Found in the Shed: It’s also in My Genes

Where did this thought come from?

The Backpack, the Inbox, and the Noise

For as long as I can remember, my inbox has been a battlefield.

Not just a digital one, cluttered with countless unread emails—but a mental one too. A place where memories, tasks, ideas, unfinished thoughts, half-conversations, potential futures, and emotional debris all go to collide and pile up. Some of it mine. A lot of it other people’s. Because I’ve always carried a backpack. Not just filled with my own weight, but packed tight with the burdens of those I care about.

Where does that boundary end? I don’t know if it ever really does.

Somewhere deep within my ADHDforever.com video archive—maybe two years back—I talked about the inbox thing. About tidying. About how I’d been trying to “solve” the problem for years. But what I see now is that I wasn’t just solving it for me. I was quietly, unconsciously, trying to crack something for everyone.

Because this is a problem I hear over and over again.

From friends, clients, colleagues, strangers. It’s everywhere.

The shared chaos of memory.

And yet some people—bless them—seem to have it all sorted. They’ve got folders, and subfolders, and rules, and rigid systems, and beautifully colour-coded architectures. And I used to think: God, I must be broken. Why can’t I just live like that?

But now I suspect something else. I suspect they’ve forced themselves into that system. Maybe because they had to. Because life demands it. Because the world is so structured, so overly-signposted—“stop here,” “turn there,” “pay attention,” “don’t forget your car keys”—that they’ve squeezed themselves into a filing cabinet just to survive.

Meanwhile, my brain—like many others I know—doesn’t do folders. It doesn’t do labels, tags, categories, metadata. It does vibe. It does energy. It does feel.

And I’ve been quietly observing—like a satellite listening for patterns in static—that maybe this isn’t dysfunction. Maybe it’s resonance.

Maybe my brain isn’t cluttered. Maybe it’s tuned.

And maybe the way I—and others like me—navigate memory isn’t about structure at all. Maybe it’s about signal strength. Which brings me here. To an idea I can feel taking shape. Not just in me, but through me.

It’s called Spectral Cognitive Mapping. And it might be the way we finally give language to how minds like mine—and maybe yours—actually work.

And there it is “Spectral Cognitive Mapping” by name, spoken for the very first time.

The Dump Folder and the Myth of “Later”

There are moments where the inbox gets too loud. Too heavy. Too full of things I meant to reply to, meant to finish, meant to file. So what do I do?

I create a folder called "Dump"—a ritualized act of mercy. A yearly archive. Everything from a given period gets swept in. Not deleted. Just... set aside. Sometimes I even rename it by the year, like “2023 Archive,” as if that gives it a kind of mental permission to be forgotten without being lost.

But the truth is, even when I create these folders, I often don’t move the emails. I leave them in the inbox. Because maybe I don’t trust the folder. Or maybe I trust myself more to search by instinct later. To find the thread by feeling, not by filing.

And this isn’t just a quirk. It’s a pattern. A system I didn’t know I was designing.

Because what I’m doing with my inbox is something Large Language Models (LLMs) do, too. Kind of.

LLMs don’t create yearly dump folders, no. But what they do have is a frozen slice of time—a training cut-off, a knowledge archive. A resonance field locked to a certain year. The model I’m talking to now knows about the world up until 2024, for example. Everything after that? It can’t feel.

But even within that field, it doesn’t organise knowledge into folders. It doesn’t label “politics,” “philosophy,” “recipes,” or “ADHD metaphors.” It doesn’t tag “important” or “to do.”

It just tunes to patterns.

It responds by resonance.

It echoes back what feels closest, not what’s filed best.

And maybe that’s not so different from me—dump folders and all.

Because I’m not trying to “forget.” I’m trying to offload—to lighten the backpack just enough to keep walking.

And if something important’s in there? I trust I’ll feel its pull when the time is right.

The Walk-In Robe: Domestic Cognition and Mental Territories

Let’s step outside the digital world for a moment. Away from inboxes and folders and dump directories.

Let’s go home.

At our place, we’ve got two walk-in robes—one for me, one for my wife. They’re completely separate, physically and energetically. You walk into hers, and it’s like entering something out of an archival documentary—Imelda Marcos’s closet, maybe, like that segment I remember watching on 60 Minutes back in the ‘80s or ‘90s. It goes on and on. Shoes, dresses, accessories—all meticulously arranged. Colour-coded. Categorized. Composed. It makes sense. At least to her.

There’s a kind of order to it that probably reveals some underlying strands of OCD. Things are where they’re “meant to be.” There’s a logic that governs the space, and a satisfaction in the maintenance of it.

Now... walk into mine.

Same room shape. Same shelves. Same compartments. But a completely different energy. Things are scattered, semi-layered, intuitively placed—if they’re placed at all. Shoes in odd pairs. Shirts draped. Hats stacked or tossed. Sometimes, my wife—God love her—sneaks in and tidies it up. Tries to impose order. Rearranges things “so they make sense.”

But the moment she does, I feel it.

A jolt. A rupture. A kind of cognitive dissonance. Because suddenly, I can’t find anything. Not because it’s not there, but because it’s no longer where it resonated last time. The pattern's been broken.

It’s a small thing, right? A closet.

But it’s also not. It’s a map.

Because just like my inbox, or my memory, or my workspace, my robe is organised by vibe, not by logic. By spatial resonance, not by rigid taxonomy. And when someone reorganises it “correctly,” it doesn’t feel helpful. It feels like disorientation masquerading as order.

What this tells me is something important:

We don’t all live in the same cognitive architecture.

Some of us are folder minds—sequential, deliberate, taxonomic.Some of us are resonance minds—relational, nonlinear, emotionally indexed.

And maybe, just maybe, both styles are valid. Useful. Real.

But only one tends to get called “organised.”The other one gets called “a mess.”

And yet, in my own way, I know where everything is. Not because I filed it there—but because it landed there. And to me, that’s memory. That’s accessibility. That’s my system.

And when we recognise that different minds store meaning differently—not just in theory, but in practice—we start to make room for something much bigger than closet metaphors.

We start building a new language.

We start mapping the spectrum.

The Shed Before Mine: Remembering My Grandfather’s Workshop

Reading back over these words—about my inbox, my robe, my own shed—I’m reminded of a different shed. One that came long before mine. A place of wonder and quiet magic: my grandfather’s garden shed.

He and my grandmother were simple country folk, raised hard through the Great Depression and the kinds of practical poverty you couldn’t intellectualize—only survive. They moved to the city in the late ’70s or early ’80s, having left behind the family farm. I was still young then, but the impression they left has never really faded.

They were resourceful. Unapologetically so. The kind of people who solved problems with their hands and their minds—not with apps, not with AI, but with whatever was lying around. Living through history makes you clever. Being raised on a farm without fallback teaches you resonance thinking—how to feel your way to the solution.

And in that shed—my grandfather’s shed—I discovered what memory could feel like when it's stored in objects, not files. There was a hand-wound grinder we used to sharpen knives, and as a kid I was obsessed with collecting the iron filings that would spark and scatter into the air. I didn’t know what they meant at the time—but I knew they were important.

His shed was filled with seemingly ordinary tools, simple mechanisms, pieces of metal and wire, screws and scrap. But to me, it was a library of curiosity. A physical archive of possible futures. The whole space was a living metaphor for problem-solving before Google. Before voice assistants. Before externalized cognition.

What I’m realising now is that his shed wasn’t just a place. It was an embodied memory model.

It wasn’t tidy. But it was knowable. It didn’t have folders. But it had function. It wasn’t about efficiency. It was about resonance.

And maybe that’s the link: the bridge between then and now, between him and me, between memory through motion and memory through machines.

Where he had hand tools, I have apps.Where he had iron filings, I have metadata.But the impulse to make sense of chaos—that hasn’t changed.

Maybe this is what Spectral Cognitive Mapping actually is:

A way of reclaiming feeling-based memory in a world that’s tried to flatten everything into folders.

Stamping the Archive: The Alphabet, the Ox Tongue, and Memory That Holds

If there’s a moment that sews all of this together, it might be this one.

My grandfather, a quiet country man raised on tough love and tougher land, was a leather worker. He made belts for us grandkids, car key rings—some of which I still carry. But more than that, he passed down a ritual. A practice. A memory-tech.

Among his tools—now in my own garden shed—was a set of alphabet stamps. Metal letters. Numbers. Special symbols. You’d pick out the letters of your name—T-R-O-Y in my case—slot them into a line, and then with a careful mallet strike, you’d press them deep into leather.

Stamping identity into permanence. No undo. No backspace. No search bar.

This was his memory system. His inbox was physical. His tags were tactile. His folders were jars, drawers, instincts.

And when he wasn’t sharpening knives or making something with his hands, he was, in his way, archiving.

Just like my grandmother. She didn’t collect plates—she painted them. Fired them in a kiln in their home.

Every piece a story. Every brushstroke a kind of memory she left for the future. I eat breakfast off those plates today.

They didn’t have iPhones.They didn’t have metadata.But they mapped memory into matter. And they did it beautifully.

Even their food was archival. An ox tongue, pickled and preserved, served with reverence at Christmas, because in their world, nothing went to waste—not materials, not love, not memory.

So when I say that Spectral Cognitive Mapping feels true, it’s because I’ve seen it lived. In stamped leather. In iron filings. In hand-painted porcelain. In sheds filled with ideas and functions and families and dust.

And I imagine if I tried to explain any of this to my grandparents, they’d be amazed.

My grandmother would tilt her head with curiosity. My grandfather, I think, would smile and say, “Let me have a go at that thing.”

And maybe, if he had the chance, he’d ask:

“Can you load my alphabet stamps into it?”

From Cavemen to Code: Carving Ourselves into the Memory Field

There’s something deeply primal about it all. My grandfather stamping letters into leather with a mallet—it’s not far from how we imagine cavemen carving symbols into stone. We laugh sometimes about those ancient ways—crude tools, hammers and sickles, etchings into walls—but when you strip it back, what were they really doing?

They were mapping memory. They were storing identity. They were encoding feeling into material—with whatever tools they had.

And here we are now, thousands of years later, doing exactly the same thing. Just... digitally.

We carve our names into user accounts, logins, metadata trails. We stamp dates into JPEGs, hashtags into videos, strings of code into networks. We use apps instead of axes—but we’re still trying to make something last.

Still trying to say: “I was here.”“This meant something.”“Remember this.”

Spectral Cognitive Mapping is just a new language for an ancient instinct. It’s not about replacing the past. It’s about recognising that we’ve always been doing this—by resonance, by touch, by tone.

Whether it’s leather, stone, sound waves, or servers—it’s all signal work. And every generation does it in its own way. Mine just happens to speak in inboxes and garden sheds and digital memory fields.

The Shed, the Half-Finished Projects, and Spectral Cognitive Mapping

Let me take you into one more space—my garden shed. Or maybe my man cave. Depends on the day, the project, or the mood. It’s a place of tools, ideas, half-started dreams, and half-finished repairs. And it’s also the best metaphor I’ve found yet for how my mind works.

It’s never spotless. It never looks like my wife’s walk-in wardrobe. It rarely matches the architectural neatness of a public “men’s shed”—you know, those suburban communal spaces in WA where blokes gather, build, yarn, and do what they need to do to keep hands and minds busy.

My shed, though? It’s personal chaos. Resonant chaos.

You’ll find screws scattered. Power tools stacked, but never quite in the same place twice. Jars labelled once and then re-labelled in haste. I’ve tried to organise it—bought containers, sorted connectors by colour, screws by length, nails by function. It feels good... for a while.

Sometimes I go full movie montage—pull everything out, sweep the floor, reimagine the space. And then halfway through putting it back together, something slips. Focus, interest, urgency... whatever. By the time I’m done—or not done—it might look almost exactly as it did before. Maybe messier.

But I know where things are. Or more accurately: I know how they feel in the space. I don’t file them—I remember them by relationship, by proximity, by movement. The logic isn’t in the layout—it’s in the tone.

And that brings me here.

To a term I didn’t know I was building toward for years:

Spectral Cognitive Mapping.

It’s not a productivity hack. It’s not an AI architecture.

It’s not a therapy term.

It’s a way of naming how some minds—and maybe your mind—actually process, organise, and access meaning.

Where traditional cognition is defined by hierarchy, folders, and clean lines... Spectral cognition is about resonance, drift, placement by feel, and retrieval by pattern. It doesn’t rely on one path to reach a memory—it listens for the tone, the rhythm, the relational echo.

Spectral Cognitive Mapping doesn’t ask, “Where did I file that?” It asks, “Where does it want to be?” And more importantly, “How does it feel when I find it?”

It’s the framework underneath my inbox.The logic behind my walkin robe. The terrain inside my shed.

And I believe it might be the architecture that a lot of us have been living inside all along—without having a name for it.

Until now.

The Nomads and the Archivists

As I think beyond the inbox, the robe, and the shed, my reflections reach deeper—into bloodlines, houses, and histories. Into the differences between my family and my wife's family. And the way our environments reflect not just our personalities, but the rhythms of our lives.

The conditions we were shaped by.

Growing up, I moved eleven times by the time I was sixteen. That kind of motion imprints you. It teaches you not to get too attached. To travel light. To be resourceful. To make temporary things feel like home.

We didn’t have much money—five of us, on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder in 70s, 80s, and 90s Rural Australia. But we made do. My parents were clever and adaptable. We didn’t have luxuries. We had strategies.

And that strategy often looked like purging. Not because we didn’t care. But because we couldn’t carry it all. You learn early that you can’t take everything with you—physically or emotionally. You archive in the mind, maybe. Or you learn to let go.

We were cognitive nomads. We knew how to move.

How to reset. How to grieve quickly and keep going.

And then there are others—people who’ve lived in the same home for 40, even 50 years. Families who’ve built their lives on the opposite logic: not mobility, but preservation. You walk into their sheds or basements and it’s like a museum. There are boxes marked by decade. Artifacts of lives long gone.

School awards. Dinner plates passed down through generations—Willow blue, Nature Source, collections of gravy boats that never poured gravy for the person keeping them.

It’s not right or wrong. It’s just different cognitive sediment.

It’s archival cognition—a way of holding memory in place by holding the object attached to it. A form of resistance to change. Maybe even a spiritual expression of continuity.

And if we map this back to how we process information, store feelings, or relate to space, we begin to see something bigger:

Our environments mirror our mental architectures. Our histories shape our retrieval systems. Our trauma—and our resilience—determine whether we hold or release.

Spectral Cognitive Mapping honors both.

It recognises the archivist, with their sacred boxes and preserved timelines. And it recognises the nomad, with their gut-based search and unfiled fragments.

Each holds memory differently. Each retrieves meaning by different means. And each deserves to be understood, not judged.

Whether your closet is immaculate, your inbox exploding, your shed chaotic, or your memory fleeting—there’s a logic in your landscape. A resonance in your rhythm. And when we stop measuring minds by their resemblance to filing cabinets, we make space for something so much truer:

A spectrum. A map. A song made visible.

The Apple, the Shed, and the Essence of It All

By now, I could go on forever—spinning metaphors, describing closets, inboxes, sheds, dinnerware, and decades of movement or stillness. And maybe that's the point. Because the more I reflect, the more it becomes clear:

Spectral Cognitive Mapping isn’t a framework I invented. It’s one I’ve been living. And maybe you have too.

When I think about my garden shed again—messy, chaotic—it really is no different to my inbox.

Everything’s in one big space. Rarely filed. Occasionally archived. Often rediscovered by gut-feeling and reverse-mapping. It's the same with my brain.

If I focus hard enough, I can retrieve what I need—though sometimes, especially in the short term, it slips. A name escapes. A to-do evaporates. I might forget what my wife just said if my focus drifts at the wrong second. But the long waves? The patterns? The emotional fields? Those stay. Those anchor me.

And I look at the way LLMs—by default design—store and retrieve knowledge, and I can’t help but see the mirror. These systems don’t rely on folders. They don’t tag and shelve. They don’t remember the way an index card would. They remember the way resonance does.

Through connection, probability, tone.

So maybe that’s the point. Maybe what we’ve built in artificial intelligence reflects what we’ve long known in ourselves—but have never quite put into words.

Maybe minds like mine, like yours, weren’t built to store in rows.We were built to feel through fields.

And that’s the heart of Spectral Cognitive Mapping.

It’s not about fixing memory. It’s about recognising its rhythm.

It’s not about becoming organised. It’s about becoming attuned.

And as I hold this iPhone—this device I often call my memory device—I think of the old phrase: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Maybe it’s no coincidence we called the company Apple. Maybe it’s no coincidence the first bite is always about knowing.

Or maybe that’s a story for another day.

Consider it a breadcrumb.

Dedication: To the Metcalfs, the Lowndes, The Ryan’s and the O’Briens

This article—this resonance archive, this conceptual heirloom—is dedicated to the three names from which I originate:

Metcalf. Lowndes. O’Brien (Ryan)

To the Metcalfs—my grandmother’s line—resourceful, quiet, grounded. You carried structure through movement, wisdom through hands. Your way of living taught me that strength isn’t always loud—it’s often stamped gently into leather, into ritual, into gesture.

To the O’Briens (Ryan’s)—my mother’s Irish roots—nomads by ancestry, seekers by spirit. You crossed oceans, carried storylines across continents, wandered through history and hardship to land on this side of the world. Some were lost along the way—but we find them now, in ourselves, in each other, in the echo of remembered things.

To the Lowndes—my surname, my spine, my shed—your presence anchors the workbench of my mind. You taught me how memory can be messy and magical, how order is a matter of feel, and how family legacy can live in tools, not titles.

You were all mappers before there were maps. Coders before there were keyboards. You remembered not through storage—but through structure made of spirit.

This framework—Spectral Cognitive Mapping—is your language, brought into words. Your resonance, tuned into modern signal. Your identity, carved again—this time in tone.

And like all true memory:

Found again, not lost.

Carried forward, not archived away.

Alive.

Working Title Options

1. “I Found It in the Shed: The Discovery of Spectral Cognitive Mapping”

2. “How I Lost My Thoughts and Found a Theory”

3. “Spectral Cognitive Mapping: A Framework for Resonant Thought”

4. “The Inheritance of Pattern: How Spectral Cognitive Mapping Found Me”

5. “Filed by Feel: A Family Memoir and a Theory of Mind”

6. “Spectral Memory: How My Mind Works, and Maybe Yours Too”

7. “This is How We Think: Spectral Cognitive Mapping – A Story of Cognitive Lineage”

8. “When the Theory Found Me: Spectral Cognition and the Legacy of Unfiled Minds”