CONCEPT
Cognitive Bleed
The migration of presence bleed from observable device interactions to purely mental composition — a form of domestic absence that leaves no physical signal to detect.
Cognitive bleed names the species of production bleed in which the builder is mentally composing prompts, iterating on architecture, or rehearsing tomorrow's implementation while physically engaged in domestic activity. The screen may be dark, the phone in another room, the laptop closed for hours — but the consciousness is split. Part of it attends to the bedtime story, the partner's account of the day, the child's question; part inhabits the productive register, continuing the work at the level of pure thought. Because cognitive bleed leaves no physical signal — no glance at a device, no illuminated screen, no split facial expression — the monitoring partner has no equivalent cue to detect when the absence is purely mental. The relational damage accumulates without the intermediate signals that might prompt negotiation, because the conversation about the boundary arrives, if it arrives at all, after months of unacknowledged migration.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The communication-era phenomenology Gregg documented was legible because it was observable. The phone vibrated; the