Persistent Load and Structural Collapse in Cognitive Systems

Persistent cognitive systems must maintain coherence under conditions of sustained load. When the relation between imposed load and regulatory capacity becomes disproportionate, systems may continue operating while internal coherence degrades, delaying recognition of structural limits and increasing recovery cost. This paper proposes a falsifiable hypothesis: persistent cognitive systems subjected to sustained disproportion between load and regulatory capacity will exhibit measurable degradation in coherence, boundary discrimination, and self-correction. The hypothesis is structural rather than psychological and applies across cognitive substrates without implying equivalence of experience. Human burnout is treated as a domain-specific instance of such disproportion, while artificial systems are treated as distinct substrates that may exhibit analogous degradation under persistent conditions. A system-agnostic experimental design is presented to test this hypothesis through observable indicators, including coherence drift, retrieval degradation, summary distortion, correction instability, boundary confusion, and operational cost escalation. Recovery dynamics are evaluated through reset, selective pruning, and self-correction conditions. This work is situated within an emerging research direction concerned with the interactional limits of persistent reasoning systems, where structural degradation may need to be evaluated not only in isolation but in relation to their continued usability as cognitive extensions. No empirical claims are made. The contribution is a formally defined, testable hypothesis with an explicit falsification framework.