Content revision 4e771eaf0390cc87b6c7c6fd8469f3508f6ceeec7119472e6c1ccf17e2e1e5d2 All 37 sources in the requested scope. 62671 characters of source text. Complete response, no pagination. ## Research I've Been Part Of Research Source ID research:overview Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research I study how people and AI systems learn from experience, represent knowledge and use it to think and act. As AI becomes part of everyday thinking, I investigate how it shapes the understanding, judgement and abilities people develop. I study how people learn from experience and use what they know. Through experiments and computational models, I examine how internal representations develop and change, and how they support memory, concepts, generalisation, reasoning and action. I build models to develop explanations of these processes and derive predictions for behavioural experiments. I pursue part of this work with Dr. Lee at the University of Hong Kong's Speech, Language, and Reading Lab . For AI systems, I study what they learn during training and how it shapes their behaviour. I use behavioural tests and causal interventions to examine their internal representations, how they use information during a task, and how their computations produce the capabilities we observe. In human-AI interaction, I study how AI's involvement in everyday life shapes people's cognition and behaviour. This includes how people learn, direct their attention, remember and make decisions, and how their abilities develop through interaction. I am also interested in how people adapt AI to their own purposes, and how those purposes change as they use it. I’m interested in how research on human cognition can inspire new approaches to AI, and how building and studying AI can deepen our understanding of the mind. I hope to draw on both to design new ways for people to think, create and act with AI. ## The Resolving Power of Transfer Experiments: When Can Designs Distinguish Accounts of Generalization? Research Source ID research:transfer Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research#transfer We developed a framework that links models of human generalisation to the design of experiments. I construct models by varying both how a learner represents information and how the learner uses it to respond. The same representation can support rule application, comparison with a category prototype or retrieval of remembered examples. Varying these mechanisms independently lets me build matched accounts and simulate how each would respond in the same task. I use these predictions to shape an experiment before collecting participant data. Candidate separation measures where the models predict different responses, and candidate recovery estimates how reliably the planned observations can distinguish them. Together, they guide whether to change the test items or response measure, or collect more evidence where a useful contrast already exists. Applications to categorisation and artificial orthography show how these choices change what we can learn about the underlying mechanisms. I developed this framework into the open-source TIDE (Transfer-design Identifiability and Diagnosticity Evaluation) toolkit and an interactive app, so researchers can construct model comparisons, inspect their predictions and explore revisions to a design. ## BRIGHT: A Realistic and Challenging Benchmark for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval Research Source ID research:bright Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research#bright Finding a useful document can depend on first understanding what a problem requires. We developed BRIGHT to evaluate this reasoning-intensive retrieval, using 1,384 real queries across domains including economics, psychology, mathematics and coding. I contributed biology and psychology data and reproduced programming examples to work through the questions and the material needed to answer them. Models that performed well on conventional retrieval benchmarks struggled on BRIGHT. Explicit reasoning about a query improved retrieval, and supplying relevant documents improved question answering. The benchmark makes it possible to study retrieval as part of solving a problem, including how reasoning helps a system recognise the information it needs. ## Early Epistemic Settlement in AI-Assisted Writing Research Source ID research:fittedAssistance Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research#structure-settles-thought In trying to finish a passage, a writer may connect her material in ways that change both the argument she can make and the demands it needs to meet. I examined what happens when AI supplies a passage that resolves the immediate difficulty while this work is still unfolding. The writer can understand the answer, judge it adequate, and move on before discovering what her own attempt could have made possible. I call this early epistemic settlement. Having a satisfactory passage removes an immediate reason to keep working. The value of continuing is harder to assess, since the writer has yet to form the connections that would reveal it. I show how writing develops both an argument and the grounds for deciding what is worth pursuing. Over successive exchanges, accepted passages help shape what the writer asks next and what a subsequent AI response needs to address. Useful answers can therefore sustain inquiry along a path while cutting short work that could have opened another. This makes the formation of new arguments and questions part of what is at stake in a response that successfully resolves the present task. ## Functional Encoding and Representational Binding in Componential Transfer Research Source ID research:encoding Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research#encoding Why can a learner demonstrate a rule during training yet fail to use it on a new item? We built a computational account in which transfer depends on how useful components are encoded and bound together. Functional encoding determines which components enter the representation used to generate a response. Representational binding determines whether those components remain available as reusable parts or become fused with the whole stimulus. Varying these properties lets us generate patterns of learning and transfer within one model. Across artificial orthography, Chinese character learning and artificial grammar, tests that preserve a trained component primarily reveal its encoding, while recombination tests reveal how the components are bound. A continuous binding parameter accounts for patterns previously attributed to two separate systems, connecting those patterns to how knowledge is organised. ## Humans Disengage, Reasoning Models Persist: Separating Difficulty Registration from Deliberation Allocation Research Source ID research:humansDisengage Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research#humansDisengage I studied how people and large reasoning models allocate effort once a problem becomes difficult. Across visual abstraction, intuitive physics and relational reasoning, I analysed human response times alongside the length and content of reasoning traces, the text models generate before answering. Comparing attempts on the same problems let me separate sensitivity to difficulty from the allocation of further effort. On visual grid puzzles, successful human attempts lasted longer than failed ones, while the model analysis showed longer traces on failed attempts. Grid actions and reasoning traces helped characterise what happened during that extra work. I developed a resource-rational account in which continued reasoning depends on its expected progress, the value of that progress and the cost of pursuing it. This makes the decision to continue a question about the return on further computation, and gives a basis for understanding how people and models can recognise the same difficulty yet pursue different courses of action. ## Persistent Priors, Preserved Targets: A Stroop-Style Paradigm for Lexical Override Research Source ID research:priorsPersist Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research#priorsPersist I investigated how language models follow a new instruction while established knowledge continues to influence their responses. I designed a Stroop-style task that puts a familiar association in conflict with a temporary definition. A prompt might define doctor as forest , while the usual association with hospital competes with that instruction. Across 11 open-weight models, these familiar associations continued to influence the answer. I used activation patching, replacing internal activations between matched prompts, to trace how a model maintains the instructed meaning. The causal interventions linked successful override to information about the defined word, its assigned meaning and the later query. Preserving the newly assigned meaning was crucial to recovering the intended response. The analysis explains how a model can apply a contextual instruction while established associations remain active. ## Fragments Fragments Source ID fragments:overview Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments I write down thoughts and memories before they fade, so I can return to what I was thinking and how life felt at the time. You’re welcome to look through them and get to know me a little beyond my work. ## The Projection of Thought Fragments Source ID fragments:the-projection-of-thought Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#the-projection-of-thought I used to think of expression mainly as compression. A thought is larger than a sentence, so putting it into words means choosing an order, making some relations explicit, and leaving other things out. That still feels true, but compression alone makes the thought sound too fixed, as if it were a complete object that language merely made smaller. Often the deeper change is that expression projects a moving state onto a surface. Before expression, a thought may contain pressure, direction, hesitation, memory, bodily feeling, and several possible paths at once. These parts do not always stand separately. They pull on one another and change meaning through their relation. A word can feel wrong not because it is false, but because saying it would make the thought turn too early. A vague feeling can hold several directions before any one of them is ready to become a claim. Language makes that movement proceed in a line. One sentence must come before another. A relation becomes a phrase, a pressure becomes a claim, a hesitation becomes a qualification, and an unfinished direction may become a title. What was simultaneous becomes sequential. What was layered is divided into parts. What was still moving becomes easier to treat as a stable object. Expression therefore changes not only how much of the thought remains, but also how its parts relate. This projection is necessary. A thought that remains only as pressure may disappear, whereas a sentence gives me something I can return to, revise, compare, and share. The surface genuinely carries the thought, even though it does not contain the whole state from which it came. The problem begins when the surface starts to feel identical to the thought itself. Once something has been written, later thinking tends to continue from the written version. I add distinctions, examples, and structure to the sentence I can see, and the result may become clearer while moving away from relations that were active before the sentence existed. This is why a summary can feel wrong even when every visible claim is accurate. It may capture what I managed to say while losing the pressure, ambiguity, or unfinished direction that made the thought matter. Old notes can feel strange for the same reason. A note may preserve one surface of a thought without preserving the movement around it. Still, it can provide a route back. A phrase, title, or badly written paragraph may reactivate more than it explicitly records if I read it as a trace rather than a definition. The note does not need to contain the whole thought. It needs to help me meet the thought again. AI is especially powerful on these projected surfaces. It can organise notes, name distinctions, build an outline, and make one possible direction look coherent. That can reveal relationships I had not seen. It can also make a temporary surface look like the final structure, turning hesitation into a neat qualification and several live possibilities into one persuasive frame. The danger is not simply that AI may be wrong. It is that one partial projection may become convincing enough that I stop returning to the wider movement that produced it. So the task is not to reject expression or AI organisation, but to keep moving between the surface and what remains unresolved beneath it. When a structure comes back to me, I need to ask whether it helps the thought continue or makes it look finished too early. This is also why I want fragments to remain open. A fragment records a moment when a thought became visible enough to hold, not the final account of what it was. I can return to it, connect it elsewhere, revise it, or discover that it was pointing in another direction. The surface should help the movement continue, not decide in advance where it must go. ## Rebuilding Another State Inside Me Fragments Source ID fragments:rebuilding-another-state-inside-me Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#rebuilding-another-state-inside-me I cannot enter another person's internal state directly. Their body, memory, history, habits, fear, shame, desire, and the way a particular event touches all of these remain inside them. What reaches me is what comes out: words, facial expression, tone, silence, movement, posture, the story they tell, what they avoid saying, and the situation around them. These are traces from a system I cannot open from the inside. Empathy therefore seems less like direct access and more like reconstruction. I receive another person's signals and use my own body, memory, experience, imagination, and learned sense of people to generate a corresponding state inside me. That state is not an exact copy of what they feel, but it is not simply my ordinary state either. It is produced by my system while being pulled into shape by theirs. This makes empathy more than correctly naming an emotion. I may recognise that someone is sad, anxious, embarrassed, or excluded while remaining largely unchanged myself. Deeper empathy seems to involve some movement in my own attention, body, feeling, or tendency to act. My voice may soften, I may become more careful, or I may feel an urge to stop explaining, stay quiet, comfort, protect, or move closer. The other person's state has become active enough inside me to rearrange me for a moment. The reconstruction is never neutral because it is built from my own materials. I may understand another person's sadness through a sadness I have known, or their fear through the way fear feels in me. This is necessary. Without using myself, I have no route toward them. It is also a source of distortion. Their silence may not mean what my silence would mean, and a strong feeling of recognition may reflect the model I built more than the state they actually occupy. Empathy can be deep and still be wrong. Self-empathy may be a special case of the same process. A past version of me is not fully available to the present one, and neither are the parts of myself that I did not understand or allowed myself to feel at the time. They leave traces: a memory, an avoidance, a bodily discomfort, an unexplained preference, a sudden resistance, or a sense that an old moment still matters after I have explained it many times. The present me has to reconstruct something from those traces. That reconstruction is not the same as explaining myself. I can describe where a reaction came from and still remain far above the state itself, as if I were analysing another person from outside. I know the story, but I have not met the feeling. Self-empathy seems to require allowing an older or hidden version of me to become active enough that I can feel why the experience mattered from somewhere closer than explanation, without pretending that I can return to the original state exactly. This is where drawing and images begin to make sense to me. Language often moves quickly toward reasons, categories, stories, and conclusions. A drawing can let something appear before it has been organised into a sentence. A state may show itself as crowded or empty, sharp or soft, repeated or broken, centred or unbalanced. The image is still a proxy, but it does not explain the state as quickly as language does. Once the image is outside me, I can look at it, notice what draws my attention, and feel how I respond before deciding what it means. It may give a difficult internal state a surface on which I can encounter it again. Empathy, self-empathy, language, and drawing may all be ways of approaching states that are not directly accessible. None provides perfect access. The question is whether something previously outside my immediate reach becomes active enough inside me to change how I feel, understand, or act. I am not simply receiving the state. I am rebuilding it with the only system I have. ## The Visible Part of the Mind Fragments Source ID fragments:visible-part-of-the-mind Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#visible-part-of-the-mind Sometimes what I consciously think feels much smaller than what is moving inside my mind. A thought appears clearly enough for me to hold, say, or write down, and because it is the part I can reach, I may take it for the whole thought. Yet memory, mood, bodily state, recent experience, old associations, unfinished ideas, and the current situation may already be shaping what appears without becoming visible themselves. I receive a sentence, a feeling, a preference, or a sense that something is wrong, but not the full process that produced it. Maybe consciousness is not where a thought begins, but where something becomes reachable. A memory can affect my reaction without appearing as a memory. A mood can alter how I read a situation without announcing itself. A past experience can make one idea feel natural and another feel wrong even when I cannot trace the path. When something becomes conscious, it may not be created at that moment. It may have become available to the part of me that can notice, name, report, and continue working on it. What becomes available is still a projection through a current way of reading. The same underlying material can appear as nostalgia, regret, evidence, a story, or a small image. A place can feel like home, distance, pressure, freedom, or nothing special. The material has not necessarily changed completely, but attention, language, mood, bodily state, recent events, and what I am trying to do determine which part becomes visible and what form it takes. This makes the conscious thought both real and partial. It is real because it came from somewhere in the larger system and carries information from it. A sudden feeling that a sentence is wrong, a memory matters, or an idea is not ready is not meaningless. It is partial because another state or another moment might have made the same underlying material appear differently. Returning to an old idea may feel like continuing the same thought when I am actually reading it through a new lens. Language may therefore not be the first compression. A larger hidden state becomes a conscious surface. That surface becomes a sentence. The sentence becomes a written note. The note later becomes the starting point for another thought. Something is preserved and something is lost at each step. I still need the visible part because I cannot work directly with the entire hidden structure. Consciousness gives me a handle: a sentence, feeling, image, or small point of access. But the handle is not the whole mind. What I can report is not nothing, and it is not everything. It is the part of the mind made reachable through the lens of the current moment. ## Before Defining Understanding Fragments Source ID fragments:understanding-before-definition Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#understanding-before-definition I do not want to define understanding too early. The word clearly points to something important, but it gathers many questions before they have been separated. Sometimes understanding means giving the right answer. Elsewhere it means explaining, transferring, generalising, correcting, compressing, using, grounding, experiencing, or being conscious of something. These may be related, but they are not identical. A quick definition can select one layer and make it look as though the entire problem has been solved. This matters for both people and machines. A student may solve a problem correctly without knowing why. A person may explain something fluently while missing the structure that would support transfer. A model may produce a strong answer while failing to adapt when the surface form changes. Instead of first asking whether a system understands, I would rather ask what capacity is at issue: Can it answer? Can it explain? Can it use the idea in a new situation? Can it recognise the same structure under a different surface? Can it notice failure and revise itself? Is there experience behind the behaviour? The usual contrast between correlation and causation has a similar problem. People often say that machines learn correlations while humans understand causes. There is something useful in the distinction, but it is too clean. Humans also begin with regularities. We notice that events occur together and form expectations. A regularity may then become an assumption, guide action, meet resistance from the world, and be corrected, refined, or abandoned. That movement from pattern to use, failure, and revision may be more informative than treating understanding as one final property. Similar outward behaviour is therefore not enough. Two systems may answer the same question correctly while depending on different processes. One may transfer while another breaks. One may revise after an error, while another repeats a familiar pattern in a new surface form. Calling both cases understanding too quickly removes the difference I want to study. I would rather keep the word open until the capacities beneath it have been separated. Only then can the larger question become less circular. ## Expression, Recording, and the Compressed Version of Thought Fragments Source ID fragments:expression-recording Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#expression-recording When a thought is still in my head, it is usually not a complete sentence. It is closer to a mixture of feeling, direction, memory, and relations that I cannot yet explain. To express it, I have to choose words, divide what was mixed together, and put the parts in an order. This makes the thought available to other people and to my later self. Without expression, many thoughts would remain too vague to examine and too fragile to preserve. Expression therefore gives thought a usable form, but it is not a neutral transfer. Language turns a continuous or layered state into a more discrete version. Mixed feelings become separate descriptions. Simultaneous relations are spoken one after another. Boundaries appear where the original state may not have contained clear divisions. The expressed version can be clearer and easier to work with while no longer being identical to what existed before the words. Recording adds another change. A spoken thought can still disappear, but a written note persists as an object: a title, paragraph, file, or page that can be opened, quoted, revised, classified, and connected to other material. This is enormously useful. Writing means I do not have to reconstruct the thought from nothing each time, and it gives scattered ideas a chance to accumulate. The difficulty is that the recorded version becomes the next starting point. When I return, I often continue from the sentence on the page rather than from the larger state that produced it. I explain the sentence, defend it, add distinctions to it, and let its wording suggest the next move. The thought may become more coherent while growing according to the shape of its record. The record preserves a path, but by making that path easy to re-enter, it can also make other paths less visible. Different languages may cut the same material differently. This is not the simple claim that one language makes people more rational or emotional. It is that each language offers different distinctions, rhythms, and default ways of organising experience. Saying something in another language can therefore feel unlike merely translating a finished sentence. The original material has been divided and arranged again, and the later thought may continue from a different set of cuts. AI mostly receives thought after these transformations have already happened. It can organise notes, identify repetitions, propose categories, and connect fragments, but it works on the material that reached language and recording. This can be genuinely useful, especially when I have accumulated more text than I can hold at once. I only need to remember that a clean organisation of the record is not the same as access to everything that produced it. I therefore want to treat notes as handles rather than definitions. A handle lets me recover, move, and work with something that would otherwise scatter. It becomes a boundary when I assume the recorded version exhausts what the thought can be. Titles and categories are useful for retrieval, but they should not prevent a note about language from later connecting to memory, consciousness, identity, or something I have not yet named. I imagine the collection less as a set of finished boxes than as a graph that keeps acquiring and losing connections. I need the records because thought disappears without them, and I need to keep moving beyond the records because thought is larger than the version that survived. ## Rich Traces and Open Paths Fragments Source ID fragments:rich-traces-and-open-paths Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#rich-traces-and-open-paths I often use voice input when I talk to AI. The obvious reason is speed. I can keep speaking before a thought disappears. But voice also preserves more of the process by which the thought is forming. A typed prompt is often already cleaned up. Before typing, I tend to choose a direction, remove hesitation, and turn the thought into something that resembles a well-defined request. That can be efficient, but it gives the model a thinner record of what was actually happening. Voice is messier. I repeat myself, change direction, reject a phrase as soon as I say it, remember another example, and leave some relations unfinished. The transcript is not direct access to the original thought. Expression has already changed the state, and transcription changes it again. Still, it can preserve more false starts, emphasis, resistance, and uncertainty than a polished prompt. I think of it as a richer external trace, not as an unfiltered copy of the mind. That richer trace gives AI more evidence about the path that produced the request. It can see which examples mattered, which formulations failed, and where I remained unsure. The structure it returns is therefore more likely to feel recognisable and easier for me to test against what I was trying to hold. This is not only a matter of answer quality. It also affects uptake. I can work with a reconstruction more easily when I can see how it connects to my own unfinished movement. Not every uncertainty has the same source. Sometimes the task is already settled, as when I am polishing a message or expressing a claim whose role is fixed. More context simply helps the model produce the expected form. Sometimes the task only appears open because I supplied too little. A vague sentence invites a conventional frame, and the remedy is to add examples, rejected versions, background, and constraints. In both cases, richer input can make the answer converge. The more interesting case is when the trace is already rich and the path is still not determined. The examples, failed formulations, doubts, and preferred directions may rule out many weak continuations without selecting one right continuation. This kind of uncertainty is not merely missing information. It may mean the inquiry still requires an organising judgment about which frame should hold it, which distinction should name it, which literature it belongs near, or which tension should remain unresolved. Research and creation often begin in this space. AI can still help, but its role should change. Instead of closing the question immediately, it can make the remaining uncertainty more visible. It can show several paths, clarify how they differ, identify what each one preserves or loses, and bring in concepts I could not have produced alone. A useful interaction does not always remove uncertainty. Sometimes it increases resolution while leaving the decision open, so my judgment still has somewhere to enter. The point is not simply to give AI more information. Richer traces help when the model is missing material that matters. But sometimes I can give it a detailed record and still not know which direction is right. In those cases, the uncertainty is not something I want the model to erase. It is part of what I still need to think through. ## Labels, Goals, and Rules as Ways of Shaping People Fragments Source ID fragments:labels-goals-rules Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#labels-goals-rules If language can compress thought, labels can compress people. A person contains experiences, habits, desires, fears, abilities, contradictions, and tendencies that do not naturally arrive in neat categories. We are not born already divided into personality type, occupation, research direction, hobbies, values, and life stages. Those divisions are made later because a whole person is too complex to communicate each time. The compression is useful. A label gives other people a rough entry point and gives me a way to gather scattered parts of myself. Saying that someone is a researcher, an introvert, a musician, or a certain kind of friend does not capture the person, but it makes some pattern easier to remember and discuss. A label works as a handle. The problem begins when the handle is treated as the whole person and the loss created by compression is forgotten. A label does not remain a passive summary. Once repeated, it starts to affect what happens next. I may feel that because I am this kind of person, I should continue behaving in the expected way, protect the identity, or ignore parts of myself that do not fit it. Other people also respond to the label by changing their expectations, opportunities, feedback, and limits. Being seen as suited to something can bring more chances to practise it. Being seen as unsuited can remove those chances before the ability has had room to develop. A feedback loop forms. Internal tendencies produce behaviour. The outside world compresses that behaviour into a label. The label changes the environment, and the altered environment shapes later behaviour and internal structure. This can help someone grow into a possibility that others recognised early. It can also trap someone inside an inaccurate version that receives enough reinforcement to become partly true. A label is therefore not only a description. It can become part of a person's training environment. Goals have a related structure, but they are usually directed toward the future. I compress a possible future into a discrete statement such as “I want to become this” or “I want to achieve that.” The goal is not my whole life, yet it begins pulling present behaviour toward its shape. I change habits, practise abilities, choose opportunities, and interpret progress through it. A goal can organise action that would otherwise scatter, but it can also make me narrow myself around one stated future while overlooking directions that have not yet become visible. Rules work differently. A label describes what someone is taken to be, and a goal describes what someone wants to become. A rule specifies what output is required or forbidden even when the person's existing impulses, habits, or judgment would produce something else. Laws, moral norms, politeness, institutional requirements, and family expectations often operate this way. Society cannot wait for every person's internal structure to align naturally, so it constrains behaviour first. The same compliant behaviour can therefore come from different internal paths. One person may not have the prohibited impulse at all. Another may have it and override it through a rule. The final output looks the same, but the underlying systems are not. This does not make behaviour unimportant. Behaviour protects or harms people, and external constraints are often necessary. It only means that behaviour alone may not reveal what had to be controlled on the way to it. Repeated override can also become training. A rule that first appears after an impulse may gradually enter earlier into attention and decision. It may become easier to apply, turn into habit, and eventually change which responses arise at all. But internalisation is not guaranteed or uniformly good. Some rules remain surface compliance, some reshape habit, and some alter judgment more deeply. Rules can protect people and create coordination, but they can also force people into unreasonable forms. Their effects depend on what they demand and how they are reinforced. AI can participate in this process as another source of structure and feedback. It does not only organise my content. It repeatedly demonstrates a way of moving thought forward. Something vague becomes a list, the list becomes a framework, the framework produces next steps, and the result looks complete. This rhythm is useful, but it is also easy to internalise. If I work through it constantly, I may begin to feel that every thought should be classified quickly, named cleanly, and moved toward an output. AI is not forcing me, yet it can still shape what I experience as clear, logical, and finished. This may be why being summarised can feel uncomfortable even when the summary is not obviously false. A summary creates a portable version of a person that other people can circulate and respond to. When the version is clear and coherent, it may become easier to look at the summary than to keep looking at the person. Being misunderstood is painful, but being understood through a convincing compression can be stranger. Something remains that resembles me while organising the important parts differently. Labels, goals, and rules all simplify something more complicated so it can guide what happens next. That can be useful, but the simplification does not stay outside the person. It changes expectations, opportunities, habits, and sometimes the way the person understands themselves. I am interested in that return path, where a description or rule becomes part of the system it was meant to describe or guide. ## Memory Compresses Time, but the Self Is Changed by Passing Through It Fragments Source ID fragments:memory-time-self Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#memory-time-self Life does not arrive already divided into chapters. While I am living it, one day follows another and many changes have no visible border. Only later do I describe one period as high school, another as university, one year as a turning point, or one city as the place where I changed. Memory helps create those divisions because it cannot preserve continuous life at the same resolution forever. The compression seems to have a temporal gradient. Recent experience still carries temperature, tone, small details, and unresolved feeling. As time recedes, a year becomes a few scenes, a place becomes an atmosphere, and a relationship becomes a story I know how to tell. Distant life was not originally made of those keywords. Memory has folded many ordinary days into a smaller number of stages that are easier to hold. This is useful. If every past moment remained equally vivid, moving through the present might become impossible. But compression also narrows. A year remembered as painful still contained ordinary afternoons and moments of humour. A city remembered as important also contained boredom, repetition, and tired days. Old photographs, messages, and notes can feel strange because they reopen details that no longer fit the cleaner version I later formed. They reveal that the period was messier and more alive than the chapter title suggests. This makes me think of the self less as a fixed point and more as a trajectory. The version of me at each moment is not identical to the next, but the versions do not appear independently. Experience, memory, language, relationships, and bodily states update the system gradually. The future me is not a stranger who suddenly replaces the present one. He is what this current system becomes after passing through many small changes. The path between two versions may matter more than their similarity. The person I was ten years ago and the person I am now may look quite different, yet each change grew out of what came before. Another person could know many of my memories without becoming me because they did not move through that sequence from the inside. Continuity may not mean preserving an unchanging core. It may be the particular way one state becomes another. An old thought experiment makes this harder. Imagine a person in pain after a breakup. A pill could move him directly to the point at which the pain has passed. It would not erase the event or create a gap in his memory. Afterward, he would remember the entire period, believe that he had lived through it, and retain the same lessons and final state. Only the actual subjective passage through the pain would be absent. My first instinct is to take the pill. If the result, memory, and sense of continuity are the same, why endure pain merely to say that it happened? Yet something still seems missing. Memory is a result available at the end, while experience is a process that changes a person moment by moment. Waking each morning, feeling the loss return, believing it has passed and then falling back again may alter attention, expectation, and feeling in ways that cannot be reduced to a final record. I do not think pain is valuable simply because it is pain. The question is narrower. If the self is partly the path by which one state becomes another, can a perfect memory of that path replace having moved through it? The person after the jump knows the road and feels that he walked it, but he was not gradually changed by each step. That is why I remain uncertain about the pill. I might still choose to avoid the pain. What bothers me is that the person who remembers the whole period may still not be quite the same as the person who actually passed through it. I am not sure whether memory can preserve that difference. ## Satisfaction Is Not a Fixed Reward Fragments Source ID fragments:satisfaction-signal Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#satisfaction-signal I sometimes wonder whether happiness can be understood partly through satisfaction. This is not meant as a complete definition. Happiness may also involve meaning, relationships, value, security, and many other things. But satisfaction becomes more useful to think with once it is not reduced to immediate pleasure. It can come from eating something good, finishing a difficult task, delaying a reward, controlling an impulse, helping someone, finding a bargain, or feeling that I made a sound decision. Delayed gratification is therefore not simply the rejection of satisfaction. A person may value the later reward, but may also gain something from waiting, planning, self-control, or becoming the kind of person who can keep a commitment. Immediate and delayed gratification can be different satisfaction curves rather than moral opposites. What appears more rational may itself feel satisfying because it produces a stronger, steadier, or longer-lasting return in that person's system. I find it useful to think of satisfaction as an internal feedback signal, without claiming that it is one specific biological quantity. Activities can produce signals with different intensities, delays, durations, and meanings. The same activity can feel rewarding to one person and empty to another, or change for the same person across stages of life. The external behaviour alone does not reveal the return generated inside the person. Buying discounted products is a small example. One person may see the search as wasted time because the money saved does not justify the attention spent. Another person may enjoy comparing options, waiting, finding the right moment, and feeling that resources were used well. The discount is then not only a financial outcome. The process itself produces a small sense of skill, control, and victory. For the first person, an hour of searching is mainly a cost. For the second, part of that hour is also the return. This changes how I think about opportunity cost. Money and time matter, but the relevant alternative is also the satisfaction that another use of the time might have produced. A behaviour becomes rational or irrational partly through how it interacts with a person's goals, habits, attention, and interpretation. Calling discount hunting a game, a life skill, a burden, or a sign of scarcity does not change every objective fact, but it helps shape the psychological event the person is actually having. Some forms of satisfaction may be trainable. Attention, progress, order, connection, or mastery can become part of what an activity gives back. Housework may produce a feeling of restored control. Exercise may become tied to rhythm and progress. Volunteering may create connection and value. The activity has not become effortless, but its internal return has changed. Some conditions are simply damaging, and reinterpretation does not make poverty, illness, oppression, or chronic stress harmless. Strong stimulation can also change the system that receives it. When rewards arrive quickly and intensely, the old high point can become a new baseline, making ordinary experience feel flat and increasing the amount required for the same effect. I increasingly think of satisfaction less as a fixed reward attached to an activity and more as something that changes with behaviour, timing, interpretation, and history. The same activity can return something very different to different people, or to the same person at different times. That makes me curious about how much of everyday satisfaction is something we can gradually learn to notice, shape, or build. ## Oysters and Black Truffle Toast at Queen Victoria Market Fragments Source ID fragments:queen-victoria-market-toast-oysters Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#queen-victoria-market-toast-oysters Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne gave me one of those food memories I still think about after leaving the city. The oysters were fresh, cold, and clean, and a squeeze of lemon made the taste even sharper and clearer. The black truffle toast was unexpectedly good too. It was warm, rich, fragrant, and straightforward. What fixes it in my memory is that I went with my sister on my last day of the Melbourne exchange. It was as much about the timing as the food, a final market morning and a final meal before leaving, something simple that ended up tied to the whole exchange. It is one of the things I still miss about Melbourne. ## Chaoshan Beef Hot Pot in Guangzhou Fragments Source ID fragments:guangzhou-chaoshan-beef-hot-pot Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#guangzhou-chaoshan-beef-hot-pot When I travelled to Guangzhou with my father, we went for Chaoshan beef hot pot. The meal stayed with me partly because the food was good and partly because it became one of the moments attached to that trip with him. I especially liked the beef balls and diaolong, a tender sliced cut commonly served in Chaoshan hot pot. The beef balls were springy and strongly beefy, while the diaolong was softer and cleaner in flavour. I usually ate both without dipping sauce because I preferred tasting the beef and broth directly rather than covering them with something stronger. ## AI-Generated Kitten Videos and Manufactured Cuteness Fragments Source ID fragments:ai-generated-kitten-videos Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#ai-generated-kitten-videos I have seen a lot of AI-generated videos on social media where kittens interact with people, along with more surreal ones, like a plush watermelon being opened to reveal little kittens inside. I find them very cute, and clearly plenty of other people do too. What interests me is not just that they are cute, but that they show generative content triggering real emotion. The kittens are not real in the usual sense, yet the videos still reach human perception through softness, smallness, eye contact, movement, care, and surprise, and those signals are enough to move people. That is part of what interests me about this kind of content. The objects are synthetic, but the response they produce is not. The same mechanism can also be used more deliberately to steer attention or emotion, which makes the boundary between harmless manufactured cuteness and manipulation worth thinking about. ## A Conversation About Identity Fragments Source ID fragments:identity-interview-reflection Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#identity-interview-reflection I once took part in an interview about identity and about growing up with a Taiwanese family background while living mostly in Shanghai. I had not planned to write about it publicly, but the conversation helped me organize a lot of scattered feelings that had sat in the background for a long time. What I took from the conversation was not a dramatic conclusion but a quieter one. Identity does not have to be a single answer. It can be made of several layers at once, where I grew up, where my family comes from, the languages and habits that shaped me, the places that feel familiar, and the way I introduce myself in different rooms. The interview helped me see that this is not really confusion so much as a layered structure, where different parts become more visible in different situations. Sometimes Shanghai is the most natural answer. Sometimes my Taiwanese family roots matter more, and neither cancels the other. The conversation gave me a calmer way to look back at my background without forcing it into one simple label. ## Napier Seaside with My Mother Fragments Source ID fragments:napier-seaside-with-my-mother Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#napier-seaside-with-my-mother Napier seaside is one of the places I connect with my mother. She lives around Hastings and Havelock North, and when I went back to New Zealand she would sometimes drive me to Napier. It was not a big trip, just a short drive to the water. I still remember it quite clearly: the car ride, the road, arriving near the sea, walking for a while, maybe not even talking much. It was ordinary, but it was one of the few things we did together there again and again. My family's connection with New Zealand is a little scattered. My sister studied there, my mother stayed for her, and later that area became part of my mother's own life too. For me the country was never only a travel destination. It was also where part of my family was living without me. So when she drove me to Napier, it felt like I was briefly stepping into that part of her life. I don't remember Napier as just a beautiful seaside so much as somewhere my mother brought me, and maybe that is enough. ## My Mother’s Cooking Across Places Fragments Source ID fragments:mothers-cooking-across-places Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#mothers-cooking-across-places My mother has always been good at making food that is both healthy and genuinely good. When we were still living together in Shanghai, this felt completely normal. She cooked at home and I ate what she made, and at the time I did not think of it as anything worth remembering. It was just part of home. Later, after life became more scattered and she spent more time in New Zealand, her cooking started to feel different. Visiting her there, a meal she had made was no longer just a normal meal; it became a small return to something familiar. The food itself matters, of course, usually clean, warm, and carefully made, but what I remember more is the continuity. The same person who cooked for us in Shanghai was now cooking in another country, at another stage of life, and the taste still carried something from before. That is what makes it feel like home. Home is not fixed in one city or one apartment or one period of life; sometimes it shows up through a repeated act, someone still cooking for you and still caring whether you have eaten well. I do not get to eat my mother's cooking often now, and maybe that is why I notice it more when I do. ## Trying Golf with My Mother in New Zealand Fragments Source ID fragments:golf-with-my-mother-in-new-zealand Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#golf-with-my-mother-in-new-zealand When I visited my mother in New Zealand, she sometimes brought me along to play golf. It is one of her hobbies, and I could tell she enjoyed the whole rhythm of it: the open grass, the slow walking, choosing a club, taking her time before a shot. It suited her. I tried a few times, but I never felt I had much talent for it. I could hit the ball, just not the way good players do, where it lifts cleanly and draws a nice curve through the air; mine was usually more practical than pretty, and sometimes not even practical. Still, I liked going with her, not because I had suddenly taken to golf, but because it was something she had made part of her life there, and for a few afternoons I got to be inside it too. ## Racket Games with the SLR Lab Fragments Source ID fragments:slr-lab-racket-games Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#slr-lab-racket-games One time the PI of our SLR Lab took me and another RA out to play badminton and table tennis. It was not a serious sports day. We played, missed shots, picked up balls, laughed a bit, and drifted between the two games in the slightly messy way small group outings usually go. I liked it because it made the lab feel like more than papers, meetings, and tasks. Those things matter, but a lab also has a feeling to it, and you can tell whether people are just working in the same place or whether there is some actual warmth around the work. That afternoon tipped it towards the second, nothing dramatic, just a good lab atmosphere showing up on an ordinary day. ## The Sea in My Early Hong Kong Years Fragments Source ID fragments:kennedy-town-seaside-hku-years Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#kennedy-town-seaside-hku-years I have not been to Kennedy Town's waterfront much lately, which feels strange because it was much more present during my first years at HKU. I lived closer to that side of the city then, and the sea was somewhere I could reach without turning the visit into a plan. I do not remember every walk clearly now. Much of the routine has probably settled into a general feeling. Hong Kong can be dense, fast, and pressed together, and walking toward the water changed the scale of the city. The buildings ended, the space opened, and the movement of the sea gave my attention somewhere else to go. Part of the familiarity may also have come from New Zealand, where time by the coast was already tied to my mother and family. What I remember is not one dramatic view, but the irregular waves, the space beyond the buildings, and the relief of reaching something wide at the edge of a crowded city. I do not live the same student rhythm now, and I visit less often, but when I think of my early years in Hong Kong, the sea remains somewhere in the background. ## Ferry Rides Across Sydney Harbour Fragments Source ID fragments:sydney-harbour-ferry-rides Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#sydney-harbour-ferry-rides One of my strongest memories of Sydney is not standing at a landmark but moving through the harbour by ferry. The public ferries were inexpensive, so we used them repeatedly to travel between different stops. Seeing the city from the water made it feel less like a fixed map and more like a sequence of changing views. Some routes passed the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, where the city looked as beautiful as its photographs suggest. Other stretches were quieter, with residential neighbourhoods and houses close to the water. On one evening ferry, commuters in work clothes left the boat in an orderly line and walked home along the harbour. For a moment I felt as though I were watching someone else's ordinary routine from outside. Work in the city, a ferry across the water, and home at the end of the route. Sunset brought the bridge, Opera House, water, and light into the same moving scene. What I remember most is that movement rather than one perfect viewpoint. The ferry let the city change gradually around me, one shore and one crossing at a time. ## Gold Coast, Water, and the City Line Fragments Source ID fragments:gold-coast-water-and-city-line Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#gold-coast-water-and-city-line Gold Coast is one of the places where I remember the sea as something I entered rather than only looked at. We went kayaking, jet skiing, snorkelling, and parasailing. What I remember most is the physical side of it, especially the speed, wind, noise, and the feeling that the water had moved from the background into the activity itself. I also remember going up to an observation deck and seeing the coast from above. The city looked like a long line pressed against the beach, with towers, sand, water, and sunlight arranged beside one another. In many cities the waterfront feels like one district among others. On the Gold Coast, the whole urban shape seemed organised around the edge of the sea. I liked the combination of density and holiday atmosphere. It was possible to stand inside a high-rise city while still feeling that the beach determined its rhythm. When I think of the Gold Coast now, I remember both being carried across the water and later looking down at the same coastline from high above. ## A Road Trip Along the Great Ocean Road Fragments Source ID fragments:great-ocean-road-melbourne-friends Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#great-ocean-road-melbourne-friends The easiest thing to say about the Great Ocean Road is that it was beautiful, but the road matters to me because of the people who took me there. During my Melbourne exchange, friends rented a car and brought us along. Without them, it might have remained a place I knew I should visit. Because of them, it became part of my life during that semester. The day included long hours in the car, stops whenever someone noticed a view, photographs, conversation, tiredness, and the repeated decision to continue to the next place. A few months earlier, I had not known the people beside me. Exchange friendships can form quickly because everyone is living inside a temporary period and knows that the same arrangement will not last. Ordinary days together can therefore carry more weight than they seem to at the time. The coastline kept changing through cliffs, open water, small stops, and famous viewpoints, but I do not remember the trip as one clean image. I remember the movement of the road, the car, the people, and the feeling that Melbourne had become more than a university term. When I think about the exchange, that day is part of why Melbourne feels like more than a university term. ## A Birthday Somewhere Along Taiwan’s East Coast Fragments Source ID fragments:taiwan-east-coast-family-road-trip Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#taiwan-east-coast-family-road-trip One of my happiest recent family memories is a road trip along Taiwan's east coast. It was the four of us, my father, my mother, my sister, and me. My father drove, and we made our way down the eastern side of the island, stopping in different places along the way. I do not remember every exact turn now, and maybe that is fine. What I remember most is the feeling of the four of us being together in one car. That kind of full family time has become rare. Everyone is in different places now, with different lives and schedules, so when we are all together for a trip, even ordinary things start to feel memorable. The east coast had a lot of sea. We would drive, catch the water, stop somewhere, and sometimes find one of those small cafés near the coast, each with its own style, and sit down with a coffee, look out at the sea, and then keep going. There was nothing dramatic about those stops, and that is exactly why I liked them. They were not arranged to become important memories. They became important because they were simple, repeated, and shared. My birthday fell somewhere inside the trip too, which made the whole thing feel warmer, not a formal celebration but a birthday folded into a moving family journey, somewhere between the sea, the road, and coffee by the coast. When I think back to it, I do not picture a single landmark first. I remember my father driving, the four of us together, and Taiwan's east coast passing by outside the window. ## The Tomatoes of August 29 Fragments Source ID fragments:tomatoes-of-august-29 Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#tomatoes-of-august-29 On August 29, I opened the fridge before leaving home and saw the tomatoes my father had given me two weeks earlier. We had met in Shenzhen while he was there for work. I had hesitated when he first offered them because I rarely eat fruit and always find washing it inconvenient. He listened, washed a box himself, and gave it to me ready to carry back to Hong Kong. Half of them were already gone. As I ate a few more, I suddenly realised that once I finished them, this small physical trace of the weekend would disappear. I took a photograph before eating the rest. I first thought I was recording one ordinary detail. When I began speaking about it, the tomatoes opened the whole weekend again. On the first afternoon, my father had spent some time near Nantou Ancient City and was waiting for me at a Starbucks. I had meant to join him after lunch with a friend, but reaching the café required another stop or two on the metro, so we met at the station instead. It felt insignificant at the time. Later, I imagined that if I had gone, the café might have become somewhere I could return to on a difficult day. I could sit alone where we had once sat together, and the place would feel slightly less anonymous. Because I never went, it never became ours. Still, its absence remained. Sometimes what did not happen leaves its own location in memory. The clearest image came from the end of the trip. We were taking trains in opposite directions. My father entered his carriage and waved to me through the glass. I watched him, but I did not wave back clearly. I had become conscious of the people around me and let that small self-consciousness interrupt something simple. Soon afterward, an unwelcome thought appeared. What if this were the last time we saw each other? I had no reason to believe it, yet the question gave the scene a frightening finality. For a while, I reduced the memory to one accusation. He waved, and I did not. When I let the whole scene return, I could also see that I had stayed there watching him until the train left. I had still been present for the goodbye. Another detail returned later. On an earlier trip, I had told my father that his snoring made it difficult for me to sleep and that we should book twin beds. By the time we met in Shenzhen, he had remembered. When the hotel offered us a different room, the first thing he checked was whether it still had two beds. The sentence was small and practical. It moved me because I had never needed to remind him. The tomatoes carried the same kind of care. I had named a small difficulty, and he quietly removed it for me. I was trying so hard to preserve details about my father that I almost missed the evidence that he had been preserving details about me too. When I tried to write the weekend down, the memories would not settle into a single feeling. Affection sat beside embarrassment. Gratitude kept turning into regret. The tomatoes led me back to the café I never entered, then to the station, then to the hotel room, then to the quiet realisation that my father had remembered something about me without being asked. I write to stay with all of these feelings, and the memory keeps changing each time I return to it. The photograph still shows a few tomatoes in a box. It cannot contain the weekend or explain my relationship with my father. It gives me a way back into both. Someday another room, another train, or a small act of care may change what I notice in this story. On August 29, the tomatoes brought me back once. For now, that is where I am leaving them. ## Athens, Ruins, and a Rare Family Trip Fragments Source ID fragments:athens-ruins-and-family-trip Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#athens-ruins-and-family-trip Our family trip to Greece stayed with me partly because the four of us rarely have two uninterrupted weeks together now. We spent most of the time around Athens, walking through the city, visiting historical sites, and eating together. The place felt different from cities I knew because the past was not contained in a museum. It remained visible in the stone, streets, and landscape around ordinary life. The ruins were the clearest expression of that feeling. At the Acropolis, I was not only looking at an old building but standing beside something connected to a much longer line of human history. The columns, exposed stone, open air, heat, and scale made the site feel almost unreal. My mother especially liked the carved female figures used in place of columns. I did not retain the name at the time, but I remember their shapes standing against the sky. The food kept the trip from feeling only grand or historical. I remember Greek salad, fried calamari, halloumi, and other simple meals after hours of walking. I mostly remember the combination of ancient places during the day, satisfying food afterward, and my family together throughout it. Greece made the world feel older and wider than the life I usually moved through. ## Swimming in the Mediterranean Fragments Source ID fragments:swimming-in-the-mediterranean Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#swimming-in-the-mediterranean One of my clearest memories from Greece is swimming in the Mediterranean. We went out by boat, with the sun above us, open water around us, and my family nearby. The day did not have much of a plot, but it stayed with me more clearly than many carefully planned sights. Before that trip, the Mediterranean had mostly been a name from maps, history, and photographs of Greece. Then I was in the water rather than looking at it from the shore. I think it was the only time I swam there, which may be why the memory feels so fixed. The place became physical rather than only visual. It had temperature, movement, distance, and contact with my body. We spent time on the boat, rested in the sun, swam, and let the day pass without needing to make it mean anything. When I think of Greece, I remember the ruins and streets, but I also remember entering a sea that I had previously known only as a name. ## Rainy Days as Permission to Stay In Fragments Source ID fragments:rainy-days-permission-to-stay-in Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#rainy-days-permission-to-stay-in I do not actually like rainy days that much. Rain is inconvenient. The ground gets wet, the sky turns grey, and going anywhere becomes a little more annoying. But there is one thing I do like about it, which is that it gives me a reason not to go out. On a sunny day, staying inside can feel like wasting the day. Even if nobody says anything, there is a small pressure to do something, meet someone, walk somewhere, make proper use of the weather. Rain takes that pressure away. It makes staying in feel less like a personal choice and more like the natural thing to do, and the room becomes enough, not because I suddenly love being cooped up but because the outside has stopped demanding anything. So maybe it is not the rain I like, but the excuse it gives me. ## The Mental Map of a Small Room Fragments Source ID fragments:mental-map-of-small-room Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#mental-map-of-small-room My mother sometimes says my room is messy, and she is probably not entirely wrong. From the outside it can look like things are scattered everywhere. But to me the room is not simply messy, because I usually know where everything is. There is a map of it in my head. That map is not visible to anyone else. A book on one side, a cable somewhere else, a camera lens near the window, some small thing on the desk. It may not look organized in the usual sense, but I know the routes, and I know where my hand should go when I need something. That is why small rooms can feel intimate to me. In a small space every object is close enough to become part of the mental map. The room may be crowded, but it is navigable, with a kind of personal order that only fully makes sense from inside my own habits. A larger space is more comfortable in an obvious way, but it can also feel less close, the things more spread out and the relationship between me and the objects around me less clear. So when I say my room is not really messy, I do not mean it is objectively tidy. I mean it has a structure I can feel, a little private, a little inefficient, maybe not very presentable, but still mine. ## My First Camera and Another Way of Seeing Fragments Source ID fragments:first-camera-another-way-of-seeing Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#first-camera-another-way-of-seeing My Nikon Zfc was my first real camera. At the start I did not even need to go far. I would stand in the apartment and shoot through the small window, trying different angles and looking for things outside that I would not normally notice. After I got a longer lens it became even more interesting, since the lens could pull distant things closer and turn a random view out the window into something worth looking at. That was probably when photography began to change my relationship with going out. The camera gave me a reason to walk more, to look around more, and later to travel with a slightly different kind of attention, not only going somewhere but also looking for frames. My mother has said that people should use their eyes to see the world instead of always taking photos, and I think she is right. There are things the eyes take in directly that a photo cannot replace, the scale of a place, the air, the movement, the feeling of being there. But I think the camera offers another kind of seeing rather than a copy of the eyes. It cuts the world differently, notices details I might have passed over, and lets me return to a moment later and see it again from a distance. Sometimes a photo is valuable not because it is beautiful but because it proves I once looked at the world from that exact angle. That is what the camera gave me, not a replacement for experience but another layer of it. ## Music That Became More Spacious Fragments Source ID fragments:music-that-became-more-spacious Original https://www.henryw.me/#/fragments#music-that-became-more-spacious My music taste has changed quite a bit. In high school I was more drawn to music with strong rhythm, EDM and rap and beats that moved quickly and gave a direct kind of energy. I still understand why I liked it. That kind of music pushes you forward, and it is useful when you want intensity or speed or just a clear hit of momentum. These days I find myself drawn to music that feels more spacious. Not music without rhythm, since rhythm still matters, but something slower, wider, and more atmospheric. Sometimes it is purely instrumental, and sometimes it still has lyrics, like Lana Del Rey's Young and Beautiful, where what I like is not only the words but the whole feeling behind them, the slow movement, the large background, the sense that the song opens up a space rather than just driving a beat. I do not think this means my old taste was wrong. Different stages of life just seem to call for different sound structures. EDM still works for exercise, because the body wants energy and repetition, but when I am not exercising I usually want music that leaves me more room to think or feel. Maybe that is the change. I used to want music to move me forward, and now I also want it to give me space.