I'm Maarten Rischen. I built Cor v0 between April 2025 and April 2026, full-time, out of Pai, Thailand. This page is for anyone who wants to check there's a person behind the work before reading the atlas.
Cor is an atlas of the human motivational-emotional architecture. What each evolved need is, what mechanism produces its signal, what the signal is for, and what stops it once it's met. Every claim traces to primary literature.
v0 is the prototype. v1 is the rebuild that makes it academically rigorous. I direct. The 12-month plan pairs me with one academic hire at postdoc level in evolutionary psychiatry or behavioral ecology, who carries the domain rigor and builds v1.
My background is music. MA from Royal University Groningen, residencies at Banff Centre (2016) and Trinity College Dublin (2017). In 2024 I did a musical theatre production called Most Human Post-Human at Adelaide Fringe with director Gavin Robins (King Kong on Broadway).
That production is where Cor took its current shape. The question I was writing music around - what happens when exponential technology meets an organism that hasn't changed in 200,000 years? - stopped working as an artistic prompt and started demanding an evidence base. After Adelaide I went full-time on building one.
I came at this sideways. I'm not a domain academic. The plan accounts for that: the academic hire and external review carry the rigor, not me.
v0 is an atlas of 15 motivational mechanisms and 17 foundations, built on 573 extractions from 101 works, structured as a derivation chain. It runs from two operating frames through three premises, nine design affordances, and three design consequences, into the 15 mechanisms and 14 convergences between them. M3 (attachment-based co-regulation) is operationalized to coding-criteria level as the worked example.
Each step is a move a reader can check, and each claim traces to a primary source. An atlas of the human motivational-emotional architecture does not exist until someone builds one. v0 is the first pass at what one looks like.
Sources are books from my personal library and papers harvested via PubMed and bibliographic chains. Full-text access for journals I couldn't reach came through Groningen's university library, courtesy of Han-Thomas Adriaenssen. All primary sources. No textbooks, no secondary summaries.
Three rules ran the build. Every work carries a DOI or PMID, or sits in physical collection and is marked as such. Every extraction draws from full text; no snippet-only sourcing. Every author quote is verbatim, not stitched or paraphrased into one.
Grading runs at three layers. Works are tiered pillar (59), key (39), or supporting (3). Foundations carry epistemic grades that distinguish convergent evidence from single-source claims. Mechanisms carry tier ratings for evidential strength: 10 Tier 1, 4 Tier 2, 1 Tier 3.
The extraction and linking ran through a multi-agent AI pipeline. I set the spec, chose the foundations and mechanisms, wrote the derivation chain, and ran review on what came out. The pipeline did corpus work at scale, which is how v0 exists at this coverage after a year of full-time work. It is also the source of the data-quality problems that v1 rebuilds. 13 extractions are currently quarantined for snippet-only sourcing. That is the discipline in practice: audit catches things and the quarantine holds them out.
v1 is a ground-up rebuild by a postdoc in evolutionary psychiatry or behavioral ecology. They are not hired to ratify v0. They are hired to rebuild it rigorously, with full latitude to change, downgrade, or delete any part of v0 that does not survive stronger review. I orchestrate. They build. That's what the SFF Main Track funds.
v0 gets published now because the hardest thing to prove about a new kind of research object is that the object can exist. v0 proves it can. The format is the contribution: the derivation chain from OF1 and OF2 through the foundations and convergences to M3 as the worked mechanism. That's what the v1 rebuild inherits. The data is what v1 redoes under domain-expert methodology.
The public stats panel reports ten numbers. Here's what lives inside each, and which carry honest caveats. As of 14 April 2026.
The extraction total adds up four kinds, not only the primary ones:
Earlier surfaces reported "487 Primary extractions." That number is still correct for the primary layer alone. I report 573 on the canonical panel so the primary layer doesn't look like the whole evidence base.
The gap inventory splits into two categories with different remediation paths.
The public atlas gap section shows all 14 grouped by category.
The mechanism inventory is M1-M14 plus R1 Touch. R1 is a Tier 3 regulatory input to M3 Social Bonding (C-tactile afferents), not a standalone motivational system. I count it in the panel and keep the "(14 + R1 Touch)" parenthetical so a reader sees the total without losing the distinction. Tier breakdown: 10 Tier-1 (forced), 4 Tier-2 (strongly supported), 1 Tier-3 (moderate).
The foundation stack has four layers: 2 frames (OF1 Fitness Interface, OF2 Signal-Default Epistemology), 3 premises (P1 Inclusive Fitness, P2 Domain-Sensitive Interacting Adaptations, P3 Systematic Mismatch), 9 properties (DA1-DA9), 3 consequences (DC1-DC3).
The bibliography holds 59 pillar works (load-bearing for a specific foundation or mechanism), 39 key works (strong empirical or synthetic contributions), and 3 supporting works (historical precedents and adjuncts).
The researcher list holds 34 foundational (primary spec contributors), 21 empirical (evidence-layer), and 8 adjacent (complementary frameworks and benchmarks).
The density number, surfaced separately on the cor home page. The 573 extractions collectively carry 864 mechanism-linking edges. On average, each linked extraction grounds about 1.66 mechanisms. I keep this separate from the headline extraction count so the two can't be mistaken for inconsistent versions of the same thing.
Both papers are mine, written alongside v0. They argue the framing and its human-facing articulation in long form.
Maarten Rischen
For grant inquiries, researcher outreach, and everything else, write. I read every message.