Embodying Our Thoughts: How I Use Two AIs to Gain a Little More Freedom

Lately, I’ve been wondering if the vague sense of suffocation or constraint we sometimes feel in life comes from not being able to see what our own thoughts are getting caught on.

This makes a lot of sense if you think about it like sports.

If you play sports, try to remember the first time you watched a video of yourself playing. Have you ever felt that moment of mild despair, or just laughed out loud, thinking, “Wait, is that really me?!”

In your head, you are moving smoothly with perfect form, but the person on the screen is carrying unnecessary tension and has some weird habits. You are faced with the reality that your own body is moving completely differently from how you imagined it.

But actually, noticing this “laughable gap” is often the first step toward improving.

As long as our form remains invisible, we stay stuck in a cycle of “for some reason, it’s not working” or “for some reason, I always struggle here.” But the moment we can observe our movements from the outside on video, we realize, “Ah, my shoulder is raised here, that’s why,” and we can regain control over ourselves.

What we cannot see restricts our freedom.

Our “thoughts” are quite similar. The common thread is that, just like our physical form, we usually cannot see them directly with our own eyes.

That is why we don’t understand what is restricting us — why we get overly irritated by certain words, or why our discussions always seem to circle back to the same conclusions.

We get pushed around by our own cognitive habits without realizing it, and because we don’t even know what we are stumbling over, we feel unfree.

What if we could observe the “movements of our thoughts” from the outside, just like recording our sports form on video? I feel like we might be able to live just a little bit more freely.

As a “video camera” to observe our thoughts from the outside, some people might write their ideas down in a notebook or let their thoughts wander while taking a walk. But recently, I’ve noticed that “AI chat logs” can serve as a really interesting recording device for this.

I want to be clear that you don’t need to use AI in some profound or high-level way. You can use it to streamline your work, as a search engine, or just to ask for a straightforward “answer.”

No matter how you use it, as you interact with the AI, your own unique sense of friction or specific requests will naturally slip out. You might catch yourself saying, “No, not that generic answer,” or “I don’t know why, but make it more like this.”

It’s that friction — the “No, that’s not it!” bouncing back when you hit the wall of the AI’s perfectly average, correct answer. That is exactly where your “cognitive habits” and “unique sticking points” vividly emerge. And the entire log of that interaction remains as a “trajectory” showing exactly how your thoughts moved.

However, there is one trap you should try to avoid here: “playing sports just to look good on video.”

Athletes don’t play their sport for the purpose of analyzing their form. They are just passionately chasing the ball, purely wanting to “win the game” or “get better.” The video is just a byproduct left behind for them to look back on later. If they played with the mindset of “I need to move so my form looks beautiful on video later,” what would happen? Their movements would become unnaturally stiff, and they would lose their original playstyle.

Observing our thoughts works the same way.

If you face the AI with the explicit goal of “finding your true self” or “visualizing your thoughts,” it quickly becomes a suffocating chore. You might unconsciously start putting makeup on your thoughts, thinking, “I need to sound smart to the AI,” or “I have to leave a meaningful conversation.”

The key is to simply tackle the questions or work tasks you care about right now, just as you normally would. Whether you are using it for efficiency or searching, while you are absorbed in chasing the ball right in front of you, the AI “camera” is quietly recording “how you thought and how you moved.”

Rather than bracing yourself to “use it the right way,” I think it’s much more fun to keep it natural. That way, when you look back at your “play” (the chat log) later, you can genuinely enjoy watching it.

That said, carefully analyzing a lengthy chat log later to uncover your own “habits” can be quite a tedious task. So recently, I landed on a playful approach: using two different AIs with distinct roles.

Right now, I have Gemini’s memory feature (the ability to remember past conversations) turned “off,” and ChatGPT’s memory feature turned “on.”

Gemini acts as a “blank wall” with no past context whatsoever. Here, without being tied down by my past self, I can simply throw ideas at the wall as they come to mind and purely enjoy the play (trial and error). Then, after playing around for a while, I toss the conclusions or the actual process of that interaction into GPT, which has its memory turned on.

When I do this, GPT — remembering my past cognitive habits — functions as an excellent “observatory.” It records the trajectory of my thoughts as an objective history and gives me feedback like, “Ah, you started with a different topic, but you’re digging into the same underground vein as before.”

Of course, this is just my personal method; there is absolutely no problem with sticking to a single AI. This is simply to share one way of playing, where you playfully leave even the task of “analyzing the log to find your habits” to the AI as an observer.

“Ah, I was really hung up on this word.” “I thought I was always talking about different themes, but I keep stopping at the exact same patterns.” You can just look at your own trajectory like this and simply enjoy it, thinking, “Huh, so this is how my mind moves. How interesting.”

This isn’t some dramatic story of self-discovery where you exclaim, “I’ve found my true self!”

Naturally, just because you can see your cognitive habits doesn’t mean the advantages and disadvantages of the real world disappear. Just as there are individual differences in our physical bodies, our thoughts have their own quirks, strengths, and weaknesses.

But it’s just like how, once you understand your physical characteristics, you can find ways to move that suit you and make adjustments. By making our invisible thoughts observable like a “physical body,” we stop being pushed around by our unconscious habits. Because we can finally see what we are getting caught on, we can realize, “Ah, I’m being pulled by this right now,” allowing us to make our own creative adjustments and take back the steering wheel.

Seeing what was once invisible. Just doing that allows us to live with a little more freedom and a lot more ease. Turning on the “video camera” for your thoughts is, in the end, just a little game to make life a tiny bit richer and a lot more fun.