This paper develops a structural account of how cognitive environments regulate coherence and how their fragmentation produces the dissolution of shared reality. It argues that cognition operates through a looped dynamic of exploration, evaluation, return, and stabilization, and that this loop depends on environmental rhythms, constraints, and feedback. Historically, shared environments aligned cognitive loops across individuals and produced a common world. Modern technological and social conditions individualize salience, weaken return cycles, and destabilize attractors, resulting in divergent cognitive worlds rather than ideological disagreement. By analyzing childhood divergence, sports as a global coherence field, and the mechanisms through which loops stabilize around incompatible attractors, the paper reframes polarization as a structural failure of coherence. It concludes by identifying the environmental conditions required to restore shared reality and rebuild coherence across populations.
Bailey et al. (2026) studied this question.