Why we try to draw the inside of our heads

Listen to how people talk about their own minds and you'll notice nobody stays literal for long. A mood is heavy. A week is foggy. An idea is brilliant, a plan is murky, and somebody catches a ray of hope. We reach for pictures, usually pictures made of light and weather and weight, because the thing we're pointing at has no edges of its own.

That reach seems to be close to universal. The Indra's Net project at UBC Okanagan collects some of the versions: Inuit shamans called an inner light qaumaneq, Vedanta calls it Atma, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls it the clear light of Buddha-nature. Centuries and continents apart, the instinct lands in the same place: the mind as something luminous.

Naming it does something. So does drawing it.

Both halves of that instinct have been studied, and modestly, they hold up.

On the naming side, a well-known UCLA study had people look at photographs of emotional faces while their brains were scanned. When participants picked a word for the emotion they were seeing, activity in the amygdala dropped and activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex rose. Putting the feeling into language changed how the brain handled it. That finding is one of the reasons we think writing things down remains the gold standard, even though most people abandon the habit.

On the drawing side, a study of 39 adults at Drexel measured salivary cortisol before and after 45 minutes of open-ended art making with markers, clay, and collage. Around three quarters of participants had lower cortisol afterward, and it made no difference whether they'd ever made art before. It's a small quasi-experimental study and worth holding loosely. Still, it points the same direction.

Neither result promises that a picture of your mind will fix anything. Together they suggest the urge to make one isn't decoration.

Someone built the platform for it

Before Conneczen, our founder spent his graduate research at UBC Okanagan building exactly that, working with psychologist Liane Gabora on a system called Indra's Net. The work was published in Leonardo in 2025.

The idea is to give people a visual vocabulary for interior states, built entirely out of light. Your life force is an inner light with an intensity. Arousal shows up as flickering sparks that speed up and crowd together. A thought you keep turning over is a beam reflecting again and again inside a vessel. Repression and rumination change the vessel itself, which turns cloudier or more rigid depending on what's happening inside.

Two decisions in that design matter far more than the imagery, and they're the reason we're writing about it.

The first is that the person builds the depiction. The platform hands you the vocabulary and you assemble your own state, adjusting the light and the vessel until it looks like how you actually feel. The assembling is the exercise. The second is a line from the project description that we've thought about a lot: the system "is designed not to give advice, but to inspire self-reflection."

So why doesn't your journal open onto a glowing vessel?

You might expect us to ship something like it. We decided not to, for two reasons.

The first is about who holds the pen. When you make the picture, a wrong picture costs nothing. It's just the next adjustment, and the adjusting was the point. When software makes the picture out of your entries, a wrong picture is a claim about your inner life that showed up without your say-so. Worse, it's a claim you can't argue with. If your journal tells you that you wrote about your mother eleven times last month, you can go check, and you can tell us we're wrong. If it shows you a dim, cracked vessel and calls that your month, there's nothing to check. The same vagueness that makes a self-made image useful is what makes a machine-made one impossible to dispute. We've written before about what it costs when the software gets you wrong, and this is that problem in prettier clothes.

The second reason is duller and just as decisive. Beautiful encodings are hard to read. In 1984 William Cleveland and Robert McGill ranked how accurately people pull quantities out of visual features. Position along a common scale came out on top, and length did fine too. Angle, area, and color saturation, which are exactly what a glowing vessel would run on, did badly. Glow, haze, and flicker live at the wrong end of that list. A view that asks you to compare this month to last month by brightness is asking you to do the thing human eyes are worst at.

We learned that one on ourselves. The first version of our wheel of life was a wedge design and it looked lovely. It also came out nearly identical month after month, because it scaled every wedge against the largest area of your life and squashed the small ones flat. You could open it in May and again in August and see the same flower. We replaced it with a plainer radar chart that lays the previous month over the current one as a dotted outline, and movement finally became visible. The view got less beautiful. You got the ability to tell two months apart.

What we did keep

The stance survived, and it turns out to be the valuable part.

Conneczen tries not to hand down verdicts. When it looks at the people in your life, it'll show you what you and they seem to do for each other, and when the record is too thin to support a conclusion, it says the record is thin instead of announcing that your friendship is out of balance. That restraint is the same principle Indra's Net was built on, and it's what we mean when we say that recall is the easy part. An assistant that remembers your words is now ordinary. What you do with those words afterward is the whole job, and doing it carefully means knowing when to stay quiet.

There's a version of the light idea we'd still like to build one day. Picture a small space where you draw how the week felt, in shape and color, sitting next to what you actually wrote. Nothing there can be wrong about you, because you made it. We haven't built it, and we might never. But the reason it appeals is the same reason we left the glowing vessel out of the product.

Conneczen is a journal you can talk to. It's a companion and not a treatment, and we say that plainly. It listens and keeps an honest record, then hands your week back to you on Sunday. If that sounds useful, you can join the waitlist. We'd rather show you something true and a little plain than something gorgeous that quietly makes things up.