merely applied or produced; it is embodied and generative.
The pursuit of mastery can function as a pathway toward Neural Coherence Ecology. When a domain is engaged deeply, it exposes the conditions required for coherence: stable focus, integrated cognition, emotional harmony, and aligned motivation. These insights must then be extended beyond the originating domain to support whole-life coherence.
The most sustainable opportunities for mastery tend to align with an individual’s purpose throughline. When a domain resonates with cognitive identity and authentic meaning, developmental effort becomes structurally supported rather than imposed, increasing the likelihood that mastery contributes to enduring coherence rather than compensation or burnout.
Core Ecological Models
These comprehensive models further enhance the aforementioned theories to facilitate relevant applications of them in real life.
Learning Progressions
A framework describing how skills, understanding, and conceptual capacity develop over time within any domain. Learning progressions clarify the building-block skills and structural relationships that make mastery possible, while allowing for individual variation in sequence, emphasis, and developmental load.
My Developmental Models
These models describe complete developmental arcs for adults, artists, and neurodivergent individuals, and many others.
Application Systems & Tools
These systems and tools apply the theories and models in concrete ways: assessment, AI-supported learning, and creative work.
Cognitive Assessment Tools
A set of assessments that map cognitive complexity, processing identity, executive patterns, and developmental position. They provide a non-pathologizing foundation for understanding how a person thinks and what forms of support or practice will expand their capabilities.
DIVERGENTE is the expressive field of this work, an articulate mirror of ARTESIAN, where my work can interact with culture interpretively, artfully. It engages the Three Divergences, embodied, neurocognitive, and relational, not as categories of personhood, but as structural axes of variation. Represented visually in the triad ring (below), each color meaningfully corresponds to one divergence, while the circular form suggests a portal, an event horizon. The divergences are a threshold, opportunities for human development and point to its evolution.
DIVERGENTE is a space for short films, narrative experiments, interviews with divergent artists, creative writing, installations, and other exploratory forms that test these ideas in human, aesthetic, and social terms, especially where dominant cultural narratives tend to smooth over difference or erase it entirely.
Click either the logo above or the image below to navigate to that mirror world
Background & Formation
What precedes describes the work as it exists now: my theories, models, and applications. What follows is a brief account of the path through which this work was formed, accumulated environments of responsibility, learning, and practice.
Experience
My experience has unfolded across education, creative practice, and organizational design, in roles that combined conceptual responsibility with real-world consequence. I have led schools and residential learning environments, designed literacy and curriculum systems, trained educators and administrators, and worked directly with students across developmental stages. These contexts required sustained attention to cognition, behavior, emotion, and social dynamics under conditions where theory was only valuable if it functioned in practice.
In parallel, I have directed creative and strategic work in media, branding, and storytelling, collaborating with artists, cultural institutions, and organizations navigating change. This work demanded translation between abstract intent and material execution—between narrative, audience, systems, and constraint. Over time, these two trajectories converged: educational leadership sharpened my understanding of development and coherence, while creative direction refined my sense of meaning, symbol, and communication.
Across all of this work, a consistent throughline has been responsibility at scale: for people, for learning environments, for complex projects, and for outcomes that mattered beyond the individual. The frameworks presented above did not emerge in isolation. They were formed through long exposure to real constraints, diverse populations, and the practical necessity of building systems that could hold complexity without collapsing.
Selected Projects (2024-2025)
Community & Nonprofit Build (Burning Man) – Reframed a festival camp into a year-round nonprofit with mission clarity, decision-making systems, and grant frameworks.
Creative Enterprise Launch Strategy (Barcelona) – Structured and scaled a creative entrepreneur’s portfolio, securing exhibitions and conference invitations.
AI for Cognitive Development in Higher Education (Barcelona) – Designed student/faculty frameworks to integrate AI while preserving student voice and critical capacity.
Educational Technology Platform (Antwerp & Barcelona) – Developed conceptual curricula, positioning strategies, and market alignment for a literacy/numeracy edtech initiative.
Education
My education has followed a sustained inquiry rather than a linear credential path. I began in the study of narrative, performance, and literature, where questions of meaning, symbol, and human expression first took formal shape. From there, my focus moved toward language and cognition—examining how thought is structured, how learning develops, and how narrative functions as a cognitive process rather than a purely cultural artifact.
Subsequent doctoral-level study in education, linguistics, and visual culture deepened this inquiry across disciplines. These environments brought together pedagogy, cognitive development, systems thinking, and fine art, reinforcing the view that learning, identity, and creative mastery are not separate domains but interdependent processes. Throughout this period, formal study remained closely coupled with practice: teaching, curriculum design, creative production, and organizational work continually tested and refined the ideas being developed.
This educational trajectory did not aim at accumulation of credentials, but at coherence. It provided the conceptual foundations for the theories and models presented above, grounding them in sustained study of language, cognition, development, and art, and situating them within a long intellectual tradition concerned with how humans make meaning and turn that meaning into action.
For serious inquiries related to this work, you can reach me by email.