Hebbian inertia and massless reasoning: comparative cognitive architecture in human and large language model systems

Human beings and artificial intelligence models learn in fundamentally different ways. Humans update beliefs through repeated exposure, a Hebbian process that creates cognitive “inertia” causing beliefs to resist change. Large language models (LLMs), by contrast, do not update parameters at inference and are unburdened by cumulative experience. Despite growing interest in comparing human and machine cognition, no prior study has placed both on a shared measurement scale permitting direct quantit