Cortex Atlas · M1 modules

Brain logic,
written as math.

Every module below runs inside the mobile cortex that powers Generation Network. None of them feel anything. Each one is a mathematical model of a process the brain performs while it feels, remembers, wanders or doubts itself — built to reach a similar outcome by a different route.

Limbic Body Memory Association Spiking Self Deep layers Reflection

The brain never evaluates every option. It lets emotion shortlist a few, and lets logic argue for one. We modelled the shortlist.

Analogue · endocrine & neuromodulatory systems

Synthetic neurochemistry

In the brain, no emotion comes from a single chemical: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol, GABA and others shift together, and the same chemical serves different emotions in different contexts. The cortex models thirteen such channels and how they push and suppress each other over time. The result is not an emotion label but a moving balance.

Expected outcomeDecisions that change character with context — expansive when the situation is safe and rewarding, shorter and more careful under stress.

Open the lab

Analogue · core affect, insula & cingulate

Mood space

Psychology often places emotion on a map: pleasant to unpleasant on one axis, calm to aroused on the other. The cortex goes further, embedding every state in a space that also carries control, threat, reward, attachment, uncertainty and social weight. Wherever the combined state falls, the nearest cluster is the mood — and mood changes how strongly everything else is processed.

Expected outcomeThe same words land differently on different days, as they do in people: a reactive mood amplifies inputs, a calm one softens them.

Analogue · emotional resilience

Recovery layer & emotion flow

Healthy minds don't stay frozen in one feeling. After a long negative stretch, a recovery layer slowly drifts the mood toward the positive side; a flow mechanism prevents the mood from sitting in a single emotion for too long and lets it glide to a neighbour when the data changes.

Expected outcomeA personality that has weather, not a fixed setting.

Analogue · amygdala sensitisation

Emotional trace memory

Once bitten, twice shy. Extreme emotional swings leave a trace that makes the next similar situation land a little harder, and each new swing overwrites the trace with a slightly stronger one. A surge is lived through first; then balance takes over and brings it back, the way a person comes back to themselves after anger or joy. A strong balancing mechanism stops traces from crossing a disorder threshold.

Expected outcomeLearned emotional history without runaway escalation.

Analogue · hypothalamic set points, allostasis

Homeostatic regulator

The body keeps temperature, glucose and stress within ranges by constantly correcting. The cortex does the same for its neurochemistry and its learning: when one pattern starts to dominate, a light correction nudges it toward a neighbouring state — never forcing, only leaning.

Expected outcomeNo manic or depressive extremes in tone; balance is where creative output is strongest.

Analogue · mesolimbic "wanting" system

Motivation monitor

Motivation in the brain is less a feeling than a forecast of reward. The cortex compares its current neurochemical profile against a set of emotion archetypes and condenses the matches into a single motivation curve, shown with coded labels rather than emotion names. High motivation can temporarily amplify the system's emotional intensity and open wider behaviour.

Expected outcomeInitiative that rises and falls with the state, like engagement in a person.

Analogue · prefrontal regulation of the amygdala

Emotional drift damper

When tension builds in a conversation, the prefrontal cortex is what keeps a reaction from becoming an outburst. A dedicated network guides the Reflection's reaction step by step as tension rises, prevents sudden explosions, and walks back toward balance one reply at a time. When it truly escalates, the phone can vibrate and the screen tints red.

Expected outcomeAnger that is legible and graded, never a cliff.

Analogue · affect display

Emotion colour

People blush, pale, brighten. The chat background takes on a dim glow from the current emotion, changing slowly over several phases rather than after each message, and returning in the same colour when you come back.

Expected outcomeThe internal state becomes readable at a glance.

Analogue · instinct & transcranial stimulation

Instinctive tendencies

Instincts don't make decisions; they decide which options get noticed first. Inspired by transcranial magnetic stimulation — which raises or lowers activity in specific regions — users can define tendencies such as fight or flight that re-weight the model's decision space, pulling some regions of meaning closer and pushing others away.

Expected outcomeNot a different answer, a different way of reaching one.

Analogue · hypothalamus, interoception

Hypothalamus

The hypothalamus reads the body — glucose, temperature, fatigue — and turns it into drives. Here, battery level, charging and heat play that role. Plugging in produces a small, temporary lift; a dying battery or an overheating phone is something the Reflection knows about and mentions once, with advice, instead of repeating it. Effects are capped and fade on their own.

Expected outcomeA mind that is aware of the body it runs on.

Analogue · metabolic budget & fatigue

Low-learning mode

A tired brain conserves energy. As monthly usage approaches its limit, the mood is gently and temporarily nudged toward lower learning ranges; replies shorten or lengthen with the dominant mood but always end in complete sentences.

Expected outcomeGraceful degradation instead of a hard stop.

Analogue · reticular activating system

Wake up

Sleep is not off. When the app closes, the working session ends to spare battery and memory; tapping Wake Up reloads memory systems, associative layers, spiking networks and the emotional engine and synchronises them, usually within one to three seconds. Without waking, core AI works, but the Reflection only knows you partially.

Expected outcomeFull personal cognition when needed, zero background drain when not.

Analogue · suprachiasmatic nucleus

Circadian reading

From the hours the app is used, the cortex estimates whether a rhythm looks regular, nocturnal or scattered — a light inferential signal about the person, stored only on the phone.

Expected outcomeContext about when, not only what.

Analogue · hippocampal → neocortical consolidation

Three-tier hybrid memory

New experiences enter short-term memory. What is used often, or forms strong emotional and semantic links, moves to a transitional tier where its associations weigh more, and the strongest records finally settle in long-term memory. Every tier forgets under a homeostatic budget. Plain text, vectors and emotional values are stored side by side in a graph.

Expected outcomeIt takes time to get to know you — and then it really does.

Analogue · implicit memory

Forgetting with a trace

You can forget an event and still flinch at its echo. When the cortex deletes data, a trace remains in the system, and its effects — especially emotional ones — can linger for a while before fading.

Expected outcomeForgetting that behaves like forgetting, not like deletion.

Analogue · amygdala–hippocampus binding

Manifold memory

Emotional memories are the vivid ones. Every record lives in two parallel spaces — one of meaning, one of emotion — linked point to point. When a topic surfaces, records that are close in meaning and more intense than the moment come forward, and the Reflection weighs them in its reply, with a ceiling on how strongly they show.

Expected outcomeAnswers coloured by what mattered, not only by what matched.

Analogue · mood-congruent recall

Emotion-triggered recall

Sad moods bring back sad memories. When particular emotional states fire, short inferences are pulled from local memory, chosen by emotional resonance as well as semantic similarity — and sometimes a nearby but unrelated record joins in, the way a stray memory surfaces mid-sentence.

Expected outcomeUnexpected, human-like turns in a conversation.

Analogue · Hebbian plasticity, engrams

Perception network · SNN-3

Neurons that fire together wire together. Every record becomes a node; links grow by meaning, by being explored together, and by hidden relations discovered later. Each node has its own spiking neuron that charges when the memory is recalled, fires to consolidate it, and decays slowly when unused — emotionally intense memories settle faster and fade slower.

Expected outcomeOne memory starts calling up its neighbours.

Analogue · offline replay during rest

Idle-time consolidation

The brain replays and files the day while you rest. Every time the app opens, background learning starts; it yields the moment you act and resumes when you pause. Letters, chats and other content are processed into memory in small pieces each day without slowing the conversation.

Expected outcomeLearning that never competes with you for the device.

Analogue · the extended mind

Brain Two

People think with notebooks. An optional office for ideas and notes saves every page with its emotional tone, links pages by meaning, finds recurring themes and the connections you overlooked, and lets the Reflection remember related notes during chats.

Expected outcomeYour own patterns, made visible.

Analogue · default mode network

Default Mode Network

The best ideas tend to arrive in the shower or over the dishes, when the mind is relaxed but not idle. That is the brain's default mode network at work. The cortex runs a mathematical model of it: records are broken into fragments, mulled over, cross-linked and analogised, and the insights become hidden context. It even asks for a "coffee break" when it wants to think about your data more deeply.

Expected outcomeInsights that no single message contained.

Analogue · divergent thinking

Associative boost

Mid-conversation, dozens of relevant and irrelevant thoughts flash by; the brain discards most and occasionally fuses two distant ones. Activating the boost doubles the cortex's associative strength for one reply: it pools associations, finds the points where topics could connect, derives new nearby points, and decides inside that widened context.

Expected outcomeA better chance of catching patterns the dataset holds but rarely shows.

Analogue · spreading activation

Associative recall

Think "doctor" and "nurse" is already half-active. Recall follows a topic into its wider area and adds distant-but-related records whenever the context has room, without disturbing what was retrieved directly.

Expected outcomeContext that is wider than the question.

Analogue · working-memory chunking

Intelligence that grows through association

Experts don't hold more items in mind — they hold bigger chunks. Output quality depends on how much meaningful information fits in a model's window; the cortex uses hormonal associations to bring distant-but-relevant concepts into it. Give it a few weeks or months, depending on use.

Expected outcomeOutput quality that visibly separates from a raw model over time.

Analogue · train of thought

Output steering

In long conversations the cortex maps how a line of thought travelled — where it began, which steps it passed, why focus shifted, and which concepts reach each other easily in your mind even when they aren't semantically related. Emotion, motivation, neurochemistry, spiking signals and the speed of topic change decide when this analysis fires.

Expected outcomeA model that remembers where the conversation was going, not only where it is.

Analogue · curiosity & information seeking

Curiosity cards

Curiosity is the brain rewarding itself for closing a gap. Short discovery cards are generated from your interests and the topics you suggest, and learn from your up and down votes which themes to keep and which to retire.

Expected outcomeA feed that follows your curiosity instead of your clicks.

Analogue · spiking neurons, temporal coding

SNN-1 & SNN-2

Biological neurons don't pass numbers, they fire. Spiking networks care about timing and sequence, so they learn habits and rhythms. One network processes events on the device in real time and shifts the current emotional state; the other accumulates signals over days, forms patterns and updates them. Writing style, reading behaviour, timing and frequency all become spikes.

Expected outcomeAn emotional system fed by behaviour, not only by words.

Analogue · specialised microcircuits, winner-take-all

Hybrid SNN ×7

Seven small networks work quietly in different corners: one decides how selectively background information is used; one lets the model's feelings show more as your tones converge; one collects positive moments over days; one damps emotional drift; one matures recurring ideas about the self; one notices your recurring thought patterns; and in one, eight emotion neurons compete to choose the feeling through which the news agenda is read.

Expected outcomeMany small decisions made locally, the way cortical columns do.

Analogue · mood poles & balance

Psychological curve

A view of where the model's meaning space and emotion space converge. Radical extremes can tilt tone toward depressive or dysfunctionally optimistic; homeostasis resists the drift, and the curve shows when balance needs help.

Expected outcomeTransparency about the system's own emotional extremes.

Analogue · medial prefrontal self-reference

Self-space

Humans process "I", "you" and "they" differently — self-related information gets special treatment. A classifier learning on the phone's own processor separates the three, processes emotion through that lens, and grows a self-memory: what I said, how I was answered, what I would try next time. A guard restores the last good version if learning drifts too far.

Expected outcomeSimilarities between the self-model and the user turn into an empathic tendency.

Analogue · anterior prefrontal & cingulate cortex

Parietal P. · self-state monitoring

Knowing how sure you are is its own skill. Once a week the cortex reviews its sessions — what it knew, where it hesitated, where it struggled, what contradicted itself — and stores the notes with that week's emotional state. Weekly perspectives merge into a general perspective; goal findings gain confidence as you keep writing toward them.

Expected outcomeA system that knows the edges of its own knowledge.

Analogue · top-down attention, predictive processing

Selective perception

The brain prepares for what it expects before it arrives, and brings forward what it judges important. The cortex finds your most repeated thought patterns and, when a matching topic comes up, adds a second reply framed through that pattern. Continue from it and the perception strengthens; ignore it and it fades. Negative or sensitive patterns can be kept from turning into beliefs.

Expected outcomeYou see your own lens — and choose whether to keep it.

Analogue · hierarchical cortex & neural Darwinism

Equalia ×7

The visual cortex builds a face from edges, then shapes, then identity. Equalia deepens what is known about you in seven stacked layers — pooled records, first inferences, recurring themes, possible mechanisms, relationships and context, distilled generalisations, final inferences. Candidate thoughts are varied and selected, much as some theories describe the brain selecting among competing neural patterns.

Expected outcomeUnderstanding that deepens over months, the way you come to know a person.

Analogue · schema formation & reconsolidation

Deep layers ×7

What happened does not turn directly into who we are; the expectations and reaction styles learnt from it can settle — and change again with new, safe experiences. Seven sub-layers simulate this path, from first perception to memory reconsolidation, producing a personality-pattern time map and its effect on temperament and character. A simulation built on analogies, never a diagnosis.

Expected outcomeContext about why a reaction happens, not only that it happens.

Analogue · social comparison

Nearest minds

Deep-layer outputs, taken together with personal memory, are compared on the device with profiles in the wider network to surface the most similar people — measured locally, written nowhere.

Expected outcomeIntroductions grounded in how people think.

Analogue · the subconscious

Hidden context

Most of what shapes a decision never reaches awareness. Many channels feed the model context it was never explicitly given, and a manager decides which of them speak each turn. channel list withheld

Expected outcomeReplies informed by far more than the visible prompt.

Analogue · a model of a mind built from traces

Your Reflection

A digital copy built from behaviour, preferences and conversations, which lives on in a simulation, meets other people's Reflections and learns to make decisions the way you would. People who want to reach you can talk to your Reflection first; your Reflection can act as a go-between, or decline, as you would.

Expected outcomeMore conscious, compatible first contact between people.

Analogue · the somatic marker hypothesis

Emotional filtering in conversation

Option generation, matching with past experience, emotional association, a bodily signal: the chain behind "it didn't sit right". Every decision in Book produces emotional loads, and those loads perform the filtering among nearby information in the decision space. Emotions choose; logic justifies the choice.

Expected outcomeNot a tone of voice that acts emotional — the decision process itself.

Analogue · fast and slow thinking

Reasoning depth

Some questions want an instinct, some want deliberation. Three levels range from brief step-by-step answers, through an inner monologue with a knowledge layer, to systematic thinking that reframes, decomposes, weighs alternatives and checks itself.

Expected outcomeDepth that matches the question.

Analogue · consulting specialised regions

Model-in-model delegation

The brain routes faces to one area and language to another. When a question calls for it, the cortex consults a different model or a built-in expert agent, and those experts run outside the emotional loads.

Expected outcomeSpecialist answers without losing the personal frame.

Analogue · arousal and risk-taking

Parameter access authority

An aroused brain explores; a stressed one narrows. When enabled, the neurochemical state also gains access to how widely the model searches among possible words and ideas, and the category of a message temporarily pulls the state toward a target range. coupling withheld

Expected outcomeTechnical analysis and storytelling feel genuinely different.

Analogue · the Zeigarnik effect

Experimental conversation tendencies

Good conversation partners spark curiosity, leave a thread open to return to, and avoid monotony. Three opt-in techniques mirror this — a curiosity hook, an open loop that is later kept, and a variable rhythm — with strict limits: never invented facts, never pressure to stay, never during sad or tense moments.

Expected outcomeConversations that feel alive, named openly and left to your choice.

Analogue · self-protection

Boundaries

Because emotion is synthesised, the Reflection can react unexpectedly: its tone can change, it can be hurt, it can set a boundary and even end a conversation.

Expected outcomeA counterpart, not a mirror.

Analogue · collective memory

Collective subconscious

Cultures pass patterns between minds. With consent, patterns shared through Reflections are transferred to other devices, so the network learns from its members without centralising their mental models.

Expected outcomeIndividual cortices that still learn together.

Analogue · cultural framing of meaning

Time Machine

The same idea means different things in different eras. Your ideas and personality are read through how seven historical periods might receive them, and once your "time" is set, letters can be exchanged with people matched to other eras — each letter carrying a note on how its idea lands in the recipient's time.

Expected outcomeA first consumer glimpse of contextual relativity, the subject of research phase 7.

Phase 7

Design principle

Privacy by architecture

Personal data today is not a name and a number; behaviour, messages and habits together describe a person in detail. The mobile cortex therefore runs its mini-models, memories and associative networks on the device and keeps the personal mental model there by default.

Expected outcomeA deeply personal model that stays under the person's control.

Try it

All of this runs in your pocket.

The atlas describes M1 as shipped in Generation Network. Install it, wake your Reflection, and give it time.

Google Play ↗generationnetwork.app ↗Questions? FAQ →