A practical guide to cognitive hygiene, drawn from the NPF/CNI framework’s immunisation protocols. Six practices—Binary Belief Sorter, Proportional Scrutiny, Pattern Naming, Mode Switching, Update Log, Information Diet Check‑In—are offered as disciplines for keeping thinking flexible. The framework is a hypothesis; these are tools to try, not prescriptions.

Through the story of Alex’s investment journey, this sci‑comm essay introduces the Neural Pathway Fallacy (NPF) factors—Lazy Thinking, Special Reasoning, Neutral Pathway, Spillover—and the Composite NPF Index (CNI) as a proposed measure of belief‑network entrenchment. It then shows how protocols like the Binary Belief Protocol, Proportional Scrutiny, prebunking, cross‑training, and dopamine rechanneling can help loosen entrenched networks.

Bad thinking spreads—between people, between humans and AI, and in self‑reinforcing loops. This essay introduces cognitive contagion, the proposed β_NPF coefficient, and then presents practical defences: the Binary Belief Protocol, Proportional Scrutiny Matrix, and three mechanisms (prebunking, cross‑training, dopamine rechanneling). All are offered as hypotheses to try.

Epistemological scepticism can act as cognitive immunisation against the Neural Pathway Fallacy. This paper presents protective interventions: Binary Belief Protocol, Proportional Scrutiny Matrix, and three mechanisms (prebunking, neural cross‑training, dopamine rechanneling). It maps each to NPF factors and CNI, summarises efficacy data from independent studies, and sketches a minimal trial design. All claims are hypotheses; no NPF‑specific validation is claimed.