Axis: A Neural-Operative System for Borderless Perception and Cognitive Reordering Abstract Conventional world-mapping and sociocultural boundaries shape human cognition, often reinforcing artificial separations that disrupt comprehension and contribute to anxiety, disorientation, and conflict-based worldviews. Axis is a novel neural–operating system (neuro-OS) designed to integrate spatial cognition, cartographic perception, and therapeutic intervention through a cortical implant and augmented-reality interface. By suppressing the perceptual primacy of geopolitical and symbolic borders, Axis enables users to access a borderless continuum of perception, promoting adaptive reorganization of world models and reduction of border-associated cognitive rigidity. We propose Axis Therapy as a new modality of intervention for disorders of perception, trauma, and existential crisis.
Background Human beings are map-making organisms. Cognitive maps guide orientation, memory, and identity formation, but they also inherit the limitations of imposed borders — geographic, cultural, and psychological. Borders act as perceptual fractures, shaping how reality is divided and comprehended. These divisions often extend into mental health: rigid boundaries in thought correlate with anxiety, alienation, and impaired global empathy. Advances in neural implants and augmented perception technologies provide an opportunity to intervene at the level of map construction itself. Axis represents the first attempt to realign perception with a borderless axis of continuity, allowing for the therapeutic reintegration of fragmented worldviews.
Methods 1. Neural Implant • A minimally invasive device interfaces with cortical regions responsible for spatial cognition and visual integration (posterior parietal cortex, hippocampal networks). • The implant modifies salience hierarchies, deprioritizing border-lines in perceptual processing. 2. AxisOS Interface • Operates as an app-layer accessible through AR contact lenses or neural projection. • Users interact with maps and world-views that emphasize flows, continuities, and horizons rather than discontinuities. 3. Therapeutic Protocol (Axis Therapy) • Patients are guided to confront existing rigid border-concepts (e.g., trauma boundaries, identity fractures, geopolitical frames). • Therapy involves live perceptual overlays that dissolve or reconfigure these lines. • Symbolic content (dreams, memories, cultural maps) is i ntegrated into the reordering, facilitating meaning-making beyond division.
Applications • Trauma Integration: Dissolves hard boundaries between “then” and “now,” allowing trauma memory to be recontextualized. • Psychiatric Care: Reduces rigid binary thinking in disorders such as PTSD, OCD, and borderline states. • Cross-Cultural Empathy: By dissolving the salience of national or cultural borders, Axis may foster a more fluid identification with global humanity. • Existential Therapy: Assists patients in encountering a more fundamental comprehension of reality as a continuum, aligning with non-dual frameworks of consciousness.