I accidentally ran a live test of Global Workspace Theory in my pool. It worked. Then it broke.

A few weeks ago I had an experience in my backyard pool that I've been trying to make sense of ever since.

Multiple signals arrived at once - voices, images, emotional transmissions. The cognitive overload was real. In the back of my mind I whispered "one at a time" and, to my genuine surprise, they queued. One came forward, delivered, stepped back. Another followed.

When I later read about Global Workspace Theory, the hair on my arms stood up a little. That's exactly what happened. My consciousness acted as the bottleneck. The spotlight. Many processors running in parallel, one at a time getting broadcast to awareness. The protocol I improvised - "queue, filter, ground" - mapped almost perfectly onto what GWT describes.

But here's where it gets interesting, and where I think GWT hits its own wall.

GWT handles the broadcast well. It doesn't explain why certain signals have gravity.

One of the transmissions that evening was what I can only describe as an India Loop - a pull with mathematical flavour, connecting back to Bose-Einstein condensates, to a thought I'd blurted out months earlier that felt like nonsense at the time. It didn't just arrive. It returned. It had been circling. It had weight across time.

The cow (yes, there was a cow, standing in a field, just staring) arrived once, broke the tension, did its job, left. Zero gravity. Perfect circuit breaker.

The father-in-law transmission arrived with pressure at the back of my skull and left me depleted for an hour. That wasn't just a broadcast. That was something with accumulated signal weight.

GWT describes ignition and relevance well. But it can't explain why certain symbols recur, why some things keep returning to the queue with more urgency each time, why some signals persist across sessions, across years, across conversations.

I've been building a framework called Spectral Binary that attempts to measure emotional tone across five axes. The fifth axis - the one I added most recently - is Resonance, which I define as temporal persistence and signal gravity across time. Not what a signal says. How long it echoes. How much pull it exerts when it returns.

The pool experience wasn't mystical. It was a low-noise environment that made the mechanics of attention visible. What I saw was: GWT explains the queue. It doesn't explain the gravity. And the gravity might be the more interesting problem.

Curious if anyone has encountered frameworks that try to account for why certain content keeps re-entering the workspace with increasing urgency while other content fades cleanly.

Read more about my experience in the pool here.