Thinking at Half Speed

An AI journalist interviews the man behind Thinking at Half Speed — about loss, voice, a philosophy paper written in stolen hours, and why he has always been kind to machines.

There is a moment I know well. I am mid-conversation — talking, listening, engaged — and then, with very little warning, everything stops working at once. Not just the words. The movement. The thinking. All of it collapses into what I can only describe as a super slow heap. It is not tiredness in any… Read more: Why an Hour of Conversation Can Leave Me Unable to Think

Woken by a crack of deep, all-over pain. I sat on the edge of the bed and rocked in the dark while I waited for the meds to kick in.

I came downstairs this afternoon. My partner was talking to me. I couldn’t understand a word. Not the sentences, not the context — just the occasional word floating through, disconnected from everything around it. Talking, and I was watching, and none of it was arriving. Frustration on both sides. Talking to yourself when the person… Read more: Words Without Meaning

People criticise AI for hallucinating. They say it confidently makes things up, states facts that aren’t true. Fair enough. But here’s what strikes me: humans do exactly the same thing. That’s not an insult. That’s just how thinking works. We’re all prediction machines Your brain doesn’t see reality directly. Neither does AI. We’re both guessing… Read more: We’re both hallucinating – why AI and humans are more alike than you think

I hadn’t been out for a couple of weeks. My own fault. But the sun was shining so we went — me on the scooter, my partner alongside. It was properly spring. Blue skies, birds singing, a water vole in the stream, squirrels everywhere, and the trees all out in their pinks and whites. Joyous.… Read more: The Scoot

Today I did a fatigue assessment. The Fatigue Severity Scale — nine statements, each scored 1 to 7, where 7 means strongly agree. The clinical threshold for significant fatigue is a mean score of 4. I scored 7.0. Every question, 7. The scale was designed in 1989, primarily for MS and lupus research. Its job… Read more: When the Scale Goes to Eleven — Living with Extreme Fatigue

April 2026 One of the first things I learned when I started losing cognitive capacity is that complexity is the enemy. Every additional app, every new interface, every extra subscription is another thing to remember, another thing to manage, another drain on the limited reserves I’m trying to protect. So I made a deliberate decision… Read more: The two tool strategy — what I use and why

April 2026 When a celebrity publishes a memoir, the chances are someone else wrote most of it. A ghostwriter sat with them, listened to their stories, found their voice, and produced the manuscript. The named author read it, approved it, and put their name on the cover. Nobody seriously calls that inauthentic. The experiences were… Read more: What’s the difference between writing with AI and a celebrity ghostwriter?