My original motivation for studying Abhidhamma was to seek some rigour as I approached the nebulous area commonly referred to as ‘mind, brain and consciousness’. Since developing the Sigala project, I have narrowed this down to the consideration of safety-critical aspects in human cognitive processes. By safety, I mean protection from serious human loss across the khandhas i.e. body, feelings, perceptions, memory and mental formations and consciousness.

Abhidhamma says a lot about processes, so my basic idea is to identify key (safety-critical) processes in the lifecycle of social media use and then seek to model them formally in terms of Abhidhamma processes involved. Such processes may typically be characterised as wholesome, unwholesome or neutral — and can be broken down to the micro level — as cetasikas (‘thought moments’).

The mind maps below are offered as an aid to navigating just a portion, concerning some of the more well-known aspects. They were created using XMind on a Mac (for other systems, you may need to choose another font for viewing).

Please download the zip file and then unzip the archive. This should provide you with five files:

• mātikā (classification of terms): matika.xmind
• citta (consciousness, heart/mind) : citta.xmind
• cetasika (mental properties): cetasika.xmind
• paccaya (conditions): paccaya.xmind
• vīthi (processes): viithi.xmind

Application to cognitive activities

How do we design systems that lead to generally wholesome states? We may use cognitive interventions!

Feel free to get in touch with queries via the contact form, though please note I am not an expert in Abhidhamma!