From “NPC” to Sage: How Humans Shift Across Instinctive, Procedural, Reflective, and Transcendent Cognitive Modes Under Changing Field Conditions.

The human mind is not a single lantern burning with one steady flame. It is a house of lamps, some bright, some ancestral, some flickering in rooms we rarely enter by choice. A person does not move through the world in one cognitive mode. The mind changes weather.