Distill to Atomic Notes

What it does

Takes messy input and produces atomic notes: each one idea, self-contained, restated in the user's own words, and linked. Atomicity is what makes a note reusable — you can drop it into any future thought without dragging context along. Restating in your own words is the deep-encoding move; copying verbatim is shallow and decays.

When to use

• After a daily brain-dump that has three good ideas tangled in one paragraph.
• When reading a source worth keeping — distill the claims, not the prose.
• As the first step before active-recall-generator (you can't make good questions from a non-atomic note).

The procedure

1. Find the ideas. Read the input. Mark each distinct claim, insight, or fact. A paragraph usually holds 1–4.
2. One note per idea. Split. If a note still has an "and" joining two claims, split again.
3. Restate in your words. Rewrite each so it stands alone and reads as yours. This is the encoding work — don't skip it by pasting the original. If you can't restate it, you don't understand it yet; flag it instead of faking it.
4. Make it self-contained. The note should make sense with nothing else open. Inline the minimum context it needs.
5. File and link. Tag each note with its canonical construct (attention, memory, emotion, motivation, identity, learning, belief, behavior, consciousness, metacognition, decision-making, social-cognition). Link to related existing notes. Links are what make later retrieval cheap.

Output shape