Clinamen — Brain Cooler

stir all you want · everything settles

the mechanism

Letting it settle

Here's the trap of being fried: mental fatigue impairs cognitive reappraisal, the very mechanism you'd use to think your way out of it.¹ A tired brain can't be told to reframe; it has to be shown. So this experience does the reframing for you, physically: a storm of particles that always, without exception, comes to rest.

Stir it as much as you want. You can delay the settling but you cannot prevent it, and watching the drift down is the point: slow, coherent, nature-like motion holds involuntary attention — soft fascination — while the directed system recovers.² The screen settles. You follow it down.

The name is the clinamen: Lucretius' word for the tiny, unpredictable swerve of falling atoms in Epicurean physics. Watch closely and you'll catch each grain taking its own small swerve on the way down.

Kara et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2025.
Kaplan, The restorative benefits of nature, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1995.