2019 — Impact
A side-impact collision resulted in head impact and lasting cognitive disruption. The problem wasn’t just symptoms — it was lack of vocabulary to describe what had changed.
Origins
Why CM exists — and why the CCM is built the way it is. This is the personal hook, but also the design constraint: make cognition describable as mechanism, and make its limits explicit.
The short version
CM began after a 2019 road traffic collision and subsequent post-concussion / mild traumatic brain injury. The lived experience wasn’t “mystery” — it was a sudden, practical loss of capacity: shortened temporal horizon, reduced complexity handling, and difficulty articulating what had changed.
The CCM language (H: temporal horizon, K: structural capacity) is partly a response to that: a way to describe cognitive limits without metaphors, and without over-claim.
2020 — Finding language
Podcasts and brain-injury material provided terms that made symptoms legible. Better articulation enabled better support, and reduced the “invisible” nature of the impairment.
Systems thinking meets biology
Years of systems design / architecture pushed the curiosity into a build impulse: if cognition is layered control, then we should be able to specify it as incremental mechanisms with boundaries, gates, and update rules.
CCM begins
The model forms around a strict rule: start from whole-organism control problems and only add higher capability when lower levels cannot explain the observed behaviour.
Why this matters
A practical motivation
Cognitive change is often described narratively. CM aims to provide a way to talk about capacity, limits, and recovery in mechanically grounded terms — without implying “mystical” gaps.
A scientific constraint
If a capability can’t be specified in mechanism, it can’t be tested or falsified. CCM is built to be checkable — and conservative about what it claims.
If you want the running updates trail, see Updates.