About this site

Connecting Cells is a website about human reasoning. More specifically, it is about how understanding human reasoning can help us improve human reasoning. And then, to add some niche element, it is also about how improvements in human reasoning can benefit multidisciplinary teams of students studying human reasoning. Or any other aspect of cognition, really.

Briefly put, it's a bunch of blog posts, touching on cognitive biases, teaching methods, conspiracy thinking and its peculiarities, interdisciplinary integration, deliberative democracy, collaborative reasoning, and many more topics. In my mind, all these topics are connected, because they deal with the phenomenon of diverse people reasoning together with purpose. In recent years, I have added large language models to the mix of topics, because GenAI appears to displace reasoning partners (I worry about this).

You can subscribe to this website to also receive The Reasoning Report, which brings interviews related to critical thinking and reasoning to your inbox. Subscribers also have the awesome privilege of being allowed to comment on all blog posts. The newsletter and privileges are free, because this is a hobby project.

Why the name?

Taken literally, the name Connecting Cells refers to the physical process of neurons connecting to each other to form networks that support cognition. Metaphorically, something similar happens when people talk to each other or when the silos of different disciplines are bridged. In all these cases, insight, understanding and novel ideas emerge as previously distinct elements merge.

About the author

The author of this blog is Vincent Tijms, who has over a decade of experience developing and organising interdisciplinary education. He's especially interested in how people reason together and has been teaching classes on critical conversations in both educational and professional environments. The rise of GenAI got him interested in how the displacement of reasoning partners by chatbots is affecting critical thinking. You can find a fuller profile here.