The Cognitive Completeness Imperative

The Brain Can't Handle Being Empty

Put someone in a sensory deprivation tank—perfectly safe, body-temperature water, complete darkness and silence—and watch what happens. Within an hour, people start hallucinating. Their brains invent stimuli rather than deal with an unfilled cognitive capacity. This is a basic reaction to the lack of cognitive inputs because most of us, most of our brains, cannot abide being empty.

We all have a drive for cognitive completeness. It's the need to fill up whatever mental space is available. And empty mental space? That's not just uncomfortable. It is like a biological alarm going off. Nature, it seems, abhors a cognitive vacuum.

This is hardly a problem these days. We’ve accelerated and multiplied the cognitive inputs available. Waiting room? Scroll away. Commute? Podcast at 1.5x speed. Making dinner? Netflix is on in the background. The whole human enterprise is consumed with a gluttony of curated, commercialised, and addictive content, available to us at any time or place.

We are also experiencing record levels of discontent, unhappiness, desperation, and depression. All of this doom scrolling is making us all a bit mad. We need to step back and assess how we manage the human drive for cognitive completeness and how the variety, timing, and duration of inputs affect who we are and who we want to be.

The Research Knows Why We Scroll; Not Why It Matters

There is plenty of research on boredom, attention, and information-seeking. Flow theory describes optimal engagement—a predictive processing framework about how brains fill gaps. The attention economy documents how TikTok and Instagram are engineered to exploit how our focus works.

But here's what’s missing: it's not just that people need stimulation. It's that different people need different kinds of stimulation to feel satisfied. And more interesting—the patterns of what satisfies, what I'm calling our "completeness signatures," those patterns don't just reflect who we are. They make us who we are. They construct the very edifice of self.

So the question isn't "why do humans seek stimulation?" We know that. The question is "why does true crime do it for some people but leave others completely cold?" And what happens to your conception of self—if not the full expression of that self—after years of getting cognitive completeness from gaming versus reading versus watching sports? How is the content we consume wiring our brains and thereby, our selves.

You Don't Like Things Because You're You. You're You Because You Like Things.

Everyone needs to eat. But people are different in what fills them up, what they crave at 2am, what actually nourishes them versus what leaves them hungry again an hour later.

Same thing with cognitive completeness. The person who reads dense philosophy isn't doing that necessarily because they're intellectual. They're intellectual because their particular brain—their constructed self—finds satisfaction in that specific kind of mental workout. The person who can recite every NBA stat from the past decade, the person who can cite the headlines from the New York Times, the person who knows which Real Housewife said what in season 3—they've all found satisfaction from these inputs and their brains have gotten better at assigning meaning and depth to this type of content—it becomes not just the basis of knowledge but the spectrum through which one assesses other areas of life. The same is true of someone who goes to the park to shoot hoops, who writes a new treatise on the state of humanity, or the person who goes to lunch with friends. We are all sommeliers of our own cognitive satisfaction, though some of us have chosen to specialise in considerably different vintages.

We think: I'm this kind of person, therefore I like this kind of input.

Actually, these inputs satisfy my brain, therefore I become this kind of person.

The causality runs the other way.

Why the Same Content Hits Differently

Some people need high-intensity stuff. Dense academic papers, Elden Ring boss fights, Christopher Nolan movies where you have to pay attention to every frame. Lighter content doesn't do it for them. It's like drinking La Croix when what you really need is espresso. Their system requires the full workout.

Other people? They get their completeness from gentler stuff. The Office for the tenth time. Cozy mysteries. YouTube videos of people doing oddly satisfying crafts. The heavy content just exhausts them. Neither type is better. They're just different engines that need different fuel.

Then there's the resonance—how inputs span across our thoughts and experience. A three-minute snowboarding video may be just mildly interesting content for some. But show it to an expert who's planning a backcountry trip and watch their brain light up. Every turn triggers something: risk assessment, equipment choices, terrain reading, muscle memory, weather patterns. Same video, completely different level of cognitive completeness.

This is why some people become obsessive about random stuff. They're not "into" mechanical keyboards or Formula 1 or serial killers in some abstract way. They've built up enough knowledge that such content in that domain hits differently. What looks like going down the rabbit hole is actually their brain finding increasingly satisfying completeness through all those connections firing. It's a kind of cognitive consummation.

And social content? That's basically evolution's cheat code for cognitive completeness. When content involves other people—either watching them or consuming it with them—you activate everything at once. Theory of mind, social comparison, identity stuff, emotional processing, moral reasoning. This is why reaction videos are a whole genre. This is why some people literally cannot watch a show alone. They need that social layer to feel complete. Other people find social content somewhat thin and need pure ideas or systems to feel satisfied.

Stop Feeling Guilty About What Your Brain Actually Needs

People sometimes feel embarrassed about their "guilty pleasures." Binge-watching reality TV, reading romance novels, and spending hours on TikTok. There's a cultural hierarchy about what's supposed to satisfy you—often driven by social norms amongst our colleagues, friend, and family, or, more precisely, how we want them to perceive us. This performative and reactive dance, often performed without clear feedback, is exceptionally complex and can cause huge levels of stress. That stress—a biological sign—is from an abundance of consumed content that is then regurgitated as an aspirational reflection of self that does not seem to then have the intended effects on targeted audiences. A poser is always seeking elusive types of cognitive completeness.

The brain is biological—it does not dictate what it needs; it takes what it can get, just like the stomach. If Love Island makes one’s particular architecture feel complete while Proust leaves another restless and unsatisfied, then this is a reflection of the stores of content-the feelings and infrastructures—that we have already created. Cultural prestige is not the same as a healthy diet; it is more complicated than that. Certain content provides cognitive completeness but it may then create other gaps or conditions that are unfulfilled. The brain achieves completeness through different mechanisms. It's not about being smart or sophisticated. It's about what fits one’s particular architecture. One person's trash is another person's cognitive treasure—and both are correct about their own brains.

Friend groups are basically signature groups. The Discord server, the fantasy football league, the book club, the climbing gym crew—these are people whose brains get satisfied by similar content. And those arguments about whether video games are art or whether reality TV is rotting everyone's brains? Those are really just people with different signatures defending that their way of feeling complete is legitimate. A kind of cognitive tribalism, if you will.

Your Content Diet Is Building Your Brain

Your signature isn't fixed. You can train it.

Someone who needs high-intensity content can learn to find satisfaction in gentler stuff. Someone who's all about social content can develop the ability to get completeness from abstract thinking. This is the essence of personal growth: expanding one’s cognitive signature to find satisfaction from multitudes of content and activity.

The person trying to read 50 books this year isn't better than the person with 500 hours in Maddon’s NFL. They've just trained different signatures. The reader gets vocabulary expansion, different perspectives, and historical knowledge. The gamer gets real-time problem-solving, pattern recognition, and systems thinking. Different benefits from different training. The only real difference is which form of mental furniture one prefers to arrange.

But here's the really wild part: the content you use to achieve completeness shapes your brain. Your signature doesn't just reflect your wiring. It builds it. The ways you've learned to feel complete have physically wired your neural networks in specific patterns. Like how your body gets shaped by whatever exercises you repeat. Or perhaps more aptly, like how a river carves its channel through stone—slowly, inexorably, until the path becomes fixed.

Ten thousand little choices about how to fill your brain—scroll or read, watch or listen, easy or challenging—those accumulate into a particular kind of mind. Your signature isn't just what satisfies you right now. It's what you're becoming.

You're Choosing Your Self Thousands of Times a Day

You can't escape this. Your brain is going to be full. That's biology.

The power of the choices you make—and you're making it thousands of times a day, mostly without thinking about it—is what type of signature you want to create or expand or minimise.

Every time you reach for content, you're training your brain. You're reinforcing certain patterns of what feels complete and letting others fade. Do this long enough and you become "the kind of person who" likes certain things. The interim period is often called “fake it till you make it.” Indeed. People don’t have some unchangeable personality type. We can train ourselves with new content; we can embrace the discomfort of something new with the knowledge that we are expanding the wiring in our brains to allow for another facet of our best selves.

This is what actually makes people different from each other. Not intelligence or talent or whatever your Myers-Briggs says. It is a highly complex jumble of the specific ways we learn to satisfy the universal need for cognitive completeness and the kind of mind those patterns have built over time.

In this sense, the signature is the self. The question is whether it's serving the life one wants and whether one is being purposeful in its construction or letting the algorithm decide.

Why This Actually Matters

Content that creates links across different domains—that connects work knowledge to hobbies, relationships to interests, past experiences to new ideas— don't just feel satisfying. They build cognitive bridges that expand the ways that the brain becomes full. The person who achieves completeness through diverse, interconnected content literally develops more neural pathways; more routes between ideas. This, in turn, creates more ways to solve problems, generate insights, understand and relate with different people.

This is where motivation and productivity come from. Not discipline. Not willpower. From having a brain that finds satisfaction in the kinds of completeness that move one toward particular goals. When one’s signature is aligned with what they are trying to accomplish, effort stops feeling like effort.

This is then extended to the connections we make with others. We can work to ensure that our signature includes rich and varied links with other people. The person who only achieves completeness through solitary, high-density content will struggle with relationships not because they're antisocial, but because their brain hasn't been trained to find satisfaction in the social multiplexing that relationships require. Meanwhile, someone who's built a signature that lights up around other people—that finds real completeness in understanding them, connecting with them, experiencing things together—they're not just more social. They've wired their brain to find joy in making links with others.

So the practice is simple but not easy: pay attention to what you're using to fill your brain. Not in a guilty, self-improving way. In a curious, architectural way. Ask: Does this content create links to other things I know and care about? Does it expand my signature or just reinforce the same narrow pattern? Does it train my brain toward the kind of completeness that serves my actual life—the relationships I want, the work I'm trying to do, the person I'm trying to become?

Your best self isn't some aspirational version you're failing to reach. It's the signature you're building, one piece of content at a time. Joy with others isn't something you learn to perform. It's what happens when your signature is wired to find real completeness in shared experience.

How you fill your brain isn't what you do while you're waiting to live your real life. It is your real life, building your real brain, creating your real self. That's worth being intentional about.