Coherence Time in Biological Oscillator Assemblies Bounds the Rate of State Registration

Distributed biological computation is bottlenecked by coherence time — the waiting time for multiple semi-independent oscillator modules to align within a tolerance window before a state transition can register. This creates a speed-flexibility trade-off: larger, more flexible networks process information more slowly.

Coherence time grows exponentially with coordination depth in the modular regime where the framework is intended to apply. The paper recovers 30–50 ms visual binding windows from independently constrained parameters and validates the expected scaling in modular Kuramoto networks (R² = 0.97), while all-to-all and sparse topologies serve mainly as regime-boundary diagnostics.

The paper also develops exploratory extensions: a pre-commit phase-delta regime, candidate biophysical substrates for pre-commit coordination dynamics, and qualitative predictions linking effective dimensionality and commit rate to subjective temporal structure. These are presented as hypotheses tied to measurable quantities, not as settled empirical results.

This paper explains why thinking takes time — not because neurons are slow, but because coordinating distributed brain regions is exponentially hard. The same formula that predicts visual binding windows also predicts why psychedelics dilate subjective time (more dimensions to coordinate), why expert motor skills are fast but inflexible (few modules, tight coupling), and why mind-wandering feels slow but generative (many modules, loose coupling). The speed-flexibility trade-off isn't a bug — it's a fundamental constraint on any distributed system without a global clock.