# The Circular Mirror

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/i-am-optimist-7143643/the-circular-mirror
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/i-am-optimist-7143643/the-circular-mirror.md
Podcast: [I am OPTimist](https://stenobird.com/podcast/i-am-optimist-7143643)
Published: 2026-02-25T01:19:10+00:00
Episode link: https://www.monikabravo.blog/p/the-circular-mirror
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/189086197/ff838b76abd828b118bbe25d45b54de0.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/i-am-optimist-7143643/episodes/the-circular-mirror
Duration seconds: 1641

## Resource

Movement I: Epistemology Metacognition is the awareness of awareness itself; the capacity to observe the structure that generates thought while experience is unfolding. The unconscious mind is capable of discernment; it has its own delicate sensibility. It knows how to choose, how to divine. — Jules Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” lecture delivered to the Société de Psychologie de Paris, 1908; later published in Science and Method (1908). As I was browsing X, I bumped into Eileen Gu [Watch video at the end of Movement I,] who had just won Olympic medals. She was asked how she thinks, and when she was responding, I saw myself reflected in her speech and in her work. I smiled unconsciously, and it led immediately to something very relaxing. I said to myself, oh, I must be doing something good. I must be observing myself being observed and then observing others. It all started again with the outside making me reflect about the inside. I first remember wanting to lock myself in my room when I was ten or eleven years old with the excuse that I wanted to read, and I would be reading a book and then I would turn it over, put it on my belly, and with my eyes open I would start visualizing the different things that I wanted to do. Somehow I was projecting into my mind what I wanted to achieve. My mom would ask what I was doing, and I would say I am reading and daydreaming. She would answer keep on reading and daydreaming, and that became part of the understanding that my reality was something I could create. It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. — Jules Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (original French: Science et Méthode), 1908. When I was around thirteen and entered a darkroom for the first time, I witnessed the miracle of photographic pr…

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## Transcript

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