Activations of five writing styles in the readout's plane (Qwen3-32B, layer 48), raw vs centered on each style's own mean.
raw: each style sits at its own offset (×N = offset in ring-radii); pooled, the loop is gone (p = 0.62)
Each point is one text, colored by the emotion angle it conveys. Each style's distance from center is its true offset magnitude relative to the ring radius (dialogue farthest, ×5.2; inner monologue nearest, ×1.3); the offsets are mutually near-orthogonal in the full space, so the directions here are spread out for legibility. Centering each style on its own mean collapses the five copies onto the one ring the readout decodes, the same loop that recovers from persistence p = 0.62 to p = 0.001.