Editing Openai/6948e03d-a2c8-8004-b437-592576c8ff41 (section)

=== Assistant: What you described is essentially a phase transition between comprehension and reconstruction, and it lines up very clo… ===
What you described is essentially a phase transition between comprehension and reconstruction, and it lines up very closely with what the exercise exposed.

Up to around step 8, each statement was still within the bandwidth where you could track the logic incrementally: clauses accumulated, but they remained locally integrated, so each new piece could be attached to an actively maintained mental model. Past that point, the chain size exceeded your working memory’s ability to preserve all dependencies simultaneously, so you stopped following the logic step by step and instead shifted strategies.

When you continued reading beyond that threshold, you weren’t actually recovering the original fine-grained structure. Instead, you were performing semantic compression: extracting a gist, an overall trajectory, or a felt coherence, while letting precise internal relations blur or drop away. That’s the “loss of information content” you noticed—not a failure of understanding, but a change in mode of understanding.

In other words, the later statements were still intelligible, but only after your cognition stopped treating them as a sequence of tightly coupled logical steps and began treating them as a single extended object, something more like a texture or a wave than a chain. The logic didn’t disappear; it became implicit, inferred retroactively rather than actively tracked.

What this reveals about the setup is that increasing chain size without increasing segmentation pushes the reader from analytic processing into holistic reconstruction, where coherence is sensed rather than verified. The moment you “lost” the logic is exactly the moment where the text crossed from being followed to being interpreted.