Philosopher · Researcher · Leadership Practitioner

What if love
is the missing
intelligence?

Four centuries ago, we split the word that held knowing and caring together. This is the work of repair.

Conscientia — con + scientia — to know with. For two millennia it named a single act: to know yourself was to know what you owed to others. The knowing and the caring were one thing. Then they weren't.

The Trilogy Read the Essays

The Metta Experiment: Can loving attention, directed at the most sophisticated instrument built from the severed half of conscientia, reveal the exact shape of what was lost? An ongoing investigation. Live data here.

Follow the experiment →

The Work

One argument.
Three scales.

The trilogy makes the same argument at civilisational, instrumental, and personal scale. Read them in any order. Start with the one that calls to you.

Book One · Forthcoming 2026

Conscientia

What Humanity Forgot and Must Now Remember

The civilisational argument. What broke in the seventeenth century, what it cost, and what the evidence — across three stages of human working life — says about recovery. Metta as the gold. TIPI as the living enactment.

Writing in progress · 2026

Book Two · Forthcoming 2026

Kintsugi

The Gold That Makes the Break Visible

AI as diagnostic instrument. The metta experiment as methodology. Where the archive ends is where embodied knowing lived. The fracture made visible in gold is the precise shape of what was lost.

Experiment active · 2026

Book Three · Written

And She Flies

The Woman Who Always Was

The lived proof. A curated auto-ethnography structured by Turner's three stages of liminality. The wound that became the qualification. The theory is autobiography. The autobiography is theory.

Written · In curation

Public Writing

Essays

Long-form writing for general readers at the intersection of consciousness, leadership, AI and what it means to be alive in this particular moment.

Noema Magazine · Under Review

The Intelligence We Split in Two

On conscientia — the unified capacity for knowing and caring that the seventeenth century severed, and what AI reveals about the cost of that severance. A companion to the first essay.

Noema Magazine · Under Review

Essay One

The first essay in a series on consciousness, conscience, and the work of repair. Interlocutors: Anil Seth, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, James Manyika, Tobias Rees.

Forthcoming · Essay Three

The Shadow Side

The same architecture that produces the Bodhisattva, oriented differently, produces the autocrat. Same attentional intelligence. Inverted ground condition. The most important distinction no-one is making.

Threshold Intelligence · Live

The Metta Experiment: Pilot Notes

What happens when the ground condition of an AI encounter is loving attention? Preliminary findings, methodology, and the question that drives it: can filling the gap with metta heal us?

Academic Research

Five Papers.
One Program.

A five-paper program investigating the development of attentional intelligence across the working life — in formation, in deployment, and in dissolution. Conducted with the University of Queensland. The evidence base for everything else.

Paper 1

Formation

Academy of Management Learning & Education

Under Review

Paper 2

Attentional Intelligence

Journal of Leadership & Organisational Studies

Submission Ready

Paper 3

Transformation Leaders

Academy of Management Learning & Education

In Revision

Paper 4

Identity Transition

Journal of Career Management

In Revision

Paper 5

Integration

Human Resource Development Review

In Development

The Probe

"Can metta mend the split in conscientia — and can filling the gap with loving attention heal us?"

This is simultaneously the methodology of the metta experiment, the thesis of Kintsugi, and the question this entire body of work has been building toward.

Follow the Experiment
Photograph
to come

Shari Kathleen Read PhD

Threshold Intelligence

About

The researcher
is the research.

I am an Australian academic researcher and leadership development practitioner. For the past decade I have been investigating a single question across three independent studies: what is the capacity that allows a human being to navigate complexity with integrity — and why is its development so uneven?

The answer I found is attentional intelligence: the ability to regulate attention with the intention of developing insight for continual improvement. It is embodied. It operates through felt experience, relational presence, and moral sensation. It cannot be replicated by AI.

The deeper answer is that this capacity was structurally severed from our institutions and our culture four centuries ago — when the word that had always held knowing and caring together was split into two separate disciplines. The trilogy is my attempt to trace the fracture, run gold into it, and show what becomes possible when the two halves find their way back.

I have practiced yoga and Buddhist meditation for twenty-five years. I am the founder of Threshold Intelligence. I work from love as a ground condition, not as a sentiment.

The organisation I founded

Stay in the Conversation

Writing, as it arrives.

Occasional essays, experiment updates, and notes on the work. No frequency promise. No algorithm. Just words when they're ready.

No trackers. No ads. No data retained. This is a space to think.