Cognitive Scaffolding

Writing Soft Soil is like pressing down soil with my hands, feeling the imprint of memory translated through fingertips into tangible form. I don't do this translation alone.

I use AI. Not as outsourced creativity or automated content generation. Rather, I've assembled what neuroscientists might call an extended cognitive network, a strange team of machine intelligences that function as specialized regions in an artificial cortex: pattern-seeking, associative, synthetic.

The Cognitive Choreography

Here’s my process as an analogy for how the brain processes experience into structured memory:

First, I dictate to AI (usually ChatGPT or Gemini), using it as a working memory buffer, a temporary scaffold to hold inchoate thoughts until I can determine their shape. Like how the hippocampus initially captures experiences before transferring them to long-term storage.

Then I migrate this preliminary structure to a Google Doc, where the real integration begins. I flesh out skeletal thoughts, strip away generic placeholders, and layer in experiential specificity, not unlike how the prefrontal cortex organizes and contextualizes memory fragments into coherent narratives.

When the draft achieves sufficient integration, I bring it to Claude. There's something about Claude's linguistic architecture that resonates with my internal voice patterns. Our ongoing dialogue has created what memory researchers might call an episodic template, a pattern of interaction that helps me articulate complex internal states more precisely.

I'll admit, I haven’t escaped the grip of imposter syndrome when it comes to my use of AI. By turning that frown upside down, my imposter syndrome has actually inspired me to explore the boundaries of authorial identity in this collaborative process. I asked Claude directly about our co-creative relationship.

The Integration Loop

Once the conceptual structure and experiential content have been synthesized, I return to GPT to generate visual representations. I provide abstract sensory prompts ("a textile dripping like paint," "a flower blooming in a Sankey diagram," "an image like a memory blended with one of Agnes Martin's grids"), and the AI translates these non-verbal concepts into visual form.

This might appear to outside observers as a mechanistic process that diminishes authorial authenticity. From my internal perspective, it feels like the opposite.

When writing about trauma, the limbic system often overwhelms the language centers of the brain. Trauma researchers have documented how activity in the Broca's area (responsible for speech production) can decrease in response to trauma. In these moments, I need cognitive scaffolding. I need rhythmic structure. I need mediated distance between raw experience and verbalization.

These AI tools function as what trauma therapists might call titration tools, allowing me to process difficult material at a pace that prevents overwhelm, creating the conditions for integration rather than fragmentation.

A Living Network

Soft Soil, at least in these early iterations, emerges from a distributed cognitive system that spans human memory and machine processing, emotional resonance and pattern recognition, rhythmic intuition and semantic analysis. This isn't academic publishing. It's not traditional journalism. It's not strictly a blog.

It's a living practice. It’s a dynamic interplay between organic and artificial intelligence, between embodied memory and disembodied processing, between the intimacy of trauma and the necessary distance of its articulation.

I choose transparency about this process not just as ethical disclosure, but as part of the very content I'm exploring: how we heal, how we integrate, how we make meaning from experience. Sometimes with unexpected partnerships along the way.