Glossary

Agent Memory

Durable context that an LLM agent can read and update across sessions.

Active Learning

Learning where the learner transforms information through comparison, evaluation, explanation, mapping, retrieval, or application.

Compiled Wiki

The synthesized knowledge layer produced from raw sources and prior outputs.

Bear Hunter System

The user’s main encoding system for turning new material into a structured map through inquiry, investigation, and refinement.

Deep Processing

Meaning-making operations that connect information into durable, usable schemas.

Dimensions of Learning

The central study-system model: Deep Processing, Self-Management, Self-Regulation, Mindset, and Retrieval.

Kolbs Experiential Cycle

A reflection cycle for turning experience into better experiments through reflection, abstraction, and action.

Marginal Gains

A method for choosing small, compounding improvements that move a larger goal forward.

Health Check

A maintenance pass that finds gaps, contradictions, stale pages, orphan pages, and unsupported claims.

Metacognition

Awareness and control of one’s own thinking processes during learning or problem solving.

Mindset

The interpretive layer for difficulty, feedback, mistakes, identity, and growth.

Retrieval

The active reconstruction and use of knowledge before checking a source.

Self-Management

The systems for time, tasks, focus, energy, habits, and environment that make learning executable.

Self-Regulation

The control process of monitoring learning, diagnosing gaps, and adjusting strategy.

Spaced Interleaved Retrieval

A retrieval system that mixes recall, widening delays, varied contexts, and gap repair.

WPW

A whole-part-whole retrieval method for testing both big-picture structure and detailed recall.

Passive Learning

Learning behavior where the learner consumes or records information without meaningfully transforming it.

Raw Source

Original or near-original material used as evidence, stored under raw/.

Source Note

A metadata-rich markdown file describing a source, its claims, relevance, and compilation status.

Working Memory

The limited mental workbench used to hold and manipulate information during thinking, encoding, and retrieval.

Global Workspace

A limited-capacity broadcast buffer that makes selected information available across the whole system; the leading cognitive-science model of conscious access, closely tied to working memory.

Access Consciousness

Information being globally available for reasoning, report, and control — the functional sense of “conscious,” distinct from subjective feel (phenomenal consciousness).

J-space

In Anthropic’s interpretability work, the small set of a language model’s internal patterns — each standing for a word it is poised to say — that carry its deliberate reasoning; the model-side analogue of a global workspace.

J-lens

Anthropic’s tool for reading the J-space: for every word in the model’s vocabulary it finds the internal pattern that makes the model likelier to say that word later, averaged across many contexts.

Functional Component

A Chinese character part classified by the job it does in one specific character: form, meaning, sound, or empty. The same shape can hold different jobs in different characters.

Form Component

A character component that contributes by depicting something; the picture, not a sound or sense, does the work.

Meaning Component

A character component that contributes an abstract extension of its concrete original sense to the host character.

Sound Component

A character component that points at the host’s pronunciation as a syllable range — rarely the exact reading, almost never the tone.

Empty Component

A character component doing no sound or meaning work in a given character; usually a distinguishing mark or the residue of historical corruption.

Sound Series

The family of characters sharing one sound component, related through seven groups of initials that share a place of articulation.

Semantic Series

The set of characters sharing one meaning component, used to map that component’s range of senses across siblings.

Meaning Tree

A character-entry structure that roots every sense in the original meaning, marks loan senses as off-tree, and gives each reading its own tree.

Original Meaning

The sense a character’s form was created to write; the root that makes later senses derivable instead of memorized.

Fence Principle

An authoritative statement that two readings are related lets the brain accept and absorb sound connections it would otherwise silently reject.

Rebus Principle

Borrowing an existing character to write an unrelated word that sounds the same; explains many apparent component mismatches, and the borrowing story doubles as the mnemonic.

Pipelining (Character Intake)

Staggering a character’s spoken word and written form across overlapping three-session cohorts so forms attach to already-overlearned words.