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Every account starts with a brain of its own. Yours was created the moment you joined, it is called My Work Brain, and it begins with exactly one member: you, as its Owner. That member list is the whole privacy model. Nobody can open, search or connect an agent to a brain they are not a member of, so a brain whose member list is just you is yours alone. There is no separate visibility setting to check; who can see a brain is precisely who is on it.

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The safe default

Your work brain is the default destination for what you capture. When your agent saves a conversation, when you drag a file into an inbox without thinking too hard, when a connected tool pushes something in overnight, it lands there unless you deliberately pointed it somewhere else (once you hold write access to several brains, your agent names the destination each time). That makes it the right place to capture freely: half-formed thoughts, sensitive notes, rambling conversations with your agent. Decide what to share later, deliberately.

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Marked as yours

Your agents do not guess which brain is yours from its name. One brain per person in a workspace carries a mark that says “this is my personal brain”, and that mark is what the agent reads: it writes there unless you name another brain, and it treats a team or client brain as a place to write only when you say so. If no brain of yours carries the mark, the agent asks which brain to write to before its first write. The brain Cortex created for you when you joined is marked already. If you create a brain of your own later, from a folder of notes say, and want that one to be your default, mark it: open the brain’s Settings, then General, and press Make this my personal brain. The same mark is cortex personal --brain <slug> on the command line and one call on the API. You need to be the brain’s Owner. Marking a second brain moves the mark; there is only ever one. The button appears only on a brain nobody has marked; a brain another member has marked as theirs says so instead.

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It keeps your tasks

Your personal brain is the one brain with a task page: todos.md at its root, one line per task, and Tasks in its sidebar straight after Pages. Meetings and mail that Cortex files for you leave your action items there under Captured, and other people’s actions on their own pages as things to raise with them. You can look at the Tasks page, but you do not have to: ask your agent what has been captured, keep what you agree with, and have it push those into whatever you run your day from. The brain makes your agent a better assistant; it never makes you work in Cortex.

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It grows with you

Because your work brain is an ordinary brain that you own, it is not a dead end:
  • You can share it if you choose, by adding members with roles, the same as any brain. Many people never do, and it stays private for as long as its member list stays at one.
  • You can move knowledge out of it with promoting: a deliberate copy of specific knowledge into a shared brain, leaving your private original untouched.
  • You own its settings, including its filing mode and its lifecycle.
One honest note for team accounts: brains belong to the workspace, like files in a company drive. Day to day only members see a brain’s content, but workspace admins administer all of the workspace’s brains as part of running it, for example exporting or reassigning a brain when someone leaves.

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Try it

  1. Open My Work Brain and look at its Members list: just you, as Owner.
  2. Ask your connected agent to “save a note that I prefer morning meetings” and watch it arrive in the inbox.
  3. Check the filed page afterwards: private, cited, and yours.