"To find out, we tried deleting the J-space entirely, removing its most active contents at every point in the text while leaving everything else alone. Whatever Claude can still do without its J-space is what the rest of the network handles on its own.

It turns out the rest of the network can do quite a lot. Without its J-space, Claude speaks fluently, classifies sentiment, answers multiple-choice questions, and pulls facts out of passages roughly as well as before. What it loses, though, are the tasks that require some higher-order thinking: multi-step reasoning drops to near zero, and summarization and rhyming poetry-writing performance fall below the level of a much smaller, intact model."

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5524513&forum_id=2#49984457)