Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Oxford Seminar, 25th of September 2025

Abstract: The internet is a strange place — one moment you're
convinced the Starbucks logo never had a star on top, the next you're
knee-deep in a rumor that spreads everywhere at once, and before long
you're staring at a series of pictures that "prove" the moon landing
was fake. These phenomena may look like pure nonsense, but they also
show how perception, memory, and belief are shaped by our
experiences, the hidden biases behind what we perceive, and the
difficulty of stitching multiple pieces of information, sometimes
conflicting, into a coherent story that fits the most into one's
worldview.

In this talk I introduce "adult brainrot" as a categorical framework
for these inconsistencies. I will show how categorical models of
quantum processes can capture order-sensitive memory and
indistinguishable sources of misinformation, and how categorical
notions of centers help explain why people’s theories sometimes fail
to form a consistent picture of reality. The aim is to argue that
quantum categorical structures offer a natural mathematical framework
for modeling the inconsistencies and oddities of human perception and
belief.