Asa Jomard | Substack
Asa Jomard
Curious Biomimicry Specialist
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Asa Jomard
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Asa Jomard
@pursuitofwonder
Curious Biomimicry Specialist
Asa Jomard
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Off the coast of Ghana, in the Cor lagoon, something is happening that no engineer designed and no algorithm predicted. Microbial communities living in water saturated with synthetic textile fibres are adapting. They are developing, through the slow pressure of evolutionary necessity, a biochemical capacity to process synthetic polymers …
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What AI Cannot See: Industrial Symbiosis, Ecological Intelligence, and the Limits of Optimisation
Leila is twenty years old, studying history, and not cheating. She uses AI to explain difficult passages, suggest essay structures, and give feedback on drafts. She is engaged with every response. She is making good decisions with what the AI gives her. And something is happening to her thinking that she doesn't yet have the vocabulary t…
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The Erosion of Learning: What AI Is Doing to How We Think, Not Just What We Write
Creative Health with Katina Bajaj Katina, Creative Scientist
The science of feeling alive. Join 18,000+ subscribers exploring the neuroscience and psychology of creativity, play, beauty and wonder alongside Creative Health Scientist, Katina Bajaj. Creativity isn't talent - it's a dimension of our well-being.
daydreamerspace.substack.com
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I have never been able to stay in one place for long.
Not intellectually, anyway. Philosophy would pull me in, then developmental psychology, then biology, evolution of the brain, then innovation and creative approaches to thinking, and now AI. Each time I followed a new thread, someone told me to stop. To pick one …
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The Future of Education: Polymaths, Personalisation, and the End of the Assembly Line
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Nadia is forty-three. A teacher. Comfortable but not wealthy. Last spring she went to a free longevity clinic consultation. Her epigenetic age came back three years older than her chronological age. The protocol the clinic's AI designed to address it cost £4,800 a year. She earns £38,000 before tax. She left with a leaflet and a feeling …
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The Ethics of AI-Designed Longevity Therapies: Who Gets Access and Who Decides?
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On March 3, 2026, a video appeared on X showing Iranian missiles striking Tel Aviv. It spread to millions. People turned to Grok — X's own AI chatbot — to verify it. Grok told them it was real. It fabricated citations from Reuters and CNN to support the claim. The video was AI-generated.
This essay is not really about deepfakes. It's abo…
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Who Prompts the Prompters?
Medicine has always had a latency problem. By the time you felt something, the damage was often already done.
AI health agents are designed to close that gap — monitoring continuously, flagging patterns, suggesting responses. The direction is right. The evidence in specific areas is real.
But something else is happening too.
When David's he…
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From Reactive to Proactive: Prompting AI Agents to Monitor Your Health Continuously
Asa JomardApr 23
From Reactive to Proactive: Prompting AI Agents to Monitor Your Health Continuously
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The previous piece focused on children and AI-assisted learning. This one goes deeper — into the theory behind why the shadow cards work, and why the same practice matters as much for adults.
The core argument: every act of thinking operates on two layers. The visible one — decisions, conclusions, behaviour. And a hidden one — assumptions…
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Shadow Explorer: The Architecture Beneath Your Thinking
We often think of focus as something we control through discipline.
But what if attention is not just a function of the brain—but of the environment around it?
In this essay, I explore why time in nature reliably restores mental clarity. Drawing on Attention Restoration Theory and a biomimicry lens, it suggests something deeper: that the m…
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Nature Restores Attention by Engaging the Mind Without Effort
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MIT researchers have a name for what happens when we let AI do our thinking: cognitive debt. You get the output today, you pay with your thinking ability tomorrow.
This post is about a practical response to that problem — not a ban on AI, not a return to pencil and paper, but a framework called Shadow Explorer that gives children the habi…
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Shadow Explorer: Teaching Children to See What Isn’t There
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What if mental resilience isn't just a mindset — but an ecosystem?
The gut–brain axis is one of the more surprising frontiers in health science right now. This essay looks at what researchers are finding about microbial diversity, inflammation, and the feedback loops connecting your gut to your brain.
Part of The Connected Body series, whi…
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What the Microbiome May Reveal About Mental Resilience
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Substack Notes
AI didn't make thinking obsolete.
It revealed that we may have been teaching the wrong layer of thinking for decades.
Techniques are becoming AI features. Schemas matter more than ever. And metacognition — the ability to notice the edges of your own thinking — may be the most important skill we're currently failing to teach.
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Lead with the uncomfortable truth
What can living systems teach us about intelligence, health, and the environments we design?
Modern life often separates the very systems that biology keeps integrated.
We study cognition without thinking much about the body that supports it.
We design cities without always considering how environments shape biology.
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The Connected Body
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Asa JomardMar 6
The Connected Body
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This week, I want to make an argument that runs against the current of almost everything being written about AI and climate change.
The breakthroughs are real. GraphCast and Aurora are remarkable. AI is going to reshape how we model planetary systems — that much seems certain.
But certainty, it turns out, is exactly the problem.
Climate sci…
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The Monoculture Trap: Why Climate AI Must Be Built for Uncertainty, Not Confidence
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What happens when a child realises they don’t understand something?
This essay follows that moment — from the feeling of confusion, to metacognition, to an unexpected link with Gödel and Tarski — and asks what AI can and can’t replace in learning.
Confusion isn’t a bug. It’s the mechanism by which understanding grows.
What Happens When a Child Notices Their Own Confusion
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A short, philosophical piece to end a week filled with ideas and reflections — less about technology, more about what technology has done to the quieter project of becoming yourself.
The question at the centre of it is one I think most of us have stopped asking: Who am I when there is no audience?
It touches on social media, the coming cha…
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Who Are You When No One Is Watching?
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The mainstream conversation about AI and education is asking the wrong first question. Everyone wants to know how to incorporate AI effectively. But the more important question is: what does AI make invisible — and how do we protect it?
In this post, I look at where the thinking of some of the biggest voices in the field — including Musta…
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The One Skill AI Cannot Replace
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Asa Jomard restacked
The School of BiophiliaFeb 18
MONDAY — WHO is Biophilia For? \ \ Introduction\ \ The School of Biophilia’s Substack
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“Have you cleaned your room?” It turns out this is the same question we keep asking people in power — and getting very good at not answering.
An essay about honesty, evasion, and what children are really learning from the world we’ve built.
Why Children Stay Silent
Two-month-old babies can already distinguish living things from objects. Not behaviourally — neurally. The fMRI data is unambiguous.
But the stranger finding is where in the brain it happens: in the high-level visual cortex, before the intermediate processing areas have organised themselves.
Development, it turns out, doesn't go from simpl…
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What Babies Know That AI Doesn’t — Yet
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What if a building could teach children to notice what they don't know? 🌿
I've been sketching a kindergarten where nothing explains itself.
A pollinator garden that's empty in February and buzzing in July. A mud kitchen whose results depend on yesterday's rain. Solar trees that rotate on their own rhythm. A corner for broken things, waiti…
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The Kindergarten That Asks Questions
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Check out my new post!
In a moment when AI can generate fluent self-reflection on demand, the risk is not that we stop asking questions, but that we ask them without consequence. Insight becomes cheap. Clarity becomes performative. Reflection turns into another smooth output.
The prompts that structured this reflection came from a short P…
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Cornered Into Coherence
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Asa JomardFeb 5
Shadow Explorer Cards: Designing for the Edge of Children’s Thinking
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When kids use AI for brainstorming or problem-solving, they're not learning to think—they're learning to outsource thinking. This creates 'borrowed competence': they feel smart but can't function independently. Here's the edge-spotting approach, shadow explorer, that actually builds confidence and creativity.
Why Teaching Kids “Thinking Techniques” Backfires in the Age of AI
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This article explores why metacognition—the ability to notice, understand, and guide one’s own thinking—should be treated as a core learning infrastructure for learners on the autistic spectrum, not an optional add-on or a one-size-fits-all strategy. It argues that while accommodations reduce barriers, metacognitio…
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Unlocking Learning Potential
Asa JomardJan 24
Holding Space for Thought
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Asa JomardJan 24
When Intent Declaration Fails — and What That Teaches Us
Asa JomardJan 24
Why Intent Declaration Is a Democratic Skill (and Not a Solution)
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This was my most popular post in 2025. I have added a short video created by Google NotebookLM this morning. Check it out!
AI, Democracy, and the Metacognition Gap
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If AI is becoming part of the environment in which thinking happens, then the most important skills aren’t technical—they’re cognitive.
This piece continues the thread from Part 1 and Part 2, moving from what’s missing in current AI literacy to how judgment, time, and non-human perspectives actually fit together in practice.
It’s an attemp…
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The Thinking Skills We Need for an AI Age
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Asa JomardJan 15
The Thinking Skills We Need for an AI Age
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Check out my recent blog post.
“The question is not whether AI can decide for us. It cannot, without hollowing democracy out from the inside.
The question is narrower and more difficult: Can AI help hold the conditions under which democratic judgment remains possible, without replacing that judgment itself?”
Where AI Might Still Belong
Asa JomardJan 14
Liquid Democracy 2.0: Can AI Help Us Vote on Issues, Not Just People?
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If a doctor could only see one-fifth of your body, could they really treat you?
This is the exact dilemma we face with Earth’s biodiversity. We only "see" a fraction of the species we are trying to save.
But the tools are changing. I’m diving into the new world of AI-assisted discovery and how a "partnership modeled on nature" might be our best shot at protecting the 80% we don't yet know.
The Zebra in the Machine: Unlocking Nature’s 8-Million-Species Secret.
Check out my new post!
Screens or Scripts?
Asa JomardJan 8
Screens or Scripts?
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“What would you rather have? A tool that thinks for you, or a tool that makes you think?”
The Map and the Compass
Thanks Phil, for this thoughtful piece. I appreciate how you've taken my essay seriously and offered a substantive response beyond my wildest dream when I wrote about AI, Democracy, and the Metacognition Gap.
Fascinated by your reframing of the problem. Rather than asking "how do we control AI?" you're asking "how should people behave in …
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Task Codes
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Architecture is a silent teacher: it shapes attention, behaviour, and values without uttering a single word. By 2035, this teacher will no longer stop at the school gate. As the walls between school, home, and world continue to thin, the home must inherit the role of the kindergarten—becoming a daily, lived curriculum in ecological belonging.
Biophilia and Children’s Wellbeing
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Asa JomardDec 24
An Ethical Compass for Biomimicry Inventors in an AI Age
Asa JomardDec 24
The Digital Mycelium
Some of my posts about AI, Metacognition, Thinking, Democracy and Healthcare.
My recent Post on Substack about Nature, Biomimicry, Sustainability and Biophilia- naturesinfinitetreasure…
Over the past two centuries, human life expectancy has nearly doubled in affluent nations. Yet this achievement has exposed a different problem: many individuals now spend a substantial portion of late life coping with chronic disease, disability, cognitive decline, and loss of independence.
Healthspan Beyond Medicine