Bernard, thank you for this thoughtfully grounded insight—it names something many of us recognize implicitly, but rarely slow down enough to examine in the moment.
I’m curious how this lands for you when you look at moments where coherence tightened quickly—when meaning, hierarchy, or action seemed to organize themselves before there was space to stay with ambiguity. In Baars’ terms, fixation often isn’t about getting something *wrong*, but about the system committing early because holding multiple possibilities would have exceeded capacity at that point.
What feels especially important here is that these compression responses—stratification, containment, moral gating—aren’t failures of judgment. They’re adaptive ways the system preserves continuity under load. Where it begins to matter relationally is when those moves are mistaken for *truth* rather than recognized as state-dependent regulation, quietly narrowing the relational field and increasing the risk of interpretive intrusion.
I’m wondering how you see this intersecting with active recall and learning: when a dominant frame locks in early, what kinds of information or felt-sense data get filtered out or held below awareness? And how might unresolved or sublimated biological or emotional material quietly shape what’s available to notice, remember, or integrate—especially under stress or in relationships that carry meaning or authority?
As you reflect on this, how does it show up for you personally? Are there contexts or relationships where you notice collapse arriving as a kind of downshift—either into withdrawal or into a brief window where something new can reorganize if pacing and repair are present?
Aha! That's a really thoughtful comment. You have many Aha's! Context processing is very complex. In the case of language, we can specify the standard six levels of language from semantics to articulation. Every mental content has its own contextual stack. Here we are on Substack discussing 'stacks'... :)b
The garden-path sentence exampel really demonstrates how quickly we commit to an intrepretation. I stared at "The ship sailed past the harbor sank" for way too long before getting it. What's intresting is that knowing about fixedness doesn't seem to prevent it, which makes me wonder if there's an evolutionary tradeoff where fast pattern completion beats flexible reinterpretation most of the time.
I agree. However, there are tricks to slow down the process. The very fact that you were able to change your context demonstrates that you already know some of those tricks.
As often says, CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.
or for better grammar, As Often says, CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.
"Often" ass s a roper noun makes it grammatically correct.
Hi @Stan! I agree with you about context, and then the tricky question is how to characterize context...
:)b
Another great article.
Priming shapes perception!
Priming is another word for evoking context... :)b
Bernard, thank you for this thoughtfully grounded insight—it names something many of us recognize implicitly, but rarely slow down enough to examine in the moment.
I’m curious how this lands for you when you look at moments where coherence tightened quickly—when meaning, hierarchy, or action seemed to organize themselves before there was space to stay with ambiguity. In Baars’ terms, fixation often isn’t about getting something *wrong*, but about the system committing early because holding multiple possibilities would have exceeded capacity at that point.
What feels especially important here is that these compression responses—stratification, containment, moral gating—aren’t failures of judgment. They’re adaptive ways the system preserves continuity under load. Where it begins to matter relationally is when those moves are mistaken for *truth* rather than recognized as state-dependent regulation, quietly narrowing the relational field and increasing the risk of interpretive intrusion.
I’m wondering how you see this intersecting with active recall and learning: when a dominant frame locks in early, what kinds of information or felt-sense data get filtered out or held below awareness? And how might unresolved or sublimated biological or emotional material quietly shape what’s available to notice, remember, or integrate—especially under stress or in relationships that carry meaning or authority?
As you reflect on this, how does it show up for you personally? Are there contexts or relationships where you notice collapse arriving as a kind of downshift—either into withdrawal or into a brief window where something new can reorganize if pacing and repair are present?
Aha! That's a really thoughtful comment. You have many Aha's! Context processing is very complex. In the case of language, we can specify the standard six levels of language from semantics to articulation. Every mental content has its own contextual stack. Here we are on Substack discussing 'stacks'... :)b
The garden-path sentence exampel really demonstrates how quickly we commit to an intrepretation. I stared at "The ship sailed past the harbor sank" for way too long before getting it. What's intresting is that knowing about fixedness doesn't seem to prevent it, which makes me wonder if there's an evolutionary tradeoff where fast pattern completion beats flexible reinterpretation most of the time.
I agree. However, there are tricks to slow down the process. The very fact that you were able to change your context demonstrates that you already know some of those tricks.
:)b