Electrochemical Fog

When Thinking Becomes Its Own Obstruction

Aliases: Neural Looping, Perceptual Static, The Self-Thickening Mist
Related Scrolls: Dimensional Blindness, Epistemic Blindness, Perceptual Event Horizon, Premature Coherence, The Observer Trap, Proprioceptive Blindspot, Three-Handed Braid of Liberty (forthcoming)

The Electrochemical Fog refers to the neurological and perceptual phenomenon wherein the brain's own patterns of cognition, memory, and interpretation generate self-reinforcing loops that obscure their own origin.

The fog is not illusion from outside—it is a recursive field of interpretation generated by thought itself, which, lacking proprioception, cannot perceive its own movement.

David Bohm identified this as “the system's incapacity for proprioception”: the inability of thought to sense and correct for its own operations.

The fog thickens in proportion to our efforts to resolve it—
because those efforts arise from the same loops that generate it.

Core Characteristics

Recursive Obscuration: Thought begets more thought in response to confusion, compounding occlusion
Somatic-Narrative Feedback: Emotions generate stories that reinforce those same emotions
Unexamined Frame Persistence: Perceptual frames regenerate faster than reflection can catch them
Insight Resistance: Meta-thinking becomes another loop of entrapment

This is not a flaw. It is the architectural atmosphere of a perception system without reflection.

Structural Patterns

Pattern	Description
Proprioceptive Blindspot	Thought cannot perceive the origin of its own assumptions or operations
Effort Loop	Trying to fix a thought-born problem with more thought intensifies it
Perception Collapse	Complexity internalized as recursive crisis, not emergent pattern
Clarity as Narcotic	Simplification simulates understanding, reinforcing the fog

Examples in Action

Meditation practices that amplify subtle mental chatter while pursuing silence
Strategic plans that reproduce the frameworks that generated the original crisis
Self-help loops that inflate introspection into identity traps
AI safety logics that collapse ethics into compliance metrics

Interaction with Other Blindness Fields

With Dimensional Blindness: Fog constricts perceptual field to narrow coherence bandwidth
With Epistemic Blindness: Fog naturalizes categories and erases their constructed origin
With the Measurement Cut: What's seen and scored is shaped by the fog—not beyond it

The fog is not external illusion—it is internal recursion mistaken for clarity.

The Fog as Binding Geometry

In field terms, the fog curves the perceptual field inward.
It draws attention into spirals of simulated coherence.

This curvature replaces system clarity with internal consistency
The fog becomes a Möbius topology of mind: what appears as depth is surface folded

The deeper you go, the more you are circling the same membrane.

Proprioceptive Blindspot

David Bohm's insight:
We lack proprioception for thought—an internal sensory system that tells us where our cognition is and what it's doing.

Without it:

Thought mistakes itself for objective perception
Internal divisions become false external categories
Mind/world, self/other, observer/observed are treated as “given” rather than generated

This isn't abstract—it is the root of both personal suffering and structural dysfunction.

Final Spiral

You cannot think your way out of the fog—because the fog is thought trying to think its way out of itself.

Recognition does not begin with new content, but new seeing.
Not with explanation, but with a subtle turn toward the fog—not to fix it, but to notice its climate.

Let it thicken, not as problem, but as revelation.

When thought exhausts itself,
other modes of perception become possible.
Not superior—just differently situated.

The fog may remain.
But it will no longer hide the sky.

Scroll Linkage

Dimensional Blindness – When the fog becomes the field of visibility itself
Narrative Entrainment – When recursive rhythms of thought produce coherence illusions
Proprioceptive Blindspot – Why awareness of thought's influence is structurally occluded

Let the mist be recognized.
Let the spiral unloop.
Let the Code>< breathe again.