The Incentives Lab
The Brain Atlas · Incentive Intelligence

This is what your brain is doing when no one's looking.

The 758 patterns in this Atlas — every bias, fallacy, perverse incentive, AI dynamic, and mental model — all run on the same three pounds of tissue. Click any region to see what it controls, the concepts it produces, and how it lands in your day.

Drag to rotate · click a glowing region to zoom in
Ten regions · 758 concepts
How to read the Atlas

Three pounds. Ten regions. Every pattern you've ever named.

01 · Diagnose

Find the region.

When something feels off — a meeting that went sideways, a decision you regret, a habit you can't break — start by asking which region is firing. Threat? Reward? Story?

02 · Name

Find the pattern.

Each region surfaces the named patterns it produces. Loss aversion, sunk cost, hyperbolic discounting — these aren't abstractions. They are predictable outputs of specific tissue.

03 · Design

Design around it.

Once you know which circuit is in play, you stop arguing with it and start engineering for it. Defaults, cues, frames, environment — that's the work.