AI is changing how we think and how we experience ourselves.

Cognitive selfhood means remaining meaningfully present in our own thinking.

Every human right begins with a self that is there to hold it.

Over 100 years ago, Auguste Deter sat across from the physician Alois Alzheimer, struggling to answer simple questions about her life. Her memory was failing, along with other elements of cognition that most of us take for granted. At one point, she offered a remarkable description of what was happening to her: “I have, so to speak, lost myself.”

Her words are powerful and resonant. She didn’t simply say that she had lost her memory or couldn’t remember. She said she had lost herself. Alzheimer’s disease is much more complicated than memory loss, but her words point toward something we almost intuitively understand. Cognition isn’t simply something the self possesses; it’s part of how the self is constructed and experienced.

We tend to think of cognition in functional and rather practical terms. We remember, reason, judge, imagine, and decide. When these capacities begin to fail in dementia, something deeper may change along with them.........

© Psychology Today