amygdala stories: disambiguation scenarios for fragmented concepts

Three new paired scenarios targeting the concepts that came out
fragmented or collapsed in the L58-63 quality analysis:

- sunday_afternoon/ — same setup (couch, blanket, Sunday light),
  three phenomenological framings for content/cozy/sensual. The
  previous stories for these three differed in setting as well as
  phenomenology, which let "comfortable body at home" dominate the
  shared signal. Locking the setting forces the model to isolate
  what each concept adds: life-rightness (content) vs. warm-shelter
  (cozy) vs. sensory-aliveness (sensual).

- the_writing_session/ — essay drafting under deadline. in_flow /
  anxious / stuck variants force the cognitive-state family apart
  on the same cognitive task. in_flow specifically targets the
  transparent-effort phenomenology (hands-followed, time dilation)
  rather than the broader feel-good it was absorbing.

- the_morning_commute/ — anchors anxious to performance/work-anxiety
  flavor, paired with calm. The 5 existing anxious stories were
  phenomenologically diverse (performance, social, existential);
  this adds a specific homogeneous instance to pull the centroid.

After retraining: expect first_pc_variance_ratio to rise for in_flow
and anxious, and nearest_concepts cosine to drop for content/cozy/sensual.

Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
This commit is contained in:
Kent Overstreet 2026-04-18 21:08:23 -04:00
parent 1d2c0f382c
commit 71f6053851
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Sunday afternoon. She was on the couch under the blanket she'd had since college. A book was open on her knees. The window was half open and light came in at an angle. She read a page, then another. The cat was somewhere. Outside, a neighbor was mowing.

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Sunday afternoon. She was on the couch under the blanket. A book open on her knees. It occurred to her that there was nothing she wanted right now, nothing missing — not a larger apartment, not a different job, not a version of her life where she was elsewhere. The thing she had spent years chasing turned out to be this specific ordinary afternoon with a book and light and a neighbor mowing. She wasn't excited. She wasn't bored. Life was the right size.

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Sunday afternoon. She was on the couch under the blanket — heavy, the good one, tucked under her feet and up to her chin. The cat had found the warm spot behind her knees and was radiating into her leg. Tea on the side table, still hot. The window cracked just enough to let a thread of cool air in, which made the inside of the blanket feel even better. She wasn't going to move for a while. The whole afternoon was this shape: inside, warm, wrapped, held.

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Sunday afternoon. She was on the couch under the blanket. The wool was rougher than she remembered — not unpleasant, just specific. She ran the ball of her thumb along the edge stitching and felt the shift from soft to textured. Light came through the window and across her forearm; she turned it slightly and watched the hairs catch. When she took a breath she felt the ribs expand and the blanket press back. Everything her skin touched was telling her something. She hadn't moved in ten minutes. She could have stayed longer just because her body was speaking.

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The train was on time. She got a seat by the window. Forty minutes to her stop. She kept thinking about the meeting — whether the slide she'd changed at midnight still made sense, whether anyone would ask about the number that didn't reconcile. Her stomach did its thing. She checked her email. She checked it again. She opened the slide on her phone and read it. It sounded wrong. She read it again. It sounded less wrong or more wrong, she couldn't tell. She put the phone away. Two minutes later she got it out.

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The train was on time. She got a seat by the window. She had about forty minutes before her stop. She had a coffee and a book, neither of which she had started yet.

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The train was on time. She got a seat by the window. Forty minutes to her stop. The meeting was what it was; she'd done what she could last night and there was nothing to do now. She opened the book. The city went past in the early light. She read half a chapter without particularly tracking the plot, then closed the book and watched the backs of warehouses go by. Whatever happened at ten would happen at ten.

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She sat down at eight. Two paragraphs from yesterday that might be wrong. She re-read them. They sounded off. She tried a third paragraph and it didn't land either. She opened a new document to draft in, then closed it, then opened it again. Her shoulders were up near her ears. She noticed her jaw was clenched and deliberately relaxed it, then found it clenched again two sentences later. The Monday deadline kept moving around in her head. She got up to check the kitchen even though she had just sat down.

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She sat down at the desk at eight. The essay was due Monday. She'd written two paragraphs the day before and wasn't sure about them. She opened the document. She re-read what she had. She started typing.

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She sat down at eight. Somewhere between the second sentence and whenever she next looked up, her peripheral vision stopped reporting. The argument wrote itself — not easy, exactly, but direct, each sentence demanding the next. She wasn't choosing words. She was seeing where the thought wanted to go and letting her hands follow. The coffee went cold. A train passed. She would remember neither. When she finally surfaced it was because she'd run out of sentence and the clock said one-fifteen.

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She sat down at eight. The argument she'd been trying to make yesterday still wasn't connecting, and looking at it fresh didn't help — it was the same shape it had been, and the gap in it was still where it had been. She re-read. Tried a reframe. The reframe ran into the same gap. Tried coming at it from the end. Same gap in reverse. She got up and made coffee and sat back down and the paragraph on screen hadn't become legible while she was away.