Coherence under changing inputs.

Two things pulled me into systems thinking at once: my mom’s dementia, and a growing fascination with AI. They asked the same question from opposite directions — how does a system stay coherent while its inputs are constantly changing?

A mind losing the ability to write new memory, and a model that never had one, throw you back on the same answer: coherence isn’t stored, it’s regulated. Signals come in, get synthesized, nudge the direction, and settle. When the storing fails, the regulating — and the people around it — carry the load.