Dr Tom Barber

07/08/2026

AI can make us feel faster without actually making us faster.

There is now a name for it: The Speedup Illusion.

A fascinating new preregistered study involving 1,237 participants found that people expected AI to make them significantly faster across a range of cognitive tasks.

For many of the tasks, it didn't.

What AI did change was how the work felt. Participants experienced it as less mentally effortful.

I find that distinction fascinating because it raises a much bigger question about our relationship with artificial intelligence.

If thinking feels easier, do we automatically assume we're becoming more efficient? And if we feel more efficient, might we also begin to assume that the quality of our thinking has improved?

Recent research into cognitive offloading raises another distinction that I think may become increasingly important:

Offloading cognitive labour is not the same as offloading cognitive authority.

AI can summarise, compare, calculate, generate alternatives and challenge our assumptions while we remain responsible for interpreting and integrating what it gives us.

Something different begins to happen when AI starts framing the problem, determining what matters, selecting the alternatives and recommending the conclusion.

The human may still press the final button.

But who actually organised the thinking that led there?

I've explored the research, the speedup illusion and what this could mean for human judgement and Coherence in my latest Psychernetics article:

The Speedup Illusion: What Happens to Human Judgement When AI Makes Thinking Feel Easier?

👉 Link in the first comment

06/08/2026

I have something I'm excited to bring to you.

When I wrote Unmachine Your Mind, my hope wasn't simply to publish another psychology book.

It was to introduce a different way of thinking about human intelligence.

Many of you have since read the book, shared your thoughts, and asked where these ideas lead next.

The answer is Compass.

If Unmachine Your Mind introduces the philosophy of Psychernetics, Compass is where that philosophy begins to become lived experience.

It's a practical developmental journey designed to help you strengthen the capacities that enable human beings to remain present, think clearly, exercise sound judgement and navigate an increasingly AI-mediated world.

Over the past year, that's what I've been quietly building.

I'm now in the final stages before launch.

Before Compass opens publicly, I'm inviting a small Founding Cohort to join the priority list.

If the ideas in Unmachine Your Mind resonated with you, I'd love to invite you to take the next step.

You can explore Compass and join the priority list here:
https://psychernetics.com/compass

Thank you to everyone who has supported both the book, helping it reach Amazon #1 bestseller, and the wider vision behind Psychernetics.

It's incredibly encouraging to see this community beginning to grow, and I genuinely believe this is just the beginning.

Begin your journey into Psychernetics with Compass, the foundational pathway into the architecture of human intelligence.

04/08/2026

For more than a century, we've become increasingly skilled at measuring human intelligence.

We've studied reasoning, memory, language, problem-solving and emotional awareness. All of these have helped us understand something important about how the mind works.

But I keep returning to a different question.

Why do intelligent people still struggle to think clearly in the moments that matter most?

Why does a calm conversation suddenly become defensive?

Why do we react in ways we later regret, despite knowing better?

Why do we sit down to do something important, only to find ourselves distracted before we've really begun?

These moments are rarely caused by a lack of intelligence.

They suggest that something deeper is happening.

Over many years, this observation became the foundation for what I now call the Psychernetic Equation:

I = P + E + M + C

It isn't a mathematical equation.

It's an architectural model describing how human intelligence is continually organised through four interacting capacities:

Presence. Embodied Emotion. Meaning. Coherence.

Today I've published the first paper in what will become The Psychernetics Journal, an ongoing series exploring the architecture and development of human intelligence in the age of AI.

I'd love to know what you think.

The article is linked in the comments below.

03/08/2026

When I wrote Unmachine Your Mind, my hope wasn't simply to publish another psychology book.

It was to introduce a different way of thinking about human intelligence.

Many of you have since read the book, shared your thoughts, and asked where these ideas lead next.

The answer is Compass.

If Unmachine Your Mind introduces the philosophy of Psychernetics, Compass is where that philosophy begins to become lived experience.

It's a practical developmental journey designed to help you strengthen the capacities that enable human beings to remain present, think clearly, exercise sound judgement and navigate an increasingly AI-mediated world.

Over the past year, that's what I've been quietly building.

I'm now in the final stages before launch.

Before Compass opens publicly, I'm inviting a small Founding Cohort to join the priority list.

If the ideas in Unmachine Your Mind resonated with you, I'd love to invite you to take the next step.

You can explore Compass and join the priority list here:

https://psychernetics.com/compass

Thank you to everyone who has supported Unmachine Your Mind, helping it reach Amazon #1 bestseller status, and for believing in the wider vision behind Psychernetics.

It's incredibly encouraging to see this community beginning to grow, and I genuinely believe this is just the beginning.

Begin your journey into Psychernetics with Compass, the foundational pathway into the architecture of human intelligence.

27/07/2026

We're surrounded by conversations about what AI can do.

Far fewer people are asking what AI is doing to us.

As machines become increasingly capable, the question isn't simply whether they'll become more intelligent.

It's whether we'll remain deeply human.

I've just published a new article exploring what I believe is the defining challenge of our time.

Not a crisis of technology.

A crisis of being.

If you're interested in psychology, philosophy, human potential or simply the future we're all stepping into, I'd love to know what you think.

Read it here:

https://psychernetics.com/post/crisis-of-being-age-of-ai

Explore the existential crisis of being in the age of AI, and why optimisation alone cannot provide meaning, identity, or true human intelligence.

19/07/2026

We have more information than at any other point in history.

Yet many people feel less certain, more distracted, and more overwhelmed than ever before.

Perhaps the challenge isn’t a lack of information.

Perhaps it’s that we’ve forgotten how to think independently.

I wrote Unmachine Your Mind because I believe one of the most important skills of the coming decade won’t be using artificial intelligence.

It will be protecting and strengthening human intelligence.

Not just knowledge.

But attention.

Judgement.

Discernment.

And the ability to make decisions that are truly your own.

If you’ve ever felt that modern life is making it harder to think clearly, I hope this book gives you a different perspective.

You can find out more here:
https://psychernetics.com/unmachine-your-mind

I’d genuinely love to hear what you think. What do you believe will be the most valuable human skill in the age of AI?

30/06/2026

One of the most interesting things I've learned over nearly thirty years as a psychotherapist is that insight and change are not the same thing.

Many people understand themselves remarkably well. They know where their anxiety comes from, recognise familiar relationship patterns, and can often explain exactly why they react the way they do.

Yet when life becomes difficult, they frequently find themselves returning to the same behaviours.

This raises an important question.

If awareness is so valuable, why doesn't it always lead to lasting change?

The answer, I believe, is that awareness creates the possibility of change, but it is psychological capacity that allows us to live differently. Recognising a pattern is only the beginning. The deeper task is developing the ability to remain steady, reflective and intentional when life becomes complex.

It's an idea that sits at the heart of Psychernetics, and it's something I explore in my latest article.

Why Self-Awareness Isn't Enough

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

🔗 https://psychernetics.com/post/why-self-awareness-isnt-enough

Self-awareness is only the beginning. Discover why insight alone rarely creates lasting change and how psychological capacity develops through the Psychernetics framework.

23/06/2026

A quote stopped me in my tracks recently.

"The definition of hell is that on your last day on Earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become."

The older I get, the more I think this captures something many people quietly struggle with.

Not failure.

Not lack of success.

But the gradual distance that can emerge between who we are and who we feel we were meant to become.

Over the years, I've worked with many people who appeared successful from the outside, yet privately felt disconnected from themselves, their values, or parts of their lives that had been left unexplored.

It raises an uncomfortable but important question:

Are we becoming more fully ourselves, or simply becoming better adapted to what others expect of us?

I explore that question in this new video on the psychology of the unlived life.

What do you think creates the biggest gap between who we are and who we could become?

22/06/2026

Ten years ago, I attended a business strategy conference and had the opportunity to spend a few minutes talking with Sir Clive Woodward.

What surprised me recently was not that I remembered the conversation.

It was that I remembered almost nothing else about the day.

I can't remember most of the presentations. I can't remember the conference programme. I can't remember many of the people I met, either.

Yet I can still remember two ideas from that conversation.

Clarity, and Resilience.

That got me thinking about why some conversations stay with us for years while others disappear almost immediately.

As a psychotherapist, I have become increasingly interested in what leaves a lasting impression on us. Sometimes the ideas that shape our lives are not the most dramatic or complicated. They are simply the ones that continue revealing new layers of meaning over time.

I've written a new article exploring that conversation, and why clarity may be one of the most important psychological resources we have in an increasingly complex world.

Article:

A reflection on a conversation with Sir Clive Woodward that stayed with Dr Tom Barber for over a decade, exploring clarity, resilience, leadership, decision-making, and psychological orientation.

18/06/2026

One of the strangest paradoxes of modern life is that we have access to more information than at any point in human history, yet many people seem less certain about what they think.

As a psychotherapist, I've noticed something changing over recent years.

People arrive informed.

They've watched the videos, listened to the podcasts, read the books, and increasingly, consulted AI.

Yet beneath all that information, there is often a deeper question:

"What do I actually think?"

The challenge facing us today is not information scarcity.

It is cognitive sovereignty.

The ability to think independently, tolerate uncertainty, reflect deeply, and arrive at conclusions that genuinely belong to us.

As AI becomes woven into everyday life, this question becomes increasingly important.

How do we use these extraordinary tools without outsourcing our judgment, creativity, and sense of self?

I explore this in Chapter 1 of Unmachine Your Mind: Reclaiming Human Intelligence Before AI Does It For You

If these questions resonate with you, you can learn more here:

https://psychernetics.com/unmachine-your-mind

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Has technology made you feel more informed, or more overwhelmed?