Illustrated guide · October 7, 2026
Sticky Switches: Entangled Hysterons, Without the Maths
By Daniel Preisach
A picture guide to one idea: some of your calls work like a sticky light switch. Once flipped, they stay put, and what other people say changes how sticky they are.
Key ideas
- Two valleys and a hump: once a judgment settles, it takes a real push to change it, and it stays changed.
- Other people do not carry a physical cause into you, but they can lower the hump until the switch flips by itself.
- The same mechanism explains a harmless internet argument about the color of a dress and a group of people genuinely feeling ill from something that is not there.
- "Entangled" here means mutual dependence. It has nothing to do with quantum physics.
What it means for you
Knowing which of your switches are sticky, and what pushes them, is exactly what lets an old friend say: wait, is this you, or is this the crowd?
This paper presents Daniel Preisach’s own work. It builds on peer-reviewed research (Preisach, 1935; van Hecke, 2021) and marks which parts are established and which are proposal.