thoughtfeel

Ted and I go way back to our high school days, so naturally, I was skeptical of anything he was proclaiming to invent or teach. But over the years, I’ve seen firsthand his dedication to building, researching, developing, and surprising everyone with what he decides to do next.

This time it’s thoughtfeel: a technique that identifies and names the ability to think in concept bubbles as a new sense, with a gentle learning curve. After my lesson, I feel like I understand how it can help people remember way more, for much longer.

We recorded the lesson from around 7 to 9 pm, as Ted walked me through a story about TD learning in thoughtfeel. I had no knowledge of TD learning going in. After the lesson, I didn’t put any more effort into remembering the story, and I haven’t researched it since. The next morning, I could still lay it out. The learner goes through trial after trial, and its prediction is designed to approach the reward, moment after moment. Each trial has a tone moment and a wait moment. The prediction error is the reward, plus the next tone moment’s prediction, minus this moment’s prediction: on the first trial, 1 + 0 − 0 = 1. Then the prediction moves by the learning rate, 0.5, times the error, so it becomes 0.5.

I’m most surprised at how this brand new information, on a topic I knew nothing about going in, still feels so consolidated and easily accessible the morning after.

It felt weird at first to dial in my brain to think in this way, but my brain was able to adjust quickly, and the payoff is crystal clear. I recommend anyone who’s curious about what their mind is capable of to give this a try.

I spent an hour with Ted learning about Bloom filters and building the entire story in thoughtfeel. I’d tried thoughtfeel before, building a story about iron-deficiency anemia. It definitely worked at the time, but it felt like a slow and grueling process to build the concepts.

In our session, Ted challenged me to build each part of the story as it went, without repeating or stopping between parts. His reasoning was that stopping to read the line and then build it increases the cognitive load. I took on the challenge, and I remembered much more at the end than I would have thought. I realized it was my anxiety that made me want to go slow and build everything until I felt sure about it. My advice is to trust yourself and push through that feeling. The goal is to build as you go. It’s way faster and feels more fun!

The next day, without revisiting it, I wrote out everything I could recall about Bloom filters: how each item gets three hashes that turn three bits to one, how the filter checks an item against those bits, and how an item that was never added can still match, which is a false positive. Then I asked an AI chat where the gaps in my understanding were, rewrote those parts as direct, simple sentences, and rebuilt them in thoughtfeel.

Will you become a genius who remembers everything on the first try? It’s a possibility! Unfortunately, that is not me as of now 😅. But I was able to retain a conceptual story of something I had learned once and give a coherent explanation on my first try, and I’m impressed. thoughtfeel is a mental exercise, and like anything in life, if you put in dedicated practice, you will get better. From our session, I learned I had been building incorrectly, and that’s why I was seeing minimal results.

I would bet many people reading this are like me. When I watch a lecture, I’m mostly listening to the voice or reading the slide, or taking notes and trying to recreate the story on paper. I’m not normally aware of what’s going on in my head. With thoughtfeel, I’m learning directly in my mind. I can see, but it’s not necessarily a “visual” process.

For the next few months, I’ll be building my medical school lectures in thoughtfeel and seeing where it takes me. If you’ve been experimenting with thoughtfeel and found some benefit, I highly recommend going through a learning session with Ted.

As a disclaimer, I’ve known Ted for more than a year. We met because I was curious about an early version of his work, from before thoughtfeel. Ted is a highly passionate and driven person, and he pushes me to believe that I, like anyone reading this, have a greater capacity for learning and memorizing than I may have believed.

I’ve been using thoughtfeel on and off, and sometimes found it hard to use. A lot of the difficulty came down to my ADHD. I often run into auditory processing delays, and I can struggle to turn what I hear into meaningful thoughts. With thoughtfeel, that meant the audio stories were causing me a lot of trouble.

When I tried using visuals and reading the lines instead, it was like flipping a switch. I was immediately able to build the Bloom filter in thoughtfeel, seamlessly. It felt like assembling a machine out of concepts, and I could hold the numbers and ideas in my head with ease.

I want to share my experience as a neurodivergent thinker, so others know: if you’re having trouble using thoughtfeel, try different approaches. It’s honestly really awesome being able to use it in full, and I’m really glad I gave this version a try.

Building it felt like creating thought machinery in my head, then stamping helpful visuals on top of it. Now, whenever I go to access it, I find a bird’s-eye view of this concept machine with key visuals stamped on it, almost like dictionary keys in a data structure, and boom, I can find the meaning of the concept immediately. It’s honestly super cool, and I’m looking forward to using it to learn more.

I am Khaled Barakat but most people know me as Zed. I am a third year medical student diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve always been able to understand concepts fairly quickly, but memorizing and recalling details has been a different story. I used to spend hours reading, repeating, and writing things down only to sometimes get stuck while recalling because I forgot one detail or I couldn’t remember the right sequence.

I came across Ted’s post about Thoughtfeel and decided to give it a shot. We used glycolysis as a test during our call. We built connected concepts around what was actually happening at each step instead of just memorizing everything in the process as a list. I managed to recall the entire pathway in less than five minutes after trying it again after our call.

Ted then introduced me to Dijkstra’s algorithm. Dijkstra’s algorithm was something completely new to me and outside my field. I initially couldn’t make sense of how it worked. Ted then walked me through it using Thoughtfeel. To my surprise, I was able to follow the process and execute it myself. I tested my recall the next morning on the routes that we built, and it felt as easy to remember as my own name.

That got me curious about applying it to medicine. So, I started using Thoughtfeel with neuroanatomy and neuropathologies and tumors, and I’ve started noticing improvements in both recall and the time it takes me to precisely recall information and solve practice questions.

I’m still learning how to build bubbles efficiently especially when trying to keep up with a live lecture, but I haven’t tested my exam performance or long-term retention yet so there’s still a lot for me to explore.

What stood out to me most was being able to work with information rather than just trying to hold on to it. I’m genuinely excited to see where I can take this.

Hello! I’ve been learning to use thoughtfeel ever since you started talking about it, and I want to share my results, because they’re kind of insane to me.

I’m learning Japanese, and I’ve been using thoughtfeel for kanji. I break a character into parts that each produce a thoughtfeel, connect them together, then connect that to the reading and the meaning. Take 富. On its own, it didn’t produce any thoughtfeel. But split into elements (4 boxes that look like a drawer, a rectangle on top, a line on top and a thing that looks like a lid), each part produced its own thoughtfeel – so I connected them. Then I attached the reading, “tomi”, and the meaning, “wealth”. The whole thing took about 30 seconds.

The crazy part is that it got ingrained right away and I can remember very clearly all of the ones I learned. I recognize them in text, I can write them out from memory, and the written form, sound and meaning feel as connected as any word in English or in my native language (Russian).

For comparison, I used to study Chinese in the past (without success) with the currently recommended method: take words in context, put them into Anki, do active recall on reading and meaning of the characters. I “learned” around 200 characters that way, and I couldn’t recognize them while reading, let alone write them. I remember exactly 2 of them: 一 (yī) and 了 (le). I think my brain relied on the context of the flashcard instead of actually memorizing the characters.

So it’s 30 seconds per character, once, versus ~30 minutes of daily Anki reviews with low retention. It’s just insane how efficient thoughtfeel is.

And it’s not only kanji. Right now, I’m using it to study for QA engineering from scratch. TF makes it much easier to understand the lessons and I can now recite them forwards and backwards without any rehearsal. I also use it to create reminders for myself throughout the day, to learn lessons from books and videos, to memorize useful discussions in conversations, to remember some insights and ideas that I came up with and for general thinking.

It’s basically the endgame for studying and mnemonic techniques. Thank you!

I have aphantasia: I can’t form mental images, and I have no inner voice. When I think of something, say a chair, I don’t see a chair. I get the concept of a chair, which is hard to describe to anyone who thinks in pictures. The best I can do is that my thinking is made of clumps of concepts, linked to one another in a kind of graph of relationships. It’s elusive, like something at the corner of your eye that disappears when you turn to look at it.

That has always made rote memory hard for me. I can’t call up a picture of what I’ve learned, so I have to understand something well enough to build an intuition for it. Visual techniques like the memory palace just don’t work for me: there’s no palace to walk through. The closest I came was mind maps, through my computer science degree and my MBA, and even those I was trying to remember as an image.

What drew me to ThoughtFeel was the language in Ted’s videos. He described thinking in words very close to the ones I’ve used for years to explain how I think about my own thinking. So I tried it on his list, Anchor, Saffron, Bicycle, Grumble. Normally I’d never remember a list like that. With ThoughtFeel it stuck, and 24 hours later I could still run the chain of concepts easily, forwards and backwards.

For me the difference from visual mnemonics is that I’m not translating anything into a picture. I’m linking the concepts themselves, and saying each word out loud seems to tie the sound to the concept. It works with the way my mind already works, instead of asking it to do something it can’t.

When I first spoke with Ted about ThoughtFeel, I realised how much I had been relying on visualisation to learn and remember things. I was used to having to picture things in my head, and that could get tiring, especially when learning something new.

Trying ThoughtFeel felt different. I didn’t have to force an image into my mind. I could just grasp the concept and understand what it meant.

I’ve been using it to learn Dutch because I need the language for my startup in the Netherlands, and honestly, learning feels less stressful and more natural. I find it easier to grasp things and recall what I’ve learned. It’s been a really interesting experience because I never thought I could learn this way.

Thank you for introducing me to ThoughtFeel Ted! Forever grateful

I have always felt that most of my thoughts have a significant portion that are not tied to the five senses. The technique isn’t completely new to me, but I’ve never had the words to describe it before. In the past I would make oblique connections between things. It helps a lot with understanding things, like the underlying machinery behind some math concepts, and also makes picking up new games easier. The downside is that it makes explaining things difficult, which is where the idea of thoughtfeel comes in handy. Having the language to describe this kind of thinking is completely revolutionary, and I hope it can help a lot of other people.