Fixation: Not a Flaw, but a Feature
Dielenberg’s theory unfolds in stages. Fixations, he argues, are not inherently pathological.
They exist across the entire biological hierarchy—from molecular processes like long-term potentiation (LTP), to systemic behaviors such as eye saccades, and up through cognitive-behavioral phenomena like imprinting and identity formation.
In this view, a fixation is any stable configuration of biological function that resists change and confers order.
The key insight is that fixations become maladaptive only under certain conditions—when they are inappropriate to the context, energetically over-invested in, or corrupted by external interference.
But in their adaptive form, fixations are essential for the construction of perceptual stability, memory retention, and behavioral coherence. They are, in Dielenberg’s terms, “functional set points,” deeply embedded and emotionally charged.
This leads to the concept of the fixation network: a lattice of interdependent beliefs, associations, memories, and routines that collectively resist disruption.
At the center lies a core fixation—a belief or concept bound to identity or emotional salience. Surrounding it are auxiliary fixations—supporting elements that reinforce the core and absorb contradiction.
The result is a system that maintains its internal logic even when confronted with overwhelming disconfirming evidence.
Santa, God, and the Asymmetry of Belief
To illustrate the power of fixation networks, Dielenberg examines a developmental paradox: why do children abandon belief in Santa Claus but retain belief in God?
Both are introduced early, both are culturally scaffolded, and both involve unseen omniscient figures with moral authority. Yet by age eight, most children jettison Santa, while belief in God often deepens into adulthood.
The answer, Dielenberg suggests, lies in the density of the fixation network.
Santa is seasonal, playfully fictionalized, and culturally peripheral. God, by contrast, is bound to daily ritual, emotional bonding with caregivers, and community belonging.
It is not the plausibility of the belief that determines its persistence—it is the strength of the network around it. Religious belief is not just cognitively imprinted; it is affectively and socially ritualized.
It becomes embedded not only in thought, but in the body and its movements, reinforced by dopamine-mediated reward systems and attachment circuitry.
This asymmetry of fixation offers a striking parallel to the durability of conspiratorial belief systems, many of which function like folk religions, complete with initiatory myths, moral binaries, persecutory deities, and sacred rituals of information sharing.
And like religious belief, they often prove immune to correction by external facts.
Disinformation as Fixation Engineering
Disinformation, viewed through the fixation model, is not about lying—it's about installing.
The goal is to seed ideas that bypass critical reasoning and nest into the cognitive infrastructure as fixations.This is achieved through emotionally charged repetition, symbolic saturation, identity alignment, and social reinforcement.
The result is not simply a false belief, but a cognitively locked-in system—a fixation network.
These networks are built from the outside in.
Rarely does a disinformation campaign attempt to convince someone directly of its core claim. Instead, it cultivates auxiliary beliefs: distrust of institutions, feelings of grievance, personal vulnerability, in-group solidarity.
Over time, these scaffold a more central fixation, such as the belief that an election was stolen, that vaccines are genocidal, or that a secret cabal rules the world.
As Dielenberg notes, attempts to attack the core fixation head-on often fail—or worse, backfire. This is because the auxiliary structure absorbs the impact, recontextualizes it, and reinforces the core through cognitive dissonance.
The network, once established, becomes self-sealing.
Reflexive Control: The Strategic Weaponization of Fixation
The Russian military concept of reflexive control—developed during the Cold War and deployed through modern hybrid warfare—offers a strategic analogue to Dielenberg’s cognitive model.
Reflexive control seeks to manipulate an adversary by shaping their decision-making framework: implanting premises, seeding perceptions, and guiding behavior from within their own reasoning process.
It is not about brute persuasion. It is about manipulating the fixation architecture of the target audience.
Through a combination of contradictory messaging, symbolic confusion, emotional overload, and selectively truthful claims, reflexive control exploits the same vulnerabilities Dielenberg describes—over-reliance on core fixations, failure to revise in light of new data, and susceptibility to projection.
This is not theoretical.
Disinformation campaigns surrounding COVID-19, the U.S. election system, the war in Ukraine, and globalist conspiracy theories have all relied on fixation engineering.
They begin with plausible auxiliary hooks—masks are uncomfortable, voting software is flawed, experts can be wrong—and slowly construct hardened networks of belief that are immune to contradiction.
Countering Fixation: Strategic Implications
What emerges from this synthesis is a grimly elegant model of cognitive capture.
Disinformation does not spread because it is convincing—it spreads because it exploits how the brain needs to fixate to function.
This is why debunking rarely works. Facts don’t dissolve fixations. They must be displaced, not denied.
Effective counter-disinformation strategies must take fixation architecture seriously. Rather than attacking core beliefs, they should aim to weaken auxiliary fixations—interrupting the emotional rhythms, social reinforcements, and symbolic triggers that hold the network together.
Identity-sensitive messaging, counter-narrative rituals, and slow emotional disengagement may prove more effective than truth-bombing.
Furthermore, Dielenberg’s theory may offer predictive power: identifying critical periods of vulnerability (e.g., during crises), populations with high fixation densities, and fixation “load-bearing nodes” within narrative ecosystems.
Just as religious conversion rarely begins with theology but with doubt in a peripheral belief, disinformation deconversion may begin with soft disruption at the edge.
Conclusion
Dielenberg’s fixation-projection model, though presented as a biological theory, may prove to be one of the most powerful explanatory tools for the psychological durability of disinformation in the digital age.
When belief becomes fixation—embodied, ritualized, emotionally fed—it is no longer subject to persuasion. It becomes part of the self.
Reflexive control exploits this. It does not tell people what to think; it guides what they will fixate on, knowing that once installed, belief becomes behavior, and behavior becomes identity.
To fight disinformation effectively, we must stop imagining we are correcting errors.
We are, instead, contending with an enemy that understands the human need for certainty, pattern, and purpose—and uses that need to install software into the mind.
The brain projects what it fixates on. And someone, somewhere, is choosing the projection.
Sources & Further Reading
- Dielenberg, R. A. (2024). The Biological Foundations of Fixation: A General Theory. Academia Biology, 2. https://www.academia.edu/2837-4010/2/3/10.20935/AcadBiol7360
- Friston, K. (2006). A Free Energy Principle for the Brain. Journal of Physiology, 100(1–3), 70–87.
- Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.
- Thomas, T. (2004). Russia's Reflexive Control Theory and the Military. Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 17(2), 237–256.
- Taylor, E. G., & Ahn, W. (2012). Causal Imprinting in Causal Structure Learning. Cognitive Psychology, 65(3), 381–413.
- Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2014). Cognitive Style and Religiosity: The Role of Conflict Detection. Memory & Cognition, 42(1), 1–10.
