AI as the Cognitive Prosthesis for the Firehose Mind

Every creative person has a boneyard—a drawer, a folder, a mental attic filled with brilliant but unfinished projects. Mine’s a little different. It’s not a lack of ideas—it’s the terror of the blank page amid a mind overflowing with them. I call it the Firehose Mind.

It’s a cognitive style where the problem isn’t inspiration but translation. My thoughts cascade—one idea links to a forgotten book, triggers a childhood memory, then loops into a theory of astrophysics. The connections are fast and relentless. Trying to catch just one, to fix it in place, feels impossible.

This isn’t just a personal quirk; it’s a known philosophical dilemma. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig describes how Phaedrus is undone by an “explosion of questions,” each branching into more until the sheer complexity fractures him. That’s the firehose at full blast: paralyzing, overwhelming, brilliant—and stuck. The system I’m building isn’t a clinical treatment. It’s a personal experiment, and the only proof I have is that it works for me.

What if the goal isn’t to slow the flow, but to build a better channel? This project explores a new kind of creative partnership—a structured dialogue with AI as a cognitive prosthesis. A tool to help the firehose mind do what it does best: build vast, intricate, deeply personal worlds. Prompt by prompt… Conversation by conversation…

I cannot conclusively say who the author of this project is, but I consider everything you are about to read to be authored by me—a human—in close collaboration with a Large Language Model (LLM), more commonly known as AI.