By Vaughn L. Woods, CFP®, MBA
Founder & Senior Portfolio Manager, Vaughn Woods Financial Group, Inc.
Where the research began. Geisel Library, UC San Diego, 2007.
Every financial crisis in modern history had one thing in common. Not greed. Not leverage. Not fraud — though all three showed up. The common thread was something quieter and more dangerous: people who were absolutely certain they understood the context they were in.
They didn’t.
One word explains why — and why the most powerful artificial intelligence systems on earth just proved it. That word is context. Here is the story of how I found it, and why it matters more now than the day I wrote it down.
In the thesis I wrote that year — supervised by the economist Senyo Adjibolosoo at Point Loma Nazarene University, with the neurobiology research conducted across the holdings of Geisel Library at UC San Diego — I argued something that sounded strange at the time and obvious now: the brain represents the world ten to 100 times every second in a neurobiological global congruence-overlay-of-events — and any model of human decision-making that ignores that overlay will eventually be corrected by it. Markets included. Clients included. Advisors included.
That was the finding. Here is how I got there.
A Question Nobody Was Asking
I was in my fifties when I went back to school to finish my MBA. I had already been managing money for over thirty years. I had watched markets crash and recover. I had watched smart people make terrible decisions with their portfolios and watched ordinary families retire with more than they ever imagined — simply because they held steady when everyone else panicked.
None of that made complete sense if you believed what most finance textbooks said: that people make rational choices based on the numbers.
So I carried a question into that graduate program: Is there something missing? Is there a layer the numbers don’t touch — and does that layer explain why even brilliant, educated people destroy their own financial futures?
Then I discovered two thinkers who had each built a map of human intelligence. Their maps didn’t match. And I couldn’t stop thinking about why.
Map One: Intelligence Isn’t One Thing
Howard Gardner was a psychologist at Harvard. In 1983, he published Frames of Mind and shook up education with one radical idea: intelligence isn’t a single thing you either have or don’t have. It comes in at least eight distinct forms — language, math, space, music, body movement, understanding others, understanding yourself, and understanding nature.
Gardner said every person has a different mix. A great athlete and a gifted poet are both intelligent — just differently. His model was careful, scientific, and measurable.
But here is what he would not do: Gardner refused to include moral or spiritual intelligence. He said there wasn’t enough empirical evidence. He kept his model inside the world of things that can be tested and scored.
Map Two: Character Is the Foundation
On the other side of the world, an economist named Senyo Adjibolosoo was asking a completely different question. He was studying entire nations — and trying to understand why some countries flourish while others collapse, even when they have identical laws and institutions on paper.
His answer surprised people. Institutions, he said, are just buildings and rules. They only work as well as the people running them. And people only perform well when they carry what he called the Human Factor — a combination of spiritual capital, moral capital, aesthetic capital, and the deeper dimensions of human character.
Adjibolosoo was direct: spiritual capital came first in his model. Not as a footnote — first. He believed that without it, talent and education eventually hollow out.
So here were two serious thinkers. One said intelligence has eight measurable forms. The other said the most important thing about a human being is the part hardest to measure.
Both were describing the same person — the same brain — making the same daily decisions.
I thought: there has to be a bridge. That became the question I spent the next eighteen months trying to answer.
One Question, Six Thousand PhDs
My thesis supervisor was Dr. Adjibolosoo himself — the same man whose work had become half my puzzle. I spent weeks in the neuroscience stacks at Geisel Library, reading not textbooks written for finance students, but the actual journals where neuroscientists publish their discoveries.
Everything I read pointed toward the same idea. The brain doesn’t process information like a calculator — input in, answer out. The brain processes everything through context. The same piece of news means one thing in a bull market and something completely different in a panic. The same financial loss feels manageable in one moment and catastrophic in another. Nothing has meaning in isolation. Everything gets its meaning from the surrounding context.
I built a thesis statement around this idea, calling it neurochemical context — the brain’s electrochemical map of everything you know, remember, feel, and expect, which gives any new experience its meaning.
Then I did something unusual for a graduate student. I emailed that thesis statement — simplified to one clear paragraph — to six thousand randomly selected PhDs: one thousand in each of six fields — neurology, neurobiology, pharmacology, psychology, economics, and spiritual scholarship.
I wanted to know if I was onto something real, or chasing my own shadow.
What Came Back
Nearly 15% responded. For a cold email to strangers, that is remarkable. The answers were more remarkable still.
Not one neurobiologist disagreed. Not one. Pharmacologists confirmed the idea and pushed it further. Psychologists agreed but challenged me to sharpen the language. Spiritual scholars largely confirmed it, though several warned me not to reduce the human spirit to brain chemistry alone — a critique I took seriously.
One response made me sit back in my chair. A psychologist mentioned, almost casually, that the same logic I was describing in human brains was already being used in Google’s search algorithm — that Google’s system worked by understanding the context between web pages, not just the individual pages themselves.
In 2006, that felt like an interesting footnote.
Today, it reads like a prophecy.
The Bridge
The bridge between Gardner and Adjibolosoo, I concluded, was context.
Gardner describes what kinds of intelligence you can express. Adjibolosoo describes what kind of character you bring to life. But neither explains how those things actually combine in one real person making one real decision under real pressure.
Context is the answer. The brain is always quietly asking: Where am I? What has happened before? What do I expect next? What does this moment mean — given everything I know and everything I feel? Those questions happen dozens of times every second, not in words, but in the electrochemical firing of billions of neurons working in parallel.
That process is what makes a person more than their test scores. It is what lets a seasoned portfolio manager walk into a client meeting, read the room, hear what isn’t being said, and give counsel no algorithm could produce.
It is also what lets that same portfolio manager make a catastrophic mistake — if the context they are operating from happens to be wrong.
Which brings me to the most important idea the thesis produced.
False Context: The Most Expensive Word in Investing
I called it false context.
Here is what it means in plain language. When you don’t have enough information, your brain doesn’t wait. It fills in the blanks. It builds a story fast so you can act. Most of the time that is a feature — it kept our ancestors alive when they needed to decide in the dark whether to run or stay.
In financial markets, that same fast storytelling is lethal.
The investor in 1999 who decided that internet companies with no profits were worth billions — his brain built a false context. The connection of dots felt logical, felt exciting, and turned out to be wrong.
The homeowner in 2006 who believed housing prices could never fall nationally — false context.
The investor in 2021 who decided scarcity alone makes any cryptocurrency valuable — false context.
The person who called me in March 2009, terrified, wanting to sell everything at the bottom of the worst market crash since the Great Depression — false context. The story their brain was telling was: this is the end. The actual context was: this is the moment great long-term investors step forward.
False context is not stupidity. It is the human brain being perfectly human. The question is not how you stop your brain from building context — you cannot. The question is: how do you know when the context your brain built is true, and when it is false?
The answer is having a trusted relationship with someone who carries a more complete picture of your situation — someone whose entire job is to hold your long-term context steady on the days your short-term emotions are in charge.
That is what a wealth manager is actually for. Not the spreadsheets. The context.
The Machines Just Proved It
Here is the part of this story that still surprises me when I say it out loud.
The architecture the modern AI revolution is built on — the thing that makes the most powerful software tools in history work — is a mathematical system called vector embeddings in a high-dimensional vector space.
In 2007, I described the brain as a psycho-hyper-vector-space, borrowing language from a neurophilosopher named Patricia Churchland. I was reaching for the best words I had to describe how context works inside the brain.
The AI engineers, working independently and in the same decade, converged on the exact same architecture.
I am not claiming I invented AI. I am saying the thesis was right. Context is not a soft, humanistic preference. It is the central organizing principle of intelligence — biological and artificial alike. Solomon wrote there is nothing new under the sun. What is new is that we now have machines that prove the point.
But here is what those machines cannot do: they cannot know your context. Not truly. They can process your words. They cannot feel the weight behind them. They cannot know your question about retirement is really a question about fear. They cannot distinguish true context from false context — they generate both with equal fluency and equal confidence.
That is exactly where a real advisor earns the relationship.
What I Promise
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. I have come back to that verse in every market crisis I have lived through. It is not a statement against analysis. It is a statement about the limits of what any single mind — or any single algorithm — can see on its own.
I do not promise alpha from a better algorithm. What I promise is this: I will help you understand where you actually are, not where the last market move made you feel you were. I will tell you when the math is enough and when it isn’t. I will hold your long-term context on the days when you cannot hold it yourself.
Knowing where you are is the beginning of knowing what to do next. That is the whole thesis in fifteen words. It is what nearly fifty years of carrying that idea through real markets, real crises, and real client conversations has taught me.
If you are ready to work with an advisor who brings both the math and the context — call me directly at 1-800-374-4412. No gatekeepers. No agenda. Just a real conversation about where you are and where you want to go.
If you would prefer to start in writing, reach me at vw@vaughnwoods.com. I read every message myself and respond personally.
And if this piece sparked something intellectually — I have a condensed version of the original 165-page thesis, written in plain language, that I share privately with readers who ask. Just send an email with the word Context in the subject line and I will send it along.
Vaughn Lee Woods, CFP®, MBA is Founder & Senior Portfolio Manager of Vaughn Woods Financial Group, Inc., an Investment Advisor Representative of Bolton Global Capital, Inc. Client assets are held in custody through Pershing LLC, a subsidiary of Bank of New York Mellon. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute personalized investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Securities offered through Bolton Global Capital, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC.
Disclosures
Vaughn Woods, CFP®, MBA is President and Founder of Vaughn Woods Financial Group, Inc., an Investment Advisor Representative of Bolton Global Capital, Inc. Client assets are held in custody through Pershing LLC, a subsidiary of Bank of New York Mellon. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute personalized investment or tax advice.
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Past investment performance is not indicative of future results. Securities offered through Bolton Global Capital, Inc., Bolton, MA. Member FINRA, SIPC. Advisory services offered through Bolton Global Asset Management, a registered investment advisor, 579 Main St., Bolton, MA 01740 (978) 779-5361.
Investors should be aware that there are risks inherent in all investments such as fluctuations in investment principal. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Asset allocation cannot assure a profit nor protect against loss. Although the information has been gathered from sources believed to be reliable, it cannot be guaranteed. Views expressed in this newsletter are those of Vaughn Woods and Vaughn Woods Financial Group and may not reflect the views of Bolton Global Capital or Bolton Global Asset Management. The information provided is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered individual recommendation or personalized investment advice. Representatives and Advisors of Vaughn Woods Financial Group are not tax or legal professionals, if you need tax or legal advice, please make sure to consult a tax professional/CPA and/or a lawyer. VW1/VWA0370