(est. 2021) explores the intersections of technology, culture, and human experience. From urban phenomena and digital spirituality to the evolving landscapes of creativity, we investigate how modern life reshapes perception, identity, and society.
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#21 — VIOL: the ‘anti-violence’ drug that is spreading through Lisbon by Mark Ellison
#20 — Signal Ghosts: The Cities Where Wi-Fi Never Dies
#19 — Digital Detox Retreats: Escaping the Algorithm by Cassandra Myrren
#18 — The Urban Sleep Crisis by Eleanor Voss
#17 — Cryptic Art: NFTs and the Revaluation of Creativity by Marcus Ellwood
#16 — Virtual Pilgrimages: Religious Experience Online by Mark Ellison
#15 — The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession by Eleanor Voss
#14 — AI Companions and the Loneliness Epidemic by Isolde Maren
#13 — The Rise of Microdosing in Corporate Culture by Cassandra Myrren
#12 — Sonic Immunity: Healing Through Frequencies by Cassandra Myrren
#11 — The Ethics of Immortality by Adrien Veyra
#10 — Algorithmic Faith: When Machines Preach by Mark Ellison
#09 — Post-Human Erotics: Desire Beyond the Flesh by Elin Vårnes
#08 — Synthetic Memory: The Future of Personal Archives by Caio Navarro
#07 — Neurosprawl: Mapping the Brain as a City by Eleanor Voss
#06 — The Archive Will Outlive You by Liang Wei
#05 — Eternal Scroll: The Infinite Feed as a Prison by Isolde Maren
#04 — Terraforming the Mind by Alessio Romano
#03 — Digital Necromancy by Mark Ellison
#02 — Speculative Hunger: Future Diets in a Synthetic World by Cassandra Myrren
#01 — The Ecology of Glitches by Alessio Romano
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The human brain is less a machine than a metropolis: a pulsating, sleepless sprawl of districts, boulevards, underpasses, and dark alleys. Each neuron is both a streetlight and a whisper, a point of illumination and a node in an immense, shifting network. For centuries, we have mapped the brain with the crude cartographies of anatomy — Broca’s area here, the hippocampus there — as if its functions could be cleanly zoned like urban land use. But the reality is closer to the chaos of megacities, where overlapping infrastructures defy tidy plans and the invisible flows matter more than the concrete roads.
Functional connectivity scans reveal what urban planners already know: movement defines meaning. In the brain, signals migrate like commuters, not along rigid highways, but through constantly reconfigured shortcuts, detours, and hidden pedestrian paths. Memory, for instance, is not a single district but a set of scattered neighbourhoods linked by high-speed transit, each one lighting up in unpredictable synchrony. As the neuroscientist Olaf Sporns has suggested, the connectome is less a static blueprint than a “living traffic map” (Sporns, 2011).
The neurosprawl is not purely physical. Like a city, the brain extends into its periphery: smartphones as external hippocampi, cloud servers as municipal archives, AI as automated governance. Clark and Chalmers’ Extended Mind thesis (1998) reads, today, like a prescient urban development plan for the cognitive district, where external devices function as annexes of mental space. The city of the mind is no longer contained by the skull; its suburbs sprawl into the network.
This metaphor, however, is not mere poetry. Urban informatics — the study of how cities process information — increasingly overlaps with cognitive neuroscience. Machine learning models used to optimise traffic flow are now repurposed to predict neural signalling patterns; conversely, graph-theoretic models of brain connectivity are influencing the design of urban transit systems (Bullmore & Sporns, 2009). The exchange is symbiotic: the brain teaches us how to design cities, and cities teach us how to read the brain.
Yet, as with any sprawl, the question of governance looms. Who decides which districts are lit and which remain in shadow? Deep brain stimulation can revitalise silent districts, much like urban renewal projects that gentrify derelict blocks — often at the cost of erasing older, stranger neighbourhoods of thought. In neuroprosthetics, as in urban planning, intervention carries the risk of homogenisation: the messy, eccentric cityscape of cognition may be flattened into a clean but lifeless grid.
The ethics of the neurosprawl demand that we resist the temptation to fully rationalise it. Just as every city needs its empty lots, its abandoned factories, and its inexplicable cul-de-sacs, the mind may require zones of cognitive wilderness — spaces not optimised for efficiency, but for unpredictability, daydream, and the generative accidents of wandering thought.
Mapping the brain as a city is not about imposing order, but about recognising its chaotic vitality. The neurosprawl is alive, not despite its messiness, but because of it. And perhaps the future of neuroscience lies not in taming this metropolis, but in learning how to dwell in it.
References
- Bullmore, E., & Sporns, O. (2009). Complex brain networks: graph theoretical analysis of structural and functional systems. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(3), 186–198.
- Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.
- Sporns, O. (2011). Networks of the Brain. MIT Press.