Cognitive Drift: Loss of Grounding in Human Cognition

Cognitive Drift describes how human cognition remains active, adaptive, and coherent while gradually losing alignment with reality due to increasing reliance on compressed representations, mediated inputs, and recursive internal models. Rather than a failure of reasoning or knowledge, Cognitive Drift reflects a structural shift in how thought operates. Individuals continue to interpret, update, and respond, but increasingly do so through representations rather than direct interaction with underlying conditions. This paper examines the mechanisms that produce this shift and its implications across cognition, information environments, and human experience.