I: Maps and Mental Models*

*Hofstadter, Alzheimer, Leibniz & Freud was the title that this was originally published under.

In 2002, I was a 19-year-old wandering the shelves of Kent State’s library when I picked up a book that looked like it had eaten all the other books. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter wasn’t light reading—it was more like philosophical CrossFit. But once I cracked it open, it was as if someone had lobbed a Molotov cocktail of ideas into my prefrontal cortex.

The book’s central thesis? That the “I” we carry around all day is not a thing, but a loop. A strange loop. A feedback circuit of abstract symbols inside the wet spaghetti of our neurons. Somehow, in the most elegant sleight of hand imaginable, our brains manage to generate a sense of self—a narrator—out of chaos.

This hit me like a thunderclap. Because up to that point, the only real model of the mind I had was Maslow’s hierarchy. And it made sense. I was a middle-class teenager, surrounded by other middle-class teenagers. Maslow’s pyramid was practically our anthem: esteem, belonging, meaning. We were all climbing that psychological ziggurat with the same sense of upward entitlement.

Maslow gave me a map. Hofstadter showed me the terrain was recursive.

Years later, during my psychiatry residency at the University of Florida, I began to see the strange loops Hofstadter described everywhere—disguised as depression, anxiety, PTSD. My patients weren’t just suffering—they were stuck. Not stuck in their symptoms, but in stories. Loops of pain built from trauma, biology, and beliefs. Escher prints etched onto their minds.

At some point, psychiatry stopped looking like medicine and started looking like debugging a malfunctioning operating system. Every diagnosis wasn’t just a name—it was a recursive glitch. A mental Mobius strip.

This is where the metaphor took root: Psychiatry, at its best, is a science of pattern disruption.

And yet, I began to notice something else. The mental models I was trained in—psychodynamic theory, CBT, pharmacology—each claimed to be the map. But over time, I realized they were more like different lenses in a telescope. You could toggle between them, and each would bring a different layer into focus. None told the whole story. And none needed to.

Freud, for instance, gave us a brilliant early map. He identified unconscious motives, defense mechanisms, and the human tendency toward self-deception. Essential stuff. But then he veered into “penis envy” and “hysteria” territory—concepts that aged about as well as a jug of milk in the Sahara. It’s hard not to wonder if some of his ideas were powered more by 19th-century cocaine than scientific rigor.

Still, the mature stance is this: You can be revolutionary in one domain and wildly off-base in another. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the human condition.

Case in point: Alois Alzheimer. Unlike Freud, he based his insights on hard evidence—those now-famous brain plaques and tangles visible under a microscope. Dr. Alzheimer was a psychiatrist (a fact that was well reminded to me during my board exams, and at every academic facility I’ve ever worked at). Alzheimer literally changed the game by linking symptoms to brain pathology. Freud theorized the unseen. Alzheimer revealed the visible.

Together, they sketched two halves of the same puzzle. Alas time showed both to be at least half wrong (our modern view is that these plaques and tangles do not play nearly as central a role in the disease's pathology as what Alzheimer hypothesized).

Around that same time, I fell down another rabbit hole: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his idea of monads—tiny, indivisible mirrors of the universe. Each monad is its own self-contained unit, reflecting everything else from its own unique perspective. It felt like Leibniz had beaten Hofstadter to the punch by about 300 years. His monads were strange loops in disguise.

More importantly, they offered a way to think about individual minds. Not as interchangeable drives, but as self-reflective galaxies—each shaped by its own history, biology, and myths. Each life, each consciousness, indivisible and unique, akin to black holes, singularities and bubble universes. Psychiatry, from this angle, wasn’t just brain repair. It was deep-space navigation.

Leibniz also proposed that decisions emerge from the tension of nested beliefs and conflicting impulses. He was basically describing the brain as a committee meeting run by toddlers. There’s no CEO up there, no singular “decider.” Instead, we negotiate with ourselves. Our thoughts are less like linear equations and more like late-night group texts with too many emojis and no clear outcome.

And our consciousness? That may be less of a spotlight and more of a hall of mirrors—reflections reflecting on reflections, like a funhouse powered by electricity and trauma.

This all came to a head during my time running a 37-bed psychiatric unit for men, and working as research chair for one of the largest, oldest psychiatric hospital in America. By then, I had become intimately familiar with the male psyche—not just as a clinician, but as a card-carrying member. So let me level with you: everything in this blog (and hopefully a book in the near future) is filtered through that lens. I make no pretense of understanding the female psyche in full. That map is under different management, and I suggest we ask the experts—i.e., women.

The deeper truth is this: no single map captures the mind. Not Freud’s. Not Maslow’s. Not CBT’s tidy diagrams. The human psyche is more like a city. It needs many maps. Street maps, sewer maps, power grids. None of them alone are “the city,” but each one tells you something vital. If you only ever use a GPS, you’ll be fine until you fall into a sinkhole. And if you only have the sewer map, well—good luck finding dinner.

Likewise, mental health frameworks are maps. Useful. Imperfect. Partial. Some help you find your way. Others help you dig out of disaster. Our task as clinicians—and as curious, self-reflective humans—is to collect as many as we can and learn when to switch between them.

Zoom out further, and you see that the entire landscape of brain science is shaped by the same tension: psychiatry, psychology, and neurology all peer into the same mysterious machine—but from different angles.

• Neurologists see the brain as hardware. Short circuits. Broken chips. Fried wires.

  
  

• Psychologists see it as software. Bugs in the code. Behavior shaped by reinforcement, trauma, and belief.

  
  

• Psychiatrists? We live in the liminal space—half repair technician, half mythologist. Sometimes prescribing medication for the hardware and others decoding dreams for bugs in the software.

  
  

Any of these approaches is effective. Each is a map, and each approach is scientifically validated and with a better than average record of success., but when combined together, the improvements can be extraordinary. The magic happens not when we argue over which one is “correct,” but when we ask: What does each illuminate? What might I be missing?

This book, then, is not a single framework. It’s a tour of suppositions. A curated collection of mental models, stitched together by one working hypothesis: that the mind is both a system, and a process. Not a puzzle to be solved, but a symphony to be tuned.

And at the center of all this—the spirals, the loops, the monads, the maps—is the biggest question of all: What is consciousness?

We’re still at the shoreline of that question, poking at it with sticks and metaphors. But one thing seems clear: whatever it is, it emerges not from simplicity, but from recursion. From feedback. From systems that observe themselves, model themselves, and—in doing so—become selves. As the very essense of qualia and consciousness itself, we will briefly explore the topic next chapter. We can then begin to piece together various validated suppositions and finally integrate them to answer this question in the final chapter, the last algorithm.

If you're looking for definitive answers, this book only provides suppositions (guided by the best evidence we have thus far). But these suppositions provide many effective maps. And sometimes, when you’re lost inside your own mind, a good map is the most generous thing anyone can offer. If successful, the maps should fall together like jigsaw puzzles hinting at the grander picture.