Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture

by Ryan A. Bush

We are not as powerless as you may think. With the right cognitive tools, it is possible for anyone to make modifications to their own psychological software: their mind. Our unwanted psychological tendencies really do break down into what can be compared to software algorithms.

These thinkers had the forethought to write their insights down for posterity, and their wisdom, however scattered and diverse, is the open-source code we can use to program our own minds. My long-term goal is to curate and systematize these tools of software self-optimization and distribute them to as many people as possible.

We all want to be happier, healthier, better people. But only a few grasp that all of our highest aims can be reached by placing our focus directly on our minds. If this describes you, you are what we will call a psychitect. You are among a collective of rare individuals who are excited by the idea of overcoming the seemingly fixed parts of themselves. You view the default state of your mind as an invitation to intervene and transmute.

And to begin this process, you won’t have to wait one day for futuristic technology to arrive. You can rewire the default behaviors, emotional responses, and biases that hold you back. You can learn the principles and practices for building a mind better than you ever thought possible, one algorithm at a time. Most importantly, you can internalize a mindset that will allow you to take this process beyond what you read in this book.

I will refer to ideas and techniques which have been viewed through the lens of spirituality. But every mindset and method you find in this work is rational, psychological, and empirical. This book is based on the time-tested insights of ancient thinkers, the science of neuroplasticity, and findings within cognitive, affective, and behavioral science. It looks at the ways ordinary (and extraordinary) people can modify the “software” of their minds to dramatically impact their lives today.

As I studied the human mind, its limitations, and its potential, I found a striking coherence. All the mental problems with which I struggled boiled down to automatic and systematic mental phenomena - chains of triggers and responses, inputs and outputs. More interestingly, the solutions to these problems that worked all fit into the same framework. I labeled these patterns algorithms, and the sum of these algorithms became psychological software. Within this software framework, my mental challenges began to make sense.

I coined the term psychitecture to refer to this practice of designing and optimizing the software of one’s mind. And concurrently with my practice, I was finding more and more evidence within cognitive, affective, and behavioral science that this framework wasn’t just a metaphor.

This discipline has grown beyond my initial sights. Lots of research has confirmed to me that the art of emotion regulation and restructuring is very real and very effective. But the pursuit of self-mastery has further developed to encompass three major components: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral. And the more I reflected on them, the more I realized that these three domains encompass the core competencies required for well-being and success in life.

I am not the spiritual guru or venerated professor you may be seeking. My formal background is in the design of systems - physical, digital, and theoretical. But my most relevant credential is a lifelong appetite for introspective investigation, ravenous reading, and obsessive self-optimization.

My philosophical mentors have included Lao Tzu, Siddhārtha Gautama, Aristotle, Epicurus, Diogenes, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Michel de Montaigne, Rene Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Aaron Beck, and many more.

You can join the community at designingthemind.org to receive more psychitectural insights and to participate in the discussion. This book, and DTM’s growing community of psychitects, represents a living, breathing body of ideas which will continue to take shape over time. I invite you to take part in its evolution.

Every era attempts to explain the human mind in the terms and metaphors of its dominant technologies. For Plato, the mind was a chariot. For Descartes, it was a mechanical clock. For Freud, it was a steam engine. Today, the most common analogue for the mind is the computer.

Healthy people can also utilize technologies and practices to further improve their brains. Your lifestyle behaviors like sleep, diet, and exercise have a massive effect on brain health and function.4 Growing evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation can increase concentration, self-awareness, and overall well-being.

You can take nootropics, which are typically readily available chemicals which have demonstrated an ability to enhance cognition, increase focus or memory, boost energy, or even heighten creativity.7 You could even consume psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD, which modern neuroscience indicates can stimulate new neural connection, ease anxiety related to death, and treat addiction and depression.

Transhumanist thinkers believe that some day in the not-so-distant future, we will be able to augment the brain and mind in ways nearly inconceivable today. Future pharmaceuticals and microscopic brain implants could rapidly repair, regenerate, and revamp brain cells. Genetic engineering could alter the mind biologically, increasing intelligence, creativity, or any other desired quality. Virtual or augmented reality technology may become so advanced as to be indistinguishable from reality, connect directly into our nervous systems, and allow us to live in worlds currently unimaginable.

As fascinating as the potential for future modification of the mind may be, most of it is inaccessible to us today, leaving us only to wait and contemplate. But there is another type of modification, a kind of software transhumanism, which is already available. There are tools that can be unlocked right now, by anyone, without any external technology. We might call these tools psychotechnologies. The most powerful way to improve the brain at this point in history is through its software: Through your thoughts and actions.

just as we might program computer software. Our organic brains, however, do not work in exactly

Although it may seem like common sense to anyone who has ever learned something new or developed a skill, the idea that the brain can change has become fashionable in recent years. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and reorganize throughout the life of an individual.

The ability to adapt to changing conditions has always been crucial to our survival, so this capacity has been hardwired into the mind of all higher life forms. You can build new neural pathways, and reinforce or diminish old ones through learning, conditioning, and practice. In fact, it would be impossible to prevent the modification of your mind.

People obsessively track and optimize their sleep, nutrition, and exercise regimens. But people who obsessively and directly optimize the structure of their minds for flourishing are less common. This book is less concerned with intellectual learning or general competency development and more with psychological adaptivity and well-being.

Societal pressures work to pull you up to the line of psychological adequacy, and psychotherapy can be used when society falls short. But these aims are far too low. Falling within the current normal range of psychological health is nothing to aspire to. We are interested in far exceeding this line - in psychological greatness.

I see no reason the principles of neuroplasticity should not apply to the improvement of our subjectivity. Our neurons don’t play favorites in terms of the tasks which can be improved. It would require more of a leap of faith to believe that the principles of human psychology made an exception for this particular area. If our sights are clearly set on the reworking of our own thoughts, emotional reactions, and behaviors, what is stopping us from gradually rerouting the neural pathways of well-being?

Neuroplasticity gives us the ability to gradually improve at things through consistent and sustained effort, and mastery is a relative term which does not indicate that one can reach a point at which no further progress can be made.

By becoming intimately aware of the mistakes that we would like to relinquish - by working out the disadvantageous habits and building advantageous ones, we can develop the ability to increasingly determine our own subjective experience.

The central practice and framework of this book is called psychitecture. Psychitecture is self-directed psychological evolution - the act of deliberately reprogramming your own psychological operating system. We will see that psychitecture applies to everything from breaking a bad habit to rebuilding an entire worldview.

Though it is a new term, psychitecture is not a new practice. For millennia, thinkers such as Aristotle, Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha), the Stoics, and many others have directed their pupils to place their focus on optimizing their minds and consciously constructing their character. But this book attempts to provide a modern vocabulary

The process of psychitecture, and the structure of the following chapters, is organized into a triad: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral. The cognitive realm will deal with beliefs and biases, introspection, and wisdom. The emotional realm will deal with coping mechanisms, feelings, and desires. And the behavioral realm will look at actions, temptations, and habits.

Perfectly clear reasoning and stable emotions may have gotten in the way of our survival and reproduction. But the “solutions” these default algorithms provide are actually the source of most of our psychological problems today.

Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can all be understood in terms of algorithms, and this model will serve you well in your attempts to optimize your mind. Our goal is not freedom from the algorithms that make up our minds, but the autonomy to transform the algorithms which don't serve us into algorithms which do.

This algorithm model is not a superficial metaphor. Our bad habits and harmful behaviors are effectively if-then programs triggered by real-world inputs that result in undesirable outputs.23 Our cognitive biases and fallacies are reflexive inferences which flow systematically from preprogrammed rules below our ordinary level of awareness.24 And modern psychology tells us that our emotions are mechanically generated by automatic thoughts which can be restructured.

Confirmation bias, procrastination, and thanatophobia (death anxiety) are all universal enough that we can understand our own minds by studying these ubiquitous human tendencies.26 And promisingly, there is strong evidence that we can deliberately reprogram these bad algorithms.27 28 29

But we’ll work our way there gradually. Modern self-help books often center around a few major algorithms to be banished - automatic tendencies like blaming yourself when things go wrong, making assumptions without evidence, or retreating whenever you experience fear. But the psychitectural perspective takes a step back. Instead of simply providing you with a few key algorithms to optimize your mind, this book attempts to provide you with a framework to codify the wisdom you come across in other books or stumble upon yourself. It offers you a new perspective and a methodology to become the collector, curator, and programmer of adaptive algorithms.

It is important to emphasize the “system” part of “psychological operating system.” Aristotle viewed a person as the sum of his habits. This understanding of habit far exceeded the narrow notion of morning routines and ingrained compulsions. An individual’s entire being could be represented by his habits.

Kaizen is a Japanese term often used in business, meaning continuous change for the better - an ongoing endeavor for incremental optimization. This concept can be applied to the psychological operating system just as easily. Individual thoughts, emotions, and actions are never the problem, in the same way that the individual drops of water leaking through your roof are not the problem. We are interested in the source - in the structural patterns.

When you practice psychitecture, you design your mind’s structures such that your goals come about naturally. You move to the adjacent possible using your highest ideals as your beacon.

Psychitecture’s aim is to reform biologically ingrained habits and tendencies of all forms. It’s goal is to rewire the mental biases, distortions, and assumptions that cause us to make mistakes, the unnecessary suffering we fall victim to on a regular basis, the mentalities that hold us back in life, and the impulses that lead us away from our ideals.

Before we dive into the many methods for modifying our minds, we need to acquire a tool that will be indispensable for our progress. In order to modify the structure of our minds, we need to observe and analyze their rules and patterns.

In order to effectively analyze our software, we have to step outside of it. And the tool that allows us to do this is called metacognition. Metacognition has been defined as “knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena”

Closely related to metacognition is the now-popular concept of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a metacognitive strategy which has been defined as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.”

We will look at methods for increasing mindfulness, but I have found that making a priority of objective introspection and metacognitive awareness can be enough to cultivate it. Simply deciding to start noticing your thoughts without judgment or engagement may cultivate this habit in the same way that deciding to enter the housing market causes you to start noticing “for sale” signs in suburban lawns.

If mindfulness does not come easily to you and you are not accustomed to noticing the thoughts and emotions you experience in any given moment, you may need a practice for cultivating it. Vipassana meditation is one of the most common of such practices, and many people, as well as some preliminary research, have found it to be beneficial.34 This practice will gradually guide you to a non-attached awareness of your own internal processes, often beginning with physical sensations like the breath and working up to thoughts and emotions. It trains you to notice when your attention gets sucked back into the captivating narrative your cognition presents to you.

Attention will be represented by the gaps between points in an algorithm. The less attention you are paying to your own mind in any given scenario, the more powerful the links will be.

The mindfulness/meditation movement stops with what I consider to be the prerequisite step of psychological optimization. It tells you to cultivate the objective, non-attached awareness of your own internal processes… and then do it some more.

would speculate that a leading reason some people seem not to benefit from meditation is that they are not instructed to analyze and modify the automatic processes they observe during meditation. This is exactly what we are going to do. The following nine chapters will examine the most commonly problematic algorithms in the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral realms.

Movements like transhumanism, quantified self, and biohacking focus on enhancing intelligence, focus, and energy, but the same spirit of self-optimization can be applied to well-being, adaptivity, and wisdom.

The way your mind is structured will determine the person you become, the life you live, and the fulfillment you realize.

Mindfulness weakens the links between algorithms and provides an opportunity to intervene and restructure them. It allows you to pause and examine your algorithms for what they are, rather than simply being subject to them.

We begin our psychitectural journey in the cognitive realm. Without mastery of this realm, our minds are riddled with false beliefs, recurring biases, and dissonance between our models of reality and reality itself.

Cognition is the gatekeeper of virtually every function of our software.

Our chief cognitive concern is to perceive reality as clearly and accurately as possible. To develop a functional map which aligns as closely as possible to the territory it aims to portray. This chapter will cover many of the mechanisms behind our beliefs and cognitive tendencies, as well as the methods for optimizing and reprogramming them, and many of the concepts and methods covered here will be foundational to those in later chapters.