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 an improvisation 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 compose 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 the structures that help people live from that meaning with clarity, coherence, and creative force. The page that follows draws this throughline through the body of work itself.
The Integration of My Work
My work forms a single ecosystem: a central theory of the human being as a coherent internal ecosystem interdependent with an external one, three Stewardship Domains through which that ecosystem can be understood and tended, and two companion theoretical inquiries that together with my creative work form the second half of my doctoral research. The sections that follow describe each in turn.
- Neural Coherence Ecology — the central theory. The human being as a coherent internal ecosystem, sustained by the ongoing living alignment of four interdependent Infrastructures.
- The Stewardship Domains — Functional Coherence, Developmental Coherence, and Social Coherence. Each a theory and model in its own right; each the same ecosystem entered at a different vantage.
- Biolinguistic Creativity and The Three Divergences — companion theoretical work that bridges the scientific and artistic dimensions of the research, and forms one half of the doctoral dissertation.
- DIVERGENTE and The Coherence Athenaeum — the artistic and phenomenological expression of the same inquiry NCE pursues scientifically. Together they form the other half of the doctoral dissertation.
The operational systems and applied programs that emerge from this research — Story Builder, the Neurodivergent Protocol, the Purpose Profile, DRIVEN, and DRIVEN ART — are described in full through these links and introduced on the Ecology page.
Neural Coherence Ecology
The Central Theory and Model of All that Follows
Neural Coherence Ecology approaches the human being through an unromanticized lens, taking the organism as it actually is and accounting for its complexity without posing a purpose for the whole. The processes collected under the name evolution have no design and no goal: configurations that hold are retained, and persistently unstable ones do not persist. The human configuration is stable, and the evidence of that stability is that it persists. That is the ground of the theory, and what follows from it is that the clues to the organism’s wellbeing and its stewardship are evident within its own biology. We grant as much to other species and their ecosystems readily, and oddly withhold it from ourselves.
Rather than treat the human being as a machine or a computer, NCE treats the individual as an internal ecosystem, interdependent with an external ecosystem, society. That interdependence is not an addition to the organism. Higher-level cognition matures only inside a social environment capable of sustained feedback, correction, modeling, and shared attention, which is why society is a biological imperative rather than a setting the human being happens to occupy: without it, a person could not survive a maturation that long, much less benefit from the shared knowledge and instruction that maturing cognition requires. Once matured, cognition depends on the coherence of the ecosystem it operates in. Where that ecosystem extracts rather than exchanges, the capacity the long maturation afforded may itself become a liability to wellbeing.
NCE describes the internal ecosystem across four interdependent Infrastructures: Rhythm, Activation, Patterning, and Synchrony. None of them operates alone, and none is prior to the others. Coherence is the ongoing living alignment of the four under real conditions, sustained through pattern and tending over time; it is the work and not a condition arrived at. What that work sustains is wellbeing, which this framework uses as a synonym for organism-wide homeostasis: the baseline of stable operation across the whole human being, which for a species with higher-level cognition includes its capacity for development and its interdependence with others. Wellbeing so defined is neither the absence of dysfunction nor a subjective report.
Coherence is never complete and never static, and the human being is the one who carries responsibility for tending it, as a gardener carries responsibility for a garden they do not control. Each Infrastructure is described in full, with the conditions it requires and what follows from their sustained absence, on the Ecology page.
Why Infrastructure
The term infrastructure is used deliberately so that it can carry the formed organic structures and networks of the human being together with their uses and the processes they afford. Where architecture describes a static form, infrastructure evokes networks under continuous load, which is what allows a single organic element to participate in several operations at once and establishes the interdependency between them.
Architecture is rejected as immediately too rigid and constrained, and even within that domain, one party’s ceiling is another’s floor. Mechanism is rejected in its machine sense, which is both deterministic and rejected outright by the dynamic existence of biology. There are no machines in the internal ecosystem of the human being.
Throughout, cognition is treated as a biological property of the whole organism rather than a faculty layered onto it, which is why none of the four is confined to the cortex and why interoceptive and metabolic participation appears in more than one of them. The boundaries between the Infrastructures are conceptual, drawn for clear academic analysis and not meant to be absolute; in actual practice all four are seamlessly and simultaneously interdependent by nature.
Stability Without Design
Evolution names a collection of processes and events that operate in time and tend to be linked to location. It is not a thing and it is not an agent. Nothing described in this framework evolved for a purpose, was meant to do anything, or reached its present form because prior conditions guaranteed it. Where the work describes an Infrastructure’s contribution to coherence, it describes a process and its consequences, not an intention.
What can be claimed is narrower and more useful. Complexity is not destined, but it is common in any system where different configurations are tested and the ones that work, for stability, for reproduction, are kept. Existence is not a hoarder. Complexity accumulates where it holds.
Two things follow. The first is that such a process can have no terminus, no goal, and no endgame; testing does not conclude. The second is that what persists is what proved stable, because persistently unstable systems do not persist. This is the entire basis of the coherence claim. The human being is treated here as a coherent, interdependent ecosystem not because anything designed it as one, but because the long feedback loop that produced it retains only what functions. We make sense because we derive from a process that keeps what works, including the reason with which we examine it.
The absence of a plan does not imply the absence of an optimal state. There is a range of conditions under which this system functions well, and that range is discoverable. The lack of a design also means there is no mistake to be corrected, as there was no design that was deviated from.
If any absolute is to be inferred from an existence of this kind, it lies between stewardship and abuse. Abuse undermines stability and optimal function. Stewardship, an accurate accounting of actual capacity, actual need, and the actual environment, seeks the conditions under which the system can function well and continue to develop.
Within a single organism, abuse takes the characteristic form of setting one part against another. Where a current of the organism is positioned as requiring control, it has already been defined as something that would otherwise go elsewhere, and the person and the current then stand on opposite sides of the same being. What accurate accounting affords instead is a coherent relation among the parts, in which none is set against another. The alternative to subjugation is a relation that does not require control, rather than a gentler exercise of it.
None of this is a romantic position. The terminology of gardens and ecosystems invites the misreading that tending means deference, letting nature take its course. It does not. Reading the clues the organism gives requires an honest appraisal of the particular reality one is actually in, not a romanticized account of what human existence would be if left alone. Human responsibility is therefore crucial, and so is human innovation, including pharmacology and technology. These are tools, neither redemptive nor inherently corrupting: instruments applied to a particular situation by someone accountable for the result.
Three Constraints
The framework binds itself to three constraints. These are rules rather than positions. Each can rule something out, and where an application fails one of them the application is wrong, whatever its theoretical merit.
The Biological-Link Constraint
Affection, sex, affirmation, and comparable domains belong to homeostasis only insofar as they can be traced directly to biological homeostasis. Domains for which no such link has been established are excluded deliberately. Homeostasis is a biological status and process, and admitting culturally defined domains would define it through a cultural lens rather than on the more transcendent ground the definition requires.
The Practicability Constraint
Anything this framework asks a person to do for themselves must be practicable by that person at any stage of life, under the conditions they are actually in, without specialist knowledge, elite resources, or stability they do not currently have. Where a protocol requires expertise, income, or circumstances the person lacks, it does not meet the standard for self-directed practice, whatever its theoretical merit. Facilitated and professional applications are held to a separate standard and must say so.
The Distinct Ecosystems Constraint
A society is not an organism. It is a distinct ecosystem with which the internal ecosystem of the individual is interdependent. The individual ecology is an organism; the social ecology contains organisms and is not one, which is the difference between them and is not a difference of scale. Conflating the two reduces the necessary complexity of either, and it licenses abuse in the specific sense this framework gives that term, since a society described as having needs of its own can be said to require sacrifices from the individuals composing it. No term is denied to society by this constraint. What is denied is the unstated transfer.
NCE is addressed through three Stewardship Domains, described next. They are not sub-systems of it. They are distinct ways of entering the same living ecosystem, each with its own stewardable operations, each in constant exchange with the others because the ecosystem they describe is one.
The Stewardship Domains
Three Ways into One Ecosystem
Neural Coherence Ecology is addressed through three distinct domains that are simultaneously contained within NCE and developments of it. NCE supplies the description they work from, and each is at the same time contained within the cohesive implications of the base theory. Each describes the reach of coherence into domains particularly relevant to human being and existence.
They are called Stewardship Domains because each names what can actually be tended at its scale. They are not components of the model of the four Infrastructures and they do not divide those Infrastructures between them. Nor are they layers to be worked through in sequence. Each is a way into one ecosystem, which is why a single element appears in all three: rhythm is a daily operating condition in Functional Coherence, something that matures and is refined in Developmental Coherence, and something a society either protects or erodes in Social Coherence.
Each domain requires individual responsibility and collective conditions together, and none of the three is possible in isolation. Functional Coherence rests with the individual and is nonetheless conditioned by environment and social operation throughout. Developmental Coherence depends on instruction, shared knowledge, and community, and has no solitary version. Social Coherence is the most visibly collective, and is still tended by individuals acting within it. What differs across the three is the distribution, not the interdependence.
Responsibility, Not Control
In each domain, the steward has responsibility and not control. The pair is the framework’s moral demarcation put into operation: responsibility is stewardship in operation and control is abuse in operation. It is understood as in tending a garden, restoring an ecology, or raising a child.
Responsibility requires humble, respectful vigilance and action to maintain homeostasis across the environment, for all of it. It is methodical, present work that builds stable value over time. It admits no winner-takes-all option and no magic bullet.
Control is the attempt to force a result, akin to forcing the petals of a flower open. It produces short-term superficial benefit and long-term damage. In this framework, resort to control is evidence of executive function collapse: stress has overtaken the system, and the one who should be stewarding is acting from fear.
The self-conscious being has responsibility but not control in the strict sense.
Tending is the ongoing practice of shaping conditions so the neural ecology can sustain coherence: protecting rhythms, calibrating activation, reducing unnecessary cognitive load, strengthening meaning-making, and cultivating synchrony in relationships and environments. Continuous, because the ecology is continuous. The term invokes cultivation rather than correction, and is not self-care in any popular sense.
Tending requires no specialist knowledge to practice. A gardener can rarely articulate the reason for each action taken, and still produces results through sustained attention to the particular garden. Coherence must be practicable on the same terms.
Functional Coherence Theory and Model
The operational model of NCE: the practical coordination of Focus, Cognition, Emotion, and Drive such that a person can sustain adaptive life participation over time, under real conditions. It describes what the four Functions do, what each requires to do it, and what happens across the others when one of them is carrying more than it can. Each is described in both its baseline form and its refined expression, and the refined expression names both the condition and the practice that cultivates it. The four are set out in full on the Ecology page.
The Functions are not a second account of the four Infrastructures and do not correspond to them. The two sets are accounts of the same organism arrived at by different methods, one constitutive and one operational. NCE borrows multifunctionality from the science of ecosystem ecology and expands it bidirectionally: each Infrastructure participates in multiple Functions and each Function is performed by multiple Infrastructures. No Function is performed by a single Infrastructure, and no Infrastructure participates in a single Function. Regardless of the similarities in the names, such as the Cognition Function and the Infrastructure of Cognitive Patterning, there is absolutely no one-to-one correspondence between the sets.
The domain is where the work is most legible, because the Functions are what a person actually notices and can attend to.
Executive Function
Used in its established neuropsychological sense: the set of cognitive control processes that regulate goal-directed behavior, among them inhibition, self-monitoring, cognitive flexibility, emotional management, task initiation, working memory, planning and prioritizing, organization, and goal-directed persistence. It is not redefined here.
Executive function collapse is the condition in which higher-level cognition is conscripted by threat response. The stable operating relationship, in which higher-level cognition works with the affective and physiological signal reaching it, inverts under stress, and reason comes to serve fear rather than the reverse.
Collapse is assessed through observable reasoning and patterns of action and reaction. A calm, fluent, well-reasoned defense of an incoherent position is not evidence against collapse; where the expression is performative, the performance is itself part of the threat response. A temper tantrum or meltdown is not required to signal collapse. The diagnostic evidence is in the thinking and its results: narrowed solution space, failure to update against consequences, inflexibility maintained in the face of contrary evidence.
Harmony, Not Regulation
Harmony is one of several terms used in place of regulation, which implies top-down control over an undesirable state. It does its heaviest work in the Emotion Function’s refined expression as Emotional Harmony. Elsewhere other wording is more accurate to what is being described, and the refined expressions of the other three Functions use their own: Focus Navigation, Cognitive Composition, Drive Alignment. The tended state of the Emotional Activation and Modulation Infrastructure is Equanimity, named separately so that no term is shared across the Infrastructures and the Functions.
Harmony’s work is to describe dynamic, cooperative, flexible functioning without importing control, correction, or a rigid setpoint. Framing the goal this way also reduces the shame attached to a perceived failure to regulate, which is especially relevant to the neurodivergent. And unlike high-effort discipline, which is effective only in short bursts, it is available to any individual with a living brain, whatever their circumstances.
Neurodivergence as Proving Ground
Neurodivergence is an umbrella term for developmental differences, including ASD/ASC, ADHD/ADHC, and certain learning profiles, called developmental because the brain formed along a trajectory that differs from the modal one. It is a structural description of variation, not a diagnosis, an identity, or a badge. Neurodivergence becomes clinically significant when variation crosses thresholds of continuity, intensity, and impairment, at which point a specific diagnosis applies; the underlying diversity is broader than any label.
Within this framework, neurodivergence serves as the high-resolution test environment for Functional Coherence, because patterns of incoherence are amplified, compensation is more visible, and intervention effects are easier to validate or falsify. Conditions that hold under that degree of variability tend to hold more generally. The aim is not to confine Functional Coherence to neurodivergence but to use it as a proving ground before generalizing, which is what the Neurodivergent Protocol does directly.
Developmental Coherence Theory and Model
The domain concerned with how the human ecosystem develops across a life: how it matures into its operating capacity, how those capacities are refined against real conditions, and how particular capacities are cultivated into specialized form. Development here is the organization of complexity into coherence through iterative integration, reorganization, and transfer. It is not a staircase. Capacity is reorganized as often as it is added, and there is no state of having arrived.
Its three dimensions, maturation, growth, and extension, are interactive rather than sequential, and the same activity can belong to different dimensions depending on what it is doing in that person’s life. Extension’s deepest expression is mastery, understood broadly rather than as a single condition: functional aptitude, certified competence, and Coherence Mastery, the integration of a domain into the individual’s neural ecology, where engagement is sustained, adaptive, and generative. The three forms are not stages and not a hierarchy. All of this is set out in full on the Ecology page.
The opposite of development in this sense is not stability but stagnation.
Mastery Progression Theory and Model
A theory and model in its own right within Developmental Coherence: domain-specific maps of how capability tends to develop, including prerequisite concepts, key procedural skills, likely bottlenecks, and options for scaffolding without assuming uniform sequence. It is influenced by dynamic systems theory, and it is the reconception of what the science of reading calls learning progressions.
It is not a progression through the three forms of mastery, which are not a progression at all. The maps describe how capability tends to develop within a domain; which form of mastery a person is working toward is a separate question, answered by their purpose and their context.
The Mastery Taxonomy
Within Mastery Progression is a taxonomy rather than a fixed ladder. Maps can mark the landmarks of a domain to be learned, but each learner comes with different experiences, purposes, understandings, and a host of other factors unique to them that substantially affect their journey, changing the climate of the map in real time. A specific learner may traverse some terrain more or less quickly for a variety of reasons, a large portion of which are not a reflection of capacity.
The Mastery Taxonomy is Bloom’s taxonomy enhanced with a further stage referring to Coherence Mastery. It describes a cognitive level of understanding that extends beyond creativity into neurological states such as flow, and represents a level of mastery where a domain is integrated into the individual’s neural ecology, and may contribute to one’s stable wellbeing. This level is typically developed through substantial dedication, the process of which also affords an example of the trajectory of coherence as work and Coherence as a state of being.
Mastery Progression provides the developmental scaffolds of Story Builder, and it informs the developmental structure of DRIVEN and DRIVEN ART.
The Purpose Throughline
The structure by which meaning-making passes into expression: from the predictive modeling that produces a model of reality, through higher-level cognition, through interest, talent, and honed skill, into utterance, action, and made work directed at a particular community. It is as iterative and looped as the predictive modeling at its core. Each expression is tested in exchange with that community, and the return informs the next iteration. Where the passage holds and the individual is aware of it, the result is belonging: expression that resonates, contributes value, and returns value in relevant exchange.
The Throughline spans three Infrastructures and belongs to none of them alone. Meaning-making works through Activation and through Patterning, and expression into a shared social space is the work of Synchrony. The Throughline is the passage and alignment between them. It lives within Developmental Coherence, extending across the forms of development from maturation through the development of unique capacity and its deepest expression in mastery.
Its Biological Link
Admitted to homeostasis under the Biological-Link Constraint, and the trace is direct rather than analogical: higher-level cognition matures and operates only inside a society capable of sustained feedback, so an individual expressing into no community receives none of the return the process requires. The signal goes into a void, as a predictive model denied the input that would confirm or revise it. Purpose is therefore a component of wellbeing and not an addition to it, no less biological than the body for being visible only in its effects.
The Narrative Imperative
The brain’s biological requirement to create meaning, and, in action, the process by which the requirement is met. Sensory input is filtered against what the model expects should be happening. Where input indicates the model needs revision, it is tagged with emotional and motivational weight. Tagged memory is integrated by large-scale cortical networks, the default mode network among them, into schemas and narratives that guide subsequent interpretation. The product is a narrative, and that narrative is the predictive model.
Narrative is the operative word and is not decorative. Predictive models are narratives rather than cold statements of fact: they hold their content in relation to other predictions and larger accounts. The term was coined against the assumption that narrative is a luxury or an interference, the same assumption long made about emotion in relation to reason.
Cognitive Identity
The individual particularity of cognitive patterning: what a person notices as worth predicting, how they extrapolate from it, how the prediction is evaluated against what follows, how conflict between models resolves, how talent is deployed, and how the resulting meaning integrates into a continuing account of self and of the world, and of the two in relation. Experience interacts with it continuously, and what results is a dynamic style of insight and of expression particular to the individual. Developmental rather than fixed: not a preference, not a type, not a trait.
Cognitive Identity is not the realization of a single Infrastructure. Its patterning work belongs to Cognitive Patterning and Integration, while the evaluative weighting by which some input registers as worth revising belongs to Activation and Modulation, and the identity is particular to a person because both are.
Authenticity
The integrity of the alignment between internal meaning and external action, and the name for that alignment holding across the Throughline. Authenticity is a fundamental requirement of coherence rather than a psychological ideal or an aesthetic quality.
When authenticity falters, the return from the community reports on an expression that was not the individual’s own, so the feedback informs a model the individual does not hold. The meaning the process produces does not land, and the sense of stability, belonging, and security essential to homeostasis is undermined. This is precisely why wellbeing does not refer to a subjective report. The sense is subjective, and what it destabilizes is not.
Feedback informs only to the degree that the society returning it is coherent. Where a social ecology extracts rather than exchanges, the return misreports, and absent, distorted, or punitive response is evidence about that ecology rather than about the individual’s alignment. Absent the conditions Social Coherence specifies, the Throughline is obstructed from outside, and the obstruction is not a fault in the person.
Purpose
Purpose is an expression of an individual’s dynamic engagement with the biological imperative of society, their local community. In this framework it is an expression of an essential neurological process necessary for quality of life and development, and the term is used in two senses which describe the same structure at different resolutions.
Formally, purpose is what emerges from the Throughline where expression meets exchange: a continuously revised awareness of one’s own belonging, contribution, and value in relation to a particular community. It is neither the process nor the structure, both of which the Throughline describes, but what that structure produces and then feeds back into, since the awareness conditions the next expression. It is dynamic because every exchange revises it, and particular because it is an account of this person among these people. This is why the failure of feedback is serious rather than merely disappointing. What the missing return would have informed is the person’s account of themselves.
Practically, purpose is the dynamic role an individual occupies in their community, put into a short phrase for working use. The phrase is a handle and not a definition. It hands off to the Throughline the way a title device hands off to the concept beneath it, and it should be treated as the visible portion of a structure it does not contain.
Purpose is not a telos: nothing in the process is directed toward an endpoint, and the process does not conclude. It is not a preassigned function: none is held prior to the process that produces it, and none is issued by anything. It is not an object waiting to be found: the search framing presumes something already formed and located elsewhere, when what is described is a process running now, whose shape becomes legible through attention to it. Common usage supplies all three readings, so the constraints are stated rather than assumed. Purpose acts as a stabilizing attractor, harmonizing cognition with action — attractor in its dynamic-systems sense, a region the system tends toward under its own dynamics, not a target it aims at.
Biolinguistic Creativity
The Neurocognitive Process of Voice and Expression
Biolinguistic Creativity and Neuroaesthetic Development is the first of two companion theoretical inquiries that sit beside NCE and its Stewardship Domains. Together with my creative work, these companions form one half of the doctoral dissertation, the half that addresses the phenomenological and expressive dimensions of meaning-making that the scientific framework alone cannot capture.
The theory describes the biological, cognitive, and symbolic processes that inform unique human meaning-making, creativity, and expression. Its particular interest is the predictive model of meaning-making, the brain’s continuous iteration of its internal model of reality, used as the neurocognitive anchor to identify the origin of individual voice and to follow that voice through to expression. Expression here includes the full range of human utterance, from everyday speech through to the most integrated forms of artistic creation.
The work explores this dynamic process in the domain of Fine Art because Fine Art can be observed more clearly than more diffuse forms of expression, and because it provides a particularly relevant context for studying Coherence Mastery, the integration of a domain into the individual’s neural ecology here, the point at which voice, technique, concept, and expression operate as a single coherent act. Fine Art functions as a crossroads where many essential elements converge at maximum integration, including the Three Divergences, the predictive modeling dynamics, and the full developmental arc described in Developmental Coherence. Biolinguistic Creativity is therefore both a theoretical claim and a methodology: the study of creative work gives empirical purchase on how meaning-making actually operates in lived experience.
The Three Divergences
Existences that Facilitate Exploration and Expression
The Three Divergences represents a foundational theory, research field, and resource for creative expression that forms a set of unique embodiments interacting across all three Stewardship Domains. It identifies three structural forms of human existence: embodied divergence, neurocognitive divergence, and socio-sexual divergence. These divergences arise from different substrates of human life: the body, the brain, and the relational-affective system; and each shapes how a person develops, relates, and participates in the world. They are not preferences, surface identities, or deviations from a norm. They are fundamental variations in how human existence is organized, following a deeper physics of existence and development.
Each divergence functions as an event horizon at which the social construct of “normal” breaks down and real human variation becomes visible. When divergence is integrated rather than masked, the individual, their community, and the larger ecosystem all benefit. The Three Divergences forms the second companion theoretical inquiry of the doctoral dissertation, working alongside Biolinguistic Creativity to ground the artistic and phenomenological research in structural claims about how human existence actually varies.
DIVERGENTE is the artistic and phenomenological expression of the same inquiry that NCE pursues scientifically. The other half of the work. Where NCE describes the human being as a coherent internal ecosystem and meaning-making as a neurological process, DIVERGENTE explores what it feels like to live inside that ecosystem through narratives across media. The creative work generates phenomenological material that the science alone cannot access. The theoretical framework gives the creative work structural depth and conceptual precision it would not otherwise have. There is a place for the science and a role for the expression of it in art.
This reciprocal relationship is the structural basis of the doctoral dissertation: NCE and its Stewardship Domains as the scientific dimension, researched through Biolinguistic Creativity and The Three Divergences, which together form the bridge to DIVERGENTE, the artistic and phenomenological dimension.
DIVERGENTE engages the Three Divergences, embodied, neurocognitive, and relational, as structural axes of variation in existence. Represented visually in the triad ring below, each color corresponds to one divergence, while the circular form suggests a portal, an event horizon as a threshold for human development and evolution. The site holds short films, interviews with divergent artists, narrative experiments, creative writing, installations, and other exploratory forms that test these ideas in human, aesthetic, and social terms, particularly where dominant cultural narratives tend to smooth over difference or erase it entirely.
The Coherence Athenaeum is the most comprehensive artistic expression of NCE and all it contains, currently in active development. Where the individual works of DIVERGENTE explore particular dimensions of the inquiry, the Athenaeum is conceived as a traversable environment that renders the body of work as a single living structure: a multiform artistic universe spanning narrative film, digital and physical ergodic literature, sculpture, painting, and prose, with the Codex Scroll as its transversal digital architecture. It is the most ambitious long-term project of the research program and forms a central component of the artistic dimension of the doctoral work.
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. What follows is a brief account of the path through which it was formed: accumulated environments of responsibility, learning, and practice that gave the theoretical work its applied texture. Nothing here was undertaken in order to arrive at a theory. The theory is what the accumulation eventually made appear.
Track Record
The applied work behind these frameworks spans three decades.
Schools. I spent six years at Sekolah Pelita Harapan in Indonesia, entering as a classroom teacher and finishing as Deputy Headmaster of the Sentul campus. In the final years the roles ran concurrently: executive responsibility for an international-standard school with a three-million-dollar operating budget, English curriculum development across both campuses, and management of the residential dormitory. I founded and led a foster-care programme for students whose circumstances required more than standard support but for whom removal was inappropriate, and organized a teacher-training outreach initiative delivering training and resources to village schools across Sumatra, Sulawesi, Java, Lombok, and Bali.
Literacy. From 2002 to 2010, with advisory work continuing to 2015, I consulted for Literacy First — later acquired by Catapult Learning — on literacy across disciplines, K–12 instruction, and teaching for comprehension. The work ran on several tracks at once: developing training curricula and instructional materials, delivering professional development and in-classroom demonstration at teachers’ request, and building evaluative criteria for instructional quality, comprehension demand, and developmental appropriateness. It required precise control of clarity, sequence, language load, and instructional purpose, and it is the longest continuous thread behind the developmental half of the framework.
Media and communication. I produced video journalism for the New York Times Company across the lifestyle vertical from 2008 to 2012 — researching, interviewing, scripting, directing and editing, and working as voice and on-camera talent. Across two decades of independent practice I directed brand and communication work for clients including Tulsa Opera, Porsche, Jaguar, Lexus, Panera Bread, Moët & Chandon, La Caixa, and Bumble, grounded throughout in how audiences actually process, retain, and act on information.
Cultural institution. Through ARTESIAN I have led cultural-sector consulting and institutional development in Barcelona: three warehouse spaces brought from disrepair to fully operational venues using sustainable methods, an EU, Spanish and Catalan grant portfolio written and project-managed to term, a programme of international artist residencies, and exhibition and events programming with social-impact objectives.
Teaching. Associate Professor at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, teaching Video Journalism and TV Journalism. Invited lectures and workshops at Universitat de Barcelona, ESADE, GBSB Global Business School, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, on cognition and identity in brand and business development, video in educational research, and AI as a classroom resource.
Creative Practice
Writing is the primary personal art form — narrative fiction, comedic, dramatic, and performance text — with comedy a particular focus. Its structural logic, and its demands on timing and audience calibration, have informed the professional communication work as much as any formal study. Vicious, a twenty-five-year alter-ego project built around an imaginary cat, is a long-form comedic work developed by accretion of detail, voice, and perspective. The Coherence Society is a series of works, fiction and nonfiction, exploring what a society in coherence would look like.
Film. I have written, directed and produced short films since university, working in digital video from 2000 to the present. hi(ə)r (2013), a dance short made with IT Dansa performers in Barcelona, was an Official Selection at the Dance:Film Shorts Program and the Southwest Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The Traveler (2016) grew out of an intimate hotel-room performance and sits suspended between theatre and cinema. Antoine & Florent (2018) is a documentary short in which two men reflect on how love forms and reshapes a life. La Obra (2020) was made during lockdown. Small Readings, an anthology of shorts on the major arcana of the tarot, is in production. BEST PRACTICES (2013–14) was a five-episode comedic web series satirizing arrogant false expertise in educational settings.
The Very Present Future / Interviews with the DIVERGENTE (2011–present) is a long-form interview series articulated around one question: how is the world better because this person is in it? The interviewer is invisible. The subject speaks directly and uninterrupted to camera while I sit alongside the lens, and three sequenced questions and precise editorial choices remove every trace of the exchange — content that feels unmediated while being tightly architected. A curated collection of thirty-one interviews, of which the DIVERGENTE strand focuses on artists of various divergences, with a particular attention to women and LGBTQ+ artists.
The Naked Sommelier (2018–2022) was a created character, brand, and performance project: a deliberately ignorant anti-sommelier using comedy as a cognitive vehicle to dismantle expert wine jargon and give lay audiences their own language and a relationship of confidence with sensory experience. Its design logic drew on cognition and gastrophysics. It comprised video work toured across Europe and North America, live stand-up wine tastings applying cognitive processes to tasting, five wines designed with applied gastro-psychology, and label design. An Amazon television pilot developed over roughly a year was ended to retain ownership of the creative IP.
Education
My education has followed a sustained inquiry rather than a linear credential path, moving from narrative, performance and literature toward language and cognition, and then through doctoral-level study in education, linguistics, fine arts and visual culture.
Two separate undergraduate degrees from Oral Roberts University: a B.A. in Telecommunication with a concentration in film, theater and radio (1991), enriched by study in theology, art and philosophy; and a second, independent B.A. in Literature (1993), in mythology, fairy tales and creative writing. Postgraduate study in linguistics at Colorado State University, on the cognitive development of language and pedagogy, and in education at Oral Roberts University, on language, writing and pedagogy, completed remotely while teaching in Indonesia.
Doctoral coursework in International Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a University Fellow, under Thomas Popkewitz and James Paul Gee, studying cognition, comprehension, identity construction, game theory and queer theory. Doctoral coursework in Fine Arts and Visual Culture at the Universitat de Barcelona, in the programme Artes Visuales y Educación, un enfoque construccionista, under Fernando Hernández Hernández.
Across all of it, formal study stayed coupled to practice. Teaching, curriculum design, creative production and organizational work continually tested and refined the ideas being developed. The double PhD in Neuroscience and Fine Art commencing autumn 2026 is the formal institutional expression of the research programme described on this page.
For serious inquiries related to this work, you can reach me by email.