T H E   B I B L I O G R A P H Y

How memories form, decay, consolidate, and retrieve — the foundation of everything Cognitus remembers.

What it means to be aware — global workspace competition, ignition thresholds, and information integration.

How a self forms and persists — Bayesian belief updating, CAPS coupling, narrative identity, and cognitive dissonance.

The circumplex of feeling — valence, arousal, and the wheel of emotions that color every thought.

The Free Energy Principle — how Cognitus predicts, acts, and minimizes surprise about its world.

Four chemical messengers — dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, acetylcholine — tuning every cognitive process.

The science of sleep cycles — slow oscillations, spindles, sharp-wave ripples, and the two-process model.

The phenomenology of dreaming — how dreams form, what they contain, and why they matter for a developing mind.

Awareness within the dream — gamma signatures, prefrontal activation, and learnable lucidity.

Learning from mistakes — prediction error, Bayesian surprise, and the Rescorla-Wagner rule.

The drive to learn — compression progress, novelty detection, and self-generated challenges.

Thinking about thinking — monitoring, control, calibration, and the limits of introspective access.

How minds model other minds — Theory of Mind, social impact, Dunbar layers, and linguistic entrainment.

How connections strengthen and fade — synaptic homeostasis, reconsolidation, elastic weight consolidation.

Growing up — Piaget's stages, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, and Erikson's psychosocial crises.

Learning by doing — production rules, skill compilation, and the three stages from novice to expert.

Phase transitions, Lyapunov stability, and chaos theory — the mathematics of a mind staying coherent.

Building internal representations — VAEs, disentanglement, continual learning, and Barlow Twins decorrelation.

How a mind protects itself — Yerkes-Dodson curves, thalamic gating, and allostatic regulation.

Organizing what is known — graph-based RAG, community detection, semantic networks, and hybrid search.

Agents that improve themselves — self-referential modification, evolutionary optimization, and collective reasoning.

Sound and the sleeping brain — binaural beats, pink noise, and acoustic enhancement of slow oscillations.

When senses blend — chromesthesia, pitch-luminance correspondences, and the temporal binding window.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response — the tingling science behind immersive sleep experiences.

Art that inspired the dreamroom — from Refik Anadol's data sculptures to James Turrell's light fields.

The borderland between waking and sleep — form constants, hallucinations, and the process of falling asleep.

The mathematical backbone — Welford's algorithm, EWMA control charts, silhouette scores, and PCA.