Topic1 article7 papers17 research documents9 concepts8 open problems
McLuhan & media theory
The record's largest line of work: a seven-paper series that takes McLuhan's "sense ratios" literally, the research documents that test it, and the concepts it named. They share one question: whether the balance of the senses is a physiological fact that media, drugs and illness each re-temper.
Writing
8KrasisThe synthesis of the series. McLuhan said every medium changes the ratio among our senses; the paper series tests that literally, from ADHD and typing to drugs and addiction, and find one configuration that media, drugs and illness all re-temper.Paper5 Oct9 references · 12 minExocrasisThe computing environment, not the screen, is the medium: keyboard, memory, search and network move part of the configuration of the senses and of memory outside the body.Paper5 Oct25 references · 16 minHeterocrasisADHD as a different starting balance of the senses. The strongest difference is in overall gain; the body and inner speech are mixed; binding is not looser.Paper5 Oct31 references · 16 minPharmakrasisEach class of drug sets its own balance of the senses — and the evidence for that is better than for any medium. When a drug meets a medium, as music does in psychedelic therapy, the two make a third thing.Paper5 Oct20 references · 18 minNarcocrasisIn dependence, what goes unseen is not the drug but the shifted baseline: the allostatic state is the medium, the drug its content. Two routes back — one turns the gain down, one makes the ground visible.Paper5 Oct40 references · 28 minTypomoraMcLuhan said electric media would bring back the voice. For fifty years computers made us type instead. The delay was the keyboard, not a mistake in the theory — and it is ending.Paper4 Oct39 references · 22 minSensory syncrasisMcLuhan meant his "sense ratios" literally. The brain science he reached for failed; predictive processing now gives the idea a mechanism, a name and five tests.Paper4 Oct38 references · 20 minThe counter-irritant spiral: McLuhan, Hans Selye, and relief that deepens the need for reliefIn 1964 McLuhan, reading the stress researcher Hans Selye, described relief that deepens the need for relief "like a drug habit." What users stop noticing is not the drug but their own shifted baseline.Article1 Oct24 quotes · 8 min
Concepts named here
9The visual detourThe internet from about 1990 to 2022 as a fifty-year swing back toward print — screens of text and keyboards — inside the longer return to speech that McLuhan predicted, now ending as voice interfaces take over.Concept10 OctNarcocrasisIn drug dependence, the part a person stops noticing is not the drug but their own shifted baseline: flatter pleasures, a restless body, a raised stress tone. The drug feels like the fix; the changed baseline feels like how the world is.Concept5 OctAnacrasisRecovery as re-setting that baseline, not only removing the drug. The ancient Greek word anakrasis meant mixing with others, and the evidence points the same way: what helps the reset last is other people.Concept5 OctPharmakrasisEvery class of drug sets its own characteristic balance of the senses: cannabis speeds felt time, ketamine loosens the sense of owning a body, LSD deepens the response to music. A drug, on this view, is a technology of the senses, like a medium but more direct.Concept5 OctHeterocrasisPeople start from different balances of the senses before any medium touches them. ADHD may be one such starting point, most clearly in how loudly the brain turns all its signals up or down.Concept5 OctExocrasisPart of how we sense and remember now lives outside the body, in keyboards, search, saved files and the network. The computing environment holds some of the balance the brain used to hold.Concept5 OctSensory syncrasisThe whole configuration of how the brain blends its senses: how much it trusts each one, how loud it turns them all, whether it fuses or separates them, the balance between body and world, and how long a setting lasts. From the Greek root of idiosyncrasy.Concept4 OctTypomoraThe typed delay in McLuhan's predicted return to voice: fifty years in which the keyboard, not the medium, kept networked communication typographic. Typos, type, and mora, delay — also the unit of spoken time.Concept4 OctEpanaphonyThe return of voice as the way we put language into machines — dictation, voice notes, talking to AI — that closes the typomora. Oral in production, typographic in storage.Concept4 Oct
Open problems
8Where does speaking start to beat typing?There is no established academic literature using the specific term "friction threshold" for voice.Open problem10 OctDoes naming a feeling work the way McLuhan said language works?Based on this search pass: no published work explicitly bridges McLuhan's medium-of-media theory of language to either Lieberman's affect-labeling neuroscience or Barkley/Vygotsky inner-speech theory.Open problem10 OctCan the tetrad forecast what AI turns into?The tetrad has been little applied to the major artifacts of the present: large language models, recommender systems, the smartphone-plus-app stack, cryptocurrency, the cloud, augmented reality.Open problem10 OctDid the text-internet generation think differently from the video one?No study compares a typographic-internet cohort with a video-internet cohort.Open problem9 OctDoes talking to an AI change how you think?No peer-reviewed study tests how voice conversation with an AI affects memory, composition or thinking. The one widely cited study of AI and thinking was typed, and is an unreviewed preprint.Open problem4 OctDoes typing weaken speaking?No study shows that heavy typing degrades speech production, or that heavy speaking improves typed composition. Whether practice in one carries over to the other is untested.Open problem4 OctDoes dictation train speech?No peer-reviewed study shows that dictation or speech-to-text improves unaided spoken fluency or confidence. Speech-recognition feedback does improve pronunciation, which makes it a testable idea.Open problem4 OctDo screens shift the balance of the senses?Nobody has measured whether what children watch or play changes which sense dominates when sight and sound compete — the closest measurable form of McLuhan's sense ratio.Open problem4 Oct
Research
17Typomora: Neuroscience, Naming and Framing for Paper 3The neuroscience: Literacy measurably changes the brain. Dehaene et al. (2010, Science) found increased responses to letters in the visual word form area (VWFA), a small displacement of face responses, and enhanced…Research pass4 Oct7 claims · 20+ sourcesThe Computing Environment and Sensory Syncrasis: Evidence Review for Paper 2What the environment tunes toward: an outward-facing, fast-switching, offloaded mode. Readers calibrate less carefully and process expository text more shallowly on screens (g ≈ −0.21). Memory shifts toward external stores…Evidence review4 Oct7 verdicts · 50+ sourcesSensory Syncrasis Evidence Base: Screens (Paper A) and ADHD (Paper B)Paper A (Screens): Change is real but mostly domain-specific and often enhancing. Action video games causally improve perceptual and attentional skills (Bediou et al. 2018: g = 0.34 in intervention studies, g = 0.55…Evidence review4 Oct12 verdicts · 60+ sourcesThe Precision Ratio, Revisited: Why "Ratio" Is Half Right, and What to Call the WholeNaming studyNaming study4 Oct5 dimensions · 30+ sourcesThe Medium Becomes the Ground: McLuhan and the Allostatic Model of Addiction (rebuilt)Work linking McLuhan to drugs and addiction exists only at the level of discourse and metaphor. The nearest example is Hartogsohn & Vudka (2023, Transcultural Psychiatry), which is about smartphone "addiction" and McLuhan's…Research pass4 Oct7 coinages · 30+ sourcesThe Medium Becomes the Ground: Foundation Research on Sense Ratios, Precision, Interoception, Allostasis and AddictionHistoriography: McLuhan stated in physiological terms that media "alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance," funded and ran media-comparison experiments in the 1950s, and in…Research4 Oct0 figures · 11 sourcesPrice Without Discovery: From Market Signal to Algorithmic InstructionThe lead thesis is sound and publishable: for two centuries the price was understood as an emergent signal no one sets (Hayek, 1945); algorithmic, dynamic, and surveillance pricing increasingly make the price computed and…Research27 Sep23 figures · 5 sourcesAfter the Net Comes Up: Tom Tyler's "Procrustean Probe," the Tetrad Debate, and What CANOPTICON Should Do After IngestionTom Tyler's point is more useful than a simple "the tetrad is vague.ResearchSep5 figures · 23 sourcesNet-Casting: A Practice for Turning AI Research Into a Generative, Mind-Changing CraftThe core finding is that AI research agents drift toward consensus by default, so novelty does not come from better questions alone.ResearchSep5 figures · 25 sourcesThe Network That Is the Model: Architectures for a Generative-Substrate Social MediumThe most ambitious version is buildable in fragments today but not as a monolith: no existing platform makes a continuously-learning generative model the core substrate of a human social network.ResearchSep7 figures · 5 sourcesHow NotebookLM Constructs Coherent Narratives — and How to Replicate It for Video-Essay ScriptsNotebookLM does not use a published, special "argument-structuring algorithm.ResearchSep5 figures · 15 sourcesThe Price Frontier: From Discovery to Administration — A CANOPTICON Research BriefCanada the technology "wins" have NOT cleanly offset the housing/food "losses," because the risers are non-substitutable necessities that dominate household budgets and have outrun wages over 2000–2026.Build briefSep32 figures · 6 sources
All 17 in the LibraryQuestions it raises
1Key figures
11Zhao et al.'s audit of 111 million references across 2.5 million papers in arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN and PubMed Central gave "a conservative estimate of 146,932 hallucinated citations in 2025 alone."After the Net Comes Up: Tom Tyler's "Procrustean Probe," the Tetrad Debate, and What CANOPTICON Should Do After Ingestion111 millionIn a 2026 paper, Artiles et al. showed that when Claude Opus 4.7 was asked for novel-yet-feasible idea combinations, its ten most-used concepts appeared in 95.7% of outputs.Net-Casting: A Practice for Turning AI Research Into a Generative, Mind-Changing Craft95.7%Laukkonen, Kaveladze, Tangen and Schooler showed in a preregistered study ("The dark side of Eureka," Cognition, 2020) that an "Aha!" moment triggered by solving an unrelated anagram made false statements feel truer (n = 300, d =.629).Net-Casting: A Practice for Turning AI Research Into a Generative, Mind-Changing Craftn = 300Population-level associations with well-being are tiny (≤0.4% of variance; Orben & Przybylski 2019).Sensory Syncrasis Evidence Base: Screens (Paper A) and ADHD (Paper B)0.4%The single strongest design in Paper A is the outdoor-time myopia RCT (He et al. 2015: 30.4% vs 39.5% 3-year incidence), but it concerns near-work and light, not screens per se.Sensory Syncrasis Evidence Base: Screens (Paper A) and ADHD (Paper B)30.4% vs 39.5%Gould's IBM studies found dictated letters equal in quality to written ones after a few hours of practice; in Gould (1981), "text-edited letters required 50% more time to compose than did written letters."Typomora: Neuroscience, Naming and Framing for Paper 3 (the Typed Delay and the Return of Voice)50%Rogowsky, Calhoun & Tallal (2016) found no comprehension or retention difference across audiobook, e-text and dual modality (n = 91).Typomora: Neuroscience, Naming and Framing for Paper 3 (the Typed Delay and the Return of Voice)n = 91Before the mid-19th century, most retail buying in America was done by haggling; merchants intentionally withheld a fixed price (if a merchant thought he could get $10 for an axe, he would not let you see a $7 price).Price Without Discovery: From the Signal to the Instruction$10
All 11 in the LibraryWorks the research cites
15Books and other dated works named in this topic's research documents, by year. Each document pill opens the passage that cites it.
1962
1963
1964
Understanding Media · McLuhan
Research Pass for "The Medium Becomes the Ground": Evidence Map for Seven Theoretical ClaimsThe Acoustic Return: A Research Pass on McLuhan, Voice Interfaces, and the Fifty-Year Visual DetourA Comprehensive Map of Marshall McLuhan's Thought: Concepts, Neuroscience, Unexplored Territory, and Critical ReceptionDeep Research Pass: "The Medium Becomes the Ground"
1967
The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects · McLuhan & Fiore
1981
1982
Orality and Literacy · Ong
The Acoustic Return: A Research Pass on McLuhan, Voice Interfaces, and the Fifty-Year Visual DetourA Comprehensive Map of Marshall McLuhan's Thought: Concepts, Neuroscience, Unexplored Territory, and Critical ReceptionThe Examined Cognition: Substrates of Metacognition and Methods for Looking at the Looking
1988
Laws of Media · McLuhan
After the Net Comes Up: Tom Tyler's "Procrustean Probe," the Tetrad Debate, and What CANOPTICON Should Do After IngestionNet-Casting: A Practice for Turning AI Research Into a Generative, Mind-Changing CraftA Comprehensive Map of Marshall McLuhan's Thought: Concepts, Neuroscience, Unexplored Territory, and Critical ReceptionDeep Research Pass: "The Medium Becomes the Ground"The Examined Cognition: Substrates of Metacognition and Methods for Looking at the Looking
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