“Polarize me, sensitize me
Criticize me, civilize me
Compensate me, animate me
Complicate me, elevate me.”Rush, “Animate”
AI is a tool. A strange one, a powerful one, and one about which most of us are unsure how to feel. This site is a working experiment in how I (a psychiatrist) am using AI for improving education, writing, research, clinical work, and even as a medium of self expression.
(My dear viewer. I am aware this is starting to sound a little culty. I promise nothing is being sold, no one is being recruited. There is no billion year contract. There are no weird, ignominious carnal coercions. And there certainly is no newsletter. It's just a website. My art project website.)
Most of what's here is meant to be touched. Drag the sliders. Mark the boxes. The pieces are written to be completed, not just read.
None of this is a pitch. It's a record of what's being built, and a small argument for leaning into the unknown.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.Voltaire
Imagine telling a friend they're cheating because they used TurboTax. Or that a carpenter who reaches for a nail gun isn't a real craftsman. Or that the farmer who climbs onto a tractor has lost touch with the soil. We'd find it strange. Tools are tools — we've spent the last several thousand years building them precisely so we don't have to do every difficult thing the hard way.
And yet, somehow, when the tool is AI, something shifts. The writer who used it to draft an email is lazy. The student who used it to outline an essay has cheated. The developer who used it to scaffold a project didn't really build the thing. The feeling these words carry is familiar — it belongs to an older emotional register, the one reserved for work we think ought to have cost more.
There is something worth sitting with here. Not because the feeling is wrong, and not because it is right, but because feelings like this tend to be about more than what they name. What is the suspicion protecting? What is it anxious to preserve? What older question is it trying, in its way, to answer?
These are not questions a checklist can settle, and they are older than AI. People have been asking some version of them every time a tool arrives that changes what a person is capable of being. Before we look at how they've asked it — and how often they got it wrong, which is in some ways beside the point — sit with the question itself, in five movements.
The Athenians preserved Theseus's ship by replacing each rotting plank as it failed. After enough years, no original wood remained. The wheel below represents the vessel's planks — each one ages, is replaced, and begins its own slow aging again. Watch it move on its own, or drag the slider to travel through its years yourself.
That is the first of five movements. The puzzle turns inward, then toward the machine — a figure made of circulating matter, a dial for authorship, the mirror in the tool, and the questions none of it answers.
Read the full essayWhat can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.Christopher Hitchens
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.Carl Sagan
Most of what's written about AI in medicine is about efficiency. Faster notes, cleaner charts, better triage. That matters. It's also not the whole story.
AI can be an instrument — one that helps people manifest the thing they've carried for years and never quite knew how to get it out. Writers who weren't sure they were writers. Musicians who never really practiced but felt the music. Painters with no brushes. (Ok, OK — I think you, the reader, get the point.) The bottleneck between imagination and expression is getting thinner, and that turns out to be its own quiet revolution.
This section (just like this very website) is a slow, ongoing exploration and experiment of what that means — and what psychiatrists, of all people, might have to say about it. Disclaimer: No 5ht2a receptor agonists were used in the conceptualization, creation or editing of this website.
A 130-second visual essay on depression, intervention, and the network finding its shape again. Asynchrony, reorganization, resynchronization — three movements rendered as a living network.
A child's painting, a conversation, and the code that built it — three panels held in a single frame. Paint breathes; the process is part of the work; the apparatus is part of the painting.
To observe is to entangle; to touch is to be touched. A form annealed across seven drafts — meet it and it scatters, re-anneals, and is never quite the same. The mark of the encounter lingers. Its error approaches zero but never arrives.
A 220-second meditation on free will. One neutrino, eight minutes out of the Sun, threads a single neuron — one sodium channel catches fire, a spike becomes a storm, and at the end a hand reaches for the spoon and asks whether it chose. The Hodgkin–Huxley equations do the deciding; the question is who, if anyone, is left over.
Six panels in gold and umber, hung on a single thread. A corridor, a caravan, a bridge that ends mid-river, a door standing open in the sky — every one a way across. What crossed, and what was crossed, the panels keep to themselves.
A living study in resonance. A spectral hypersphere folds slowly around a single source while harmonics are woven into light; nudge the fundamental, the detune, the drift, and the field settles into an entirely different atmosphere. Sound on. Move slowly. Stay a while.
An instrument with a memory. Plant a note, weave a connection, stir in a little uncertainty — the garden grows from what you give it, and your gestures become its habits. Choose Listen and it sings what you have made. Come back tomorrow and it will remember you — on this browser, at least. Nothing here is finished; it is only ever attended to.
“I'm reaching up and reaching out.
I'm reaching for the random
or whatever will bewilder me.
Whatever will bewilder me.”Tool, “Lateralus”
This page is itself the demonstration — built end-to-end through psychiatrist-AI collaboration, including the part you're reading right now. Code, copy, visual design. The content created here wouldn't exist in this form without the tools we so curiously explore and with which we experiment. Below is an interactive demonstration of what happens when you remove the substrate from a thing made of code.
Family, mentors, and the long lineage of voices that taught me how to think, how to make, and why it matters.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.T.S. Eliot
A working collection of voices, books, and films — the ones that have shaped how I think about intelligence, mind, and what we are becoming. Or maybe what we have always been.