A Tutorial on Cognitive Optimization in External Memory Systems: Reinterpreting Stolfi’s Layers and Currier’s Partitions as Retrieval-Oriented Design Choices Illustrated by the Voynich Manuscript

In the companion tutorial (Durdanovic, 2026), Bayesian model selection under a strict Zero-Patch Standard strongly favored a Structured Reference System (Href) over natural language (Hlang) or conventional cipher hypotheses for the Voynich Manuscript (VMS). This paper addresses the consequent mechanism: what cognitive pressures plausibly led a 15th-century author to construct a text with rigid morphology, high type-level uniqueness, and sectional vocabulary disjointness?We argue that the field requires a high-level course correction: moving from postulating linguistic priors to deducing the system’s purpose from its apparent anomalies. We reinterpret Stolfi’s crust-mantle-core decomposition and Currier’s sectional partitions not as linguistic failures, but as cognitive optimizations for manual retrieval in an external memory system. We explicitly derive the Positional Coding of glyphs (rigid slots) as a “visual combination lock” designed to exploit parallel feature binding (Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Wolfe, 1994). The VMS is thus interpreted as a paper-based external memory artifact—a specialized reference book designed to offload complex domain knowledge while preserving low-error lookup under manual search constraints.