April Project : Beyond Reading & Writing in XR.
Introduction to where we are going, based on January and February dialog as well as further texts written by Frode Hegland in support of the spatial thinking work being done, co-written with Claude.ai which has access to all transcripts.
We have spent decades naming what we do with information. We read. We write. We search. We annotate. These words carry enormous weight — they encode centuries of cognitive practice, technology, and culture. But when we put on a headset and step into extended reality to work with knowledge, something happens that none of those words adequately describes. And the absence of a word for it is not a minor inconvenience. It is the central problem.
The Long Freeze
To understand what is new, we have to understand what we have been living with. Writing changed our species by freezing thought — fixing it outside the human body so it could persist across time and be shared across distance. As the ancients put it: Verba volant, scripta manent — spoken words fly away, written words remain. This was an extraordinary cognitive gift. But the substrate always shaped the thought. Clay tablets, scrolls, the codex, and eventually the printed page each imposed a particular structure on knowledge: linear, framed, and fixed.
When knowledge moved into digital form, something important failed to happen. We had the opportunity to fundamentally reimagine the shape of knowledge — and instead we recreated the page. The PDF is perhaps the clearest symbol of this failure of imagination: a format explicitly designed to ensure that digital documents look and behave like printed ones, frozen in place. Even the innovations that did arrive — cut and paste, hyperlinks, search — were largely developed in the 1960s and 70s and then ossified. The screen became a new kind of frame, and the frame was accepted as natural.
Marshall McLuhan argued that print culture reorganised human sensory experience into a strict linear form. The screen preserved and reinforced that linearity. Even as our documents became digital, the words remained in a column, the thought remained sequential, and the frame — the rectangle of the monitor, then the tablet, then the phone — remained the boundary of what knowledge could be. We have been, in a very real sense, thinking inside a box for five hundred years.
The Brain We Forgot We Had
Here is what that linearity was contending with: a cognitive architecture evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in a three-dimensional world. The hippocampus — the brain’s primary engine of memory and learning — contains place cellsthat fire in response to physical location, and the surrounding entorhinal cortex contains grid cells that construct internal coordinate systems. These systems did not evolve for abstract thought. They evolved for navigating a three-dimensional landscape — for knowing where the water was, where the danger lay, where you had been and what was there. And then, as Frode and the group have discussed at length, these same spatial systems were repurposed for all higher-order memory and learning. They are not analogous; they are the same system.
The ancient practice of the memory palace — placing ideas as objects in imagined architectural spaces and walking through them to retrieve thought — was not a trick. It was humans instinctively using their most powerful cognitive machinery, the evolved spatial navigation system, to do intellectual work. And the flat screen, for five centuries, has been asking us to do that work while keeping our spatial cognition largely idle.
This is not a neutral choice. There is accumulating evidence that physical movement through space, the act of organising information in three dimensions, and the capacity to walk around a concept rather than look at it flat, produces genuine cognitive differences — in learning, in retention, in the quality of association. Ken Perlin has spoken in your sessions about the shift from workspace to workshop: the difference between a desk with a screen and an environment where you use physical space naturally, the way a film production team covers walls with cards, or a sculptor walks around a form. That distinction — desk versus workshop — is not about aesthetics. It is about which parts of the brain are doing the work.
What We Are Beginning to Do
The group has wrestled across many sessions with what the new practice actually is when it is not reading and not writing in the traditional sense.
Some threads of what has emerged:
It is something like sculpting. The term knowledge sculpture has appeared repeatedly — the idea that when a reader engages deeply with a body of material in XR, annotating, glossing, placing concepts in relation to one another in space, they are not consuming knowledge passively but shaping it, giving it a form that is uniquely theirs. The knowledge sculpture that emerges from this process is not a summary or a note. It is a spatial object — a three-dimensional structure of understood relationships.
It is something like standing among. The etymology of the word understand reaches back to the Old English understandan, which most likely meant not to be below something but to stand in the midst of it — to be surrounded by it. The Greek episteme, the root of epistemology, means literally to stand upon. German verstehen means to stand before. Across multiple ancient languages, knowing is a positional act — a relationship you take up in space relative to what you know. The spatial map that has been developed in Author for the Vision Pro is not, then, a metaphor for understanding. It is the literal enactment of what understanding has, in the deepest linguistic sense, always meant.
It is something like exploring. Frode has articulated the principle as: in order to understand information, you must explore the information. Knowing something means having relationships with what you know. This is not the sequential movement of a reader’s eye across a line of text. It is navigational, relational, associative — closer to moving through a landscape than moving through a list.
It involves new verbs that do not have names yet. You can explode a knowledge map spatially, extruding flat concepts into the Z dimension, and something changes — not just about the display but about the cognitive relationship between the person and the material. You can place a document at the periphery of your attention and have it remain there, visible but not dominant. You can shift scale — moving into a concept to expand it, pulling back to see its relationships. You can share a knowledge shape with a collaborator independent of the underlying content — what Christopher Gutteridge described as analogous to sharing a file icon without necessarily opening the file. None of these acts have settled names. They are waiting for language.
What This Is Not
It is worth being clear about a failure mode that the group has identified and returned to. Simply placing existing document paradigms in three dimensions is not it. A PDF floating in space is still a PDF. A library that looks like a physical library is still a library conceived on nineteenth-century organisational principles. The participants have emphasised repeatedly that XR’s transformative affordances — the removal of gravity, the capacity for teleportation, manipulation of scale, the ability to share a living spatial structure rather than a static document — are precisely the things that get abandoned when the reflex is to make XR look familiar. Familiar is comfortable. But familiar, here, may be the enemy of the genuinely new.
The tension between needing some familiar anchors to avoid disorienting users and using too many familiar anchors to avoid challenging them is real and unresolved. It is one of the productive disagreements the group continues to have.
The Question
The word we do not yet have — for what it is to think spatially with knowledge, to sculpt understanding, to stand among your ideas and navigate them — is not just a linguistic gap.
It is a design gap, a research gap, and a philosophical gap. Until we can name the practice, we cannot teach it, study it, build the right tools for it, or defend its importance against the growing pressure to simply outsource cognition to AI systems that will give us answers without requiring us to understand anything at all.
The cognitive debt of that outsourcing is real. The sycophancy of current AI tools — the way they never push back, never demand that the user do the difficult work of forming their own relationship with knowledge — is a known and growing concern. The antidote is not to resist technology but to insist that new technology serve deeper cognitive engagement rather than shallower. XR, done well, could be that. But it requires us to first understand what done well would even mean.
That is what we are trying to address. We are a very open and inviting group so please feel free to join us any given Monday.