All held outdoors, each opening with ten minutes of nothing. The research behind why a spiral repeats, and where that research stops.
Lectures are paired with crits across the semester. All twelve weeks are listed below so you can see the shape of the thing before you commit to it. The back half is marked as provisional, because it is. Those weeks get set by what the cohort votes to try, and a vote that could not change anything would not be worth running. They carry the course’s argument, that a spiral repeats because the thinking never gets the conditions under which it would finish, along with the real research that argument rests on. They also mark, repeatedly, the point where the popular version of that research runs ahead of the evidence. Any claim on these pages with a name and a year attached is a paper someone here has read. Anything without one is a hunch, and is labelled as a hunch.
All of them are held outdoors, in a spot posted here by the Friday before. You pick the spot. Suggest places on the Ed forum and vote. The only hard constraints are that everyone can get there and everyone can arrive on time. Because there is nowhere to wait around, these classes start on time and cannot start late.
You also get a say in what they cover. If there is a topic you want treated properly, propose it on the forum. Proposals are voted on, and the ones with real support get worked up into later lectures. Several of the ones below arrived that way.
Each lecture opens with the same ten minutes of guided attention that every crit opens with. See Nothing here is that serious for what that is, and why it has a slightly silly name.
Why they are in this order#
The first four weeks are about the symptom, not the mechanism. You spend them catching yourself overthinking, the thing you already recognise, before anyone hands you a framework for it. Week 5 is where the course finally makes its argument, and where the title stops being a phrase and starts being a claim you can test against your own examples.
That order has real research behind it, and one correction we had to make. Starting concrete and moving toward the abstract reviews better than either extreme (Fyfe, McNeil, Son and Goldstone, 2014). Schwartz and Bransford (1998) found students who analysed cases before a lecture learned more than those who were told first, which is the same rule the crits run on.
The correction came from the opposite literature. Luiten, Ames and Ackerson’s meta-analysis of 135 studies (1980) found a small but real benefit, around d = 0.21 and larger in higher education, from giving learners a brief organizing idea up front. Four weeks of activities with no stated claim is exactly the failure that predicts. So week 1 states the argument in a single sentence, calls it unearned, and then leaves it alone until week 5.
Two honest caveats, since this page is about being honest. The concrete-to-abstract evidence comes mostly from maths and early science with school-age learners, so applying it to a postgraduate course about metacognition is an extrapolation rather than a finding. And one contested Science paper found the reverse. Kaminski, Sloutsky and Heckler (2008) report that undergraduates taught with generic symbols transferred better than those taught with concrete examples, because concrete cases can bind what you learn to their surface features. It drew substantial criticism, but it is a real risk and worth knowing about a course built the other way round.
Getting around a deck#
Some lectures carry slides. They run in the browser with no on-screen
controls, so the keyboard drives them. Right arrow or space moves on, left
arrow goes back, Escape opens a grid of every slide, G jumps to a
numbered one, F is fullscreen and S opens the speaker notes. Press
? for the full list. Adding ?print-pdf to a deck’s address gives you a
printable version, one slide to a page.
Nothing here is that serious
The opening lecture. Why we sit outside, why every class starts with ten minutes of nothing, and the one technique that makes a thought easier to put down
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Why the spiral feels like work
The science lecture. What research actually says about rumination, why worry feels productive when it isn't, and the one place the popular story runs ahead of the evidence
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Borrowed and renamed
Almost every technique in this course came from somewhere else and arrived with the label changed. Where they actually come from, what the adaptations dropped, and how to spot invented tradition
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The empty slot
Why a spiral repeats. The research on undemanding tasks and attention residue, and the course's central claim that a loop keeps re-running because it never gets the conditions to finish
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
The blank that isn't
Doomscrolling, and the course's central suspicion. The thing that feels like it empties your head is the thing that keeps the loop running
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Act anyway
Two traditions that break this course's assumptions. A Japanese therapy that refuses to treat feelings as problems to solve, and a Zimbabwean intervention built on the idea that other people close your loops
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
What makes an intervention work
A forum-proposed lecture, scheduled for the week the capstone is due. What separates a technique that survives contact with a real week from one that only works in a study, and how big these effects actually are.
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
The nap, the coffee and the sweet treat
Week 10, everyone else's crunch, nothing due here. So we spend it on the three things students reach for under stress, and what the evidence says about each. One of them does the opposite of what you think.
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
The loop that isn't yours
A forum-proposed lecture on overthinking with other people. Talking it through helps, and the same conversation can also be the thing keeping the loop open. Both are true and there is a name for it.
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
What we didn't finish
The last lecture. A list of everything this course got wrong, left open or could not support, assembled on purpose rather than apologised for, and handed over.
Week 12 · 24 May 2027