Presenting the Cognitive Friction Cycle

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials*

"Thinking is my hobby." — Germaine Greer

There’s a certain kind of thinking that hurts a little. The kind that comes not from glancing at a dashboard or prompting a chatbot, but from pacing the floor, wrangling with an idea or fragments of an idea. It’s the agonizing, sometimes-days-long wrestling with a problem that refuses to be solved in one sitting. And it matters more now than ever because in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence—where answers are spoon-fed—the risk isn’t just that we lose skills, it’s that we bypass the very journey that shapes our insight and creativity. We’re outsourcing not just knowledge work, but the friction that forges insight … the fierce strategic dialogue, be it internal or external.

How can we defend the reflective mind? In this Substack we put forward a model of “cognitive friction” - let’s call it the Cognitive Friction Cycle - and why it must be preserved even as we embrace the accelerating capabilities of AI.

The Cognitive Friction Cycle is a way to make sense of why painful, effortful, delayed thinking still plays a vital role in how we grow as thinkers, creators, and decision-makers. It’s not anti-AI. It’s pro-thought. AI has a role—speeding up the mechanical, the repetitive, even the connective. But it cannot replace the creative value of not-knowing.

Here are five interconnected stages of this cycle:

1. Cognitive Friction Cycle as the forge of insight. Think of Burt Bacharach composing away from the piano so as not to fall into old habits or ABBA obsessing for a year over Dancing Queen. Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album took 14 months to record with 6 months dedicated to the title track alone. Springsteen's perfectionism led to gruelling studio sessions as he obsessed over every note, tone and word, as he struggled to capture the sounds he heard in his head on tape.

These aren’t just anecdotes—they reveal a truth: the most original ideas are rarely convenient. They emerge from tension. Delay. Struggle.

Psychologist Robert Bjork’s work on desirable difficulties shows that learning is often more durable and flexible when it’s effortful¹. Vygotsky called this the Zone of Proximal Development—where we grow best not in ease, but in the stretch zone, with just enough support². Cognitive friction feels like resistance. But that resistance is what forces us to move beyond clichés, reheated opinions, or the path of least intellectual resistance.

2. Slow Thinking Enables Complexity. Daniel Kahneman famously distinguishes between Type 1 (fast, intuitive) and Type 2 (slow, reflective) thinking³. We need both—but complex problems require the latter. Here’s the rub: AI excels at mimicking Type 1 fluency. It can spit out persuasive (not necessarily correct) answers in milliseconds. But what it can’t do is make us wiser.

Slow thinking is where we confront paradox, ambiguity, and morality. It's the domain of “what’s right,” not just “what works.” When we offload too much of our thinking to AI, we risk remaining in a shallow pool of snap reactions—never building the intellectual muscles required to go deeper.

Here is a plug for next week’s Substack post, which is another in our occasional Contemporary Polymaths series. We will be considering Donald Knuth. A real exponent of powerful slow thinking.

3. Incubation and the Subconscious Mind. There’s a strange magic that happens when we don’t think directly. Stephen King describes writing as sending messages down to the “boys in the basement”⁴. Bowie and Eno famously used creative constraints and oblique strategies to short-circuit the obvious. Einstein took long walks. So did Dickens. So do many of us, intuitively.

This isn’t laziness. It’s incubation. The Wallas Model of Creativity defines four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification⁵. It’s the middle two that AI has no access to. The mind wanders, gets stuck, loops back. We stare out the window. Sleep on it. And then, suddenly, a breakthrough.

Neuroscience backs this up. The brain’s default mode network, activated during rest or mind-wandering, is linked to insight and imagination⁶. But you have to sit with it. Let it marinate. Let yourself be stuck. Ruminate!

4. Epistemic Curiosity Requires Struggle. We often think of curiosity as a childlike wonder. But there’s a more serious kind—epistemic curiosity—that demands persistence in the face of confusion. Psychologist George Loewenstein calls this the information gap theory: curiosity intensifies when we know that we don’t know, but believe we could know⁷. It’s the gap that sparks the search.

AI, for all its wonders, is a gap-closer. It makes the space between question and answer vanish. But when that happens too fast, the question doesn’t get a chance to deepen. We risk becoming passive consumers of answers, rather than active shapers of inquiry. True curiosity isn’t about collecting trivia. It’s about lingering with the question. It’s the happy discomfort of wondering.

5. Intellectual Maturity Comes from Wrestling. Some problems can’t be solved. They can only be carried, as the saying goes. Adult development theorists like William Perry and Robert Kegan argue that real intellectual growth involves wrestling with complexity, ambiguity, and conflicting perspectives^8/9. We start life craving certainty. Maturity comes from tolerating doubt.

This doesn’t happen in one-click moments of revelation. It happens in long nights of uncertainty. It happens when we make a decision, doubt it, revise it, and live with its consequences. AI is good at delivering neat answers. But many of life’s biggest questions have none. The danger is not that we trust AI too much—it’s that we lose the will to think past it.

Here we are reminded of one of our favourite books, a deceptively thin “fable” called Pig Wrestling by Pete Lindsay and Mark Bawden. Pig Wrestling embodies the maturity of not rushing to resolve tension, with a message that meaningful change often comes not from solving the problem directly, but from changing how we engage with it. Agonizing over complex issues builds character, resilience, and judgment. It doesn’t reject ease, but it cautions against false clarity. Instead of fighting the problem head-on (wrestling the pig), it invites you to reconstruct your mental model—which is precisely what the Cognitive Friction Cycle calls for.

” I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” George Bernard Shaw

Let’s be clear here … AI is not the villain. It’s just a tool. In fact, it can help create space for real thinking by taking over low-value tasks. Used well, it enables us to be more human, not less. But we must resist the temptation to let it replace the slow parts, the strange parts, the stuck parts. Because that’s where the growth is.

Like Germaine Greer, maybe we should all list “thinking” as a hobby. Not typing. Not prompting. Not googling. Just thinking. It might mean blocking time in your calendar for rumination. Designing spaces to get lost in thought. Letting your subconscious stew. Noticing when something doesn’t feel right and not resolving it straight away. Thinking hurts a little. That’s how you know it’s doing you some good.

The Cognitive Friction Cycle reminds us that delay, doubt, and discomfort are not cognitive flaws. They are conditions for growth.

So yes, let AI speed up the typing. Let it summarize the meeting, schedule the calendar, even suggest a first draft. But when it comes to judgment, originality, curiosity, and character, lets leave space for the friction. The mind isn’t just a processor. It’s a forge. And thinking is still a craft.

“The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song. What do I write about? I never know. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe”. Nick Cave

1. Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. Metacognition: Knowing about knowing, MIT Press.

2. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.

3. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

4. Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, 2000.

5. Wallas, G. (1926). The Art of Thought. Harcourt Brace.

6. Beaty, R. E., et al. (2015). Creativity and the default network: A functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest. Neuropsychologia, 64, 92–98.

7. Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98.

8. Perry, W. G. (1970). Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

9. Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.

10. *Title Quote: Lucius Annaeus Seneca