What remains of a person when memory changes

Epigraph

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

— Paul the Apostle, First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:11. King James Version (1611). Project Gutenberg #10

What this article is about

Over a lifetime almost everything about a person changes: the body, habits, opinions, the circle of people close to them. And yet we point at the child in an old video and say “that’s me,” and of something done twenty years ago we say “I did that.” What does this recognition rest on? Memory, the body, character, relationships with people who know us, the story we tell about ourselves? Philosophers have argued about it at least since Locke and Hume, and Plutarch was already reporting a dispute about the ship of Theseus in antiquity. This article does not promise to settle the argument. It separates two questions that are easy to run together — what makes a person the same, and what lets a person feel the same — and tests each criterion for strength: what it explains and where it stops working. Philosophical and religious answers are attributed to their own texts, and psychological findings to particular studies, with their samples and limits. When memory changes, the distinction also keeps arguments about the self separate from respect for the person and the practical help they need.

I. Two questions under one “I”

“I’m not the same person” can concern identity or experience. What makes someone the same person as twenty years ago? What lets them experience that past as their own? These questions can have different answers: defining identity is different from describing a feeling of continuity.

John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, begins with a definition. A person, for him, is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (Book II, ch. XXVII, § 11 in the numbering of the Project Gutenberg edition). Psychologists describe the other side of the matter. Emily Hong, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut study global self-continuity; in their questionnaires it was measured by having people list important aspects of their identity and rate how far each one made them feel a link between their own past, present and future (2022).

The first question is metaphysical: it is answered with arguments and thought experiments. The second is psychological: it is studied with surveys and experiments. A study can show that a person feels the same, but it cannot prove that an unchanging essence lies beneath the feeling. Conversely, a philosophical criterion does not by itself describe how a person experiences their life.

We examine the body, memory, character, links with the past and narrative. Article I03 considers how a life story is built and tested. How consciousness arises is a separate question, outside this comparison.

II. The ship of Theseus: what remains when the parts are replaced

The problem of identity is easiest to begin not with a person but with a thing. Plutarch, in his Life of Theseus (ch. XXIII), relates that the Athenians preserved the thirty-oared vessel on which Theseus had sailed out with the young people and returned unharmed, keeping it until the days of Demetrius of Phalerum. “They constantly removed the decayed part of her timbers, and renewed them with sound wood, so that the ship became an illustration to philosophers of the doctrine of growth and change, as some argued that it remained the same, and others, that it did not remain the same” (tr. Aubrey Stewart and George Long). Plutarch does not settle the dispute; he records it.

The dispute shows that the words “the same” have at least two senses. If identity means the same material, the ship at some point ceased to be itself. If identity means the same form, the same purpose and an unbroken history of replacements, the ship remained itself, because it was never replaced all at once. This is our reading of the example, not Plutarch’s words.

Imagine watching a video of yourself at ten. Voice, face, vocabulary and interests differ, yet you say “that’s me.” You may recognise a history: the child gradually became you, rather than being replaced by you at one moment.

A person is not a ship. Remembering and answering for a life introduce questions that the vessel cannot settle. The example opens the problem; it supplies no test of someone’s humanity or present needs.

III. The body: “the same man” and “the same person”

The most everyday criterion is the body: we recognise people we know by face, voice and gait. Locke does not discard this criterion but gives it a place of its own. He distinguishes “the same man” from “the same person.” To be the same man, on Locke’s view, also takes a body that is replaced gradually rather than all at once (§ 10 in the PG numbering). To be the same person takes a consciousness able to own past thoughts and actions (§ 11).

Locke shows the difference with a thought experiment (§ 17 in the PG numbering). Imagine that a prince’s soul, with all its awareness of the prince’s past life, passed into a cobbler’s body. Everyone would see, Locke holds, that as a person this is the prince, answerable for the prince’s deeds alone. Yet who would call him the same man? To all but himself he would still be the cobbler.

A prince entering a cobbler is a thought experiment, without proof that such transfer is possible. In US online surveys, Fernandez-Duque and Schwartz found that people judged the “central self” more brain-dependent than the peripheral self (2016). This describes beliefs in one country, without settling what a person is or how brain and consciousness relate.

Bodily recognition does not explain experiencing the past as one’s own. Locke’s § 11 turns to consciousness of past thoughts and actions; “memory” is our name for this criterion.

IV. The memory criterion: Locke, and Hume’s objection

Locke’s central argument runs: “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then” (§ 11). The criterion has a strong side: it explains why we count as ours the actions we remember. Locke himself treats the person as a legal, forensic notion: it assigns actions and their merit to someone, and through consciousness the person comes to care about its past and to answer for it (§ 28 in the PG numbering; paraphrase).

Most lived days are forgotten. Hume asks whether forgetting what one thought or did on 1 January 1715, 11 March 1719 or 3 August 1733 makes one a different person (Treatise, I.IV.6; paraphrase). He still gives memory a central role: it reveals the succession of perceptions and the idea of a causal chain. Yet “memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions.” He asks those who make identity entirely dependent on memory to explain why it extends beyond recollection; he does not name Locke here. Forgotten days can belong to our history.

Hume calls the fine disputes about identity ultimately unsettled, more grammatical than philosophical (same section; paraphrase). Our narrower point is that recollection can disclose continuity without exhausting it. This philosophical argument about forgotten life does not explain a reader’s memory symptoms.

V. Severe memory loss: what research shows

If the self rested wholly on memory, little of it would be left in severe amnesia. Clinical studies show a more complicated picture — with the caveat that these are data about people who are ill and about how self-representation is measured, not about metaphysics.

Platel and colleagues (2021) studied 20 nursing-home residents with Alzheimer’s disease and moderate to severe dementia, alongside 20 healthy residents matched on age, education and mood measures. Patients attended six musical reminiscence sessions; controls attended three. Researchers assessed recalled memories during sessions, individual autobiographical memory on day twelve, and self-representation at the beginning and end. At the last workshop, patients’ memory number and quality were comparable with controls; individual episodic detail on day twelve remained better in controls. Two measures of self-representation, IMAGE and I-AM, showed stable profiles. However, the predicted enrichment of identity was not significant, possibly because the measures were insufficiently sensitive. Stable responses over this brief period establish neither an unchanging essence nor a treatment result for another person.

Stramba-Badiale and colleagues’ 2025 systematic review, covering 83 studies, describes autobiographical memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease: reduced specificity and, in most studies, better remote than recent memories. Some self-defining memories and felt continuity can remain in mild or moderate stages. Larger, more diverse samples and standardised assessment are needed (paraphrase).

Platel’s small sample and short observation, and both papers’ clinical populations, restrict inference. The findings neither transfer directly to healthy people nor prescribe reminiscence. Locke defines identity; these studies measure self-description. The two kinds of claim cannot refute or certify one another.

Everyday treatment of the person also requires an ethical distinction. Dignity and essential help do not depend on naming a date, recognising a relative or giving a coherent biography. Preserved abilities must not become an exam for the right to remain oneself. NHS communication guidance advises allowing time, enabling people to speak about their own welfare and avoiding ridicule. Participation is the aim, without a promise of restored memory. A familiar song or photograph can remain an optional invitation: refusal needs no persuasion and cancels no essential help. Someone else’s account of the past does not replace present preferences or give the family general authority over the person.

VI. A bundle of perceptions, and Hume’s admission

Hume asks what introspection finds as “I.” He reports encountering a particular perception—warmth, cold, light, shadow, love, hate, pain or pleasure—rather than a self apart from perception. In deep sleep, without awareness of perceptions, he is insensible of himself (I.IV.6; paraphrase). This is his philosophical account, without a clinical conclusion about sleep or consciousness.

Hence the conclusion: human beings are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Identity, for Hume, does not really bind these perceptions together. It is something we ascribe to them because the imagination links their ideas (same section; paraphrase).

Hume acknowledges the difficulty in the Appendix: “upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity, I find myself involved in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent.” He cannot satisfactorily explain what binds successive perceptions in thought. His admission limits the theory rather than proving that people disappear.

The caution therefore runs both ways. From the fact that the self is hard to find in introspection it does not follow that the person does not exist or that nothing holds them together. From the fact that we habitually say “I” it does not follow that an unchanging thing lies beneath the word.

VII. A bearer who passes through the ages: the answer of the Gita

The opposite answer comes from the Bhagavad Gita: in it an unchanging self exists and only its covering changes. Krishna addresses Arjuna before battle: Arjuna grieves for those who may die. Krishna replies that neither he, nor Arjuna, nor these warriors ever ceased to exist or ever will, and compares the change of bodies to the change of ages: “To man's frame As there come infancy and youth and age, So come there raisings-up and layings-down Of other and of other life-abodes” (ch. II, verses 12–13 in the standard numbering; verse rendering by Edwin Arnold).

What matters is the structure of this answer. Change is fully acknowledged: the infant, the youth and the old man differ. But the changes happen to a bearer that does not itself change. This is a religious teaching about an indestructible soul, given in a particular setting: Krishna is speaking to a warrior about battle and death, not proposing a psychological theory of personality. Arnold’s version is a verse rendering, and we draw no conclusions from his individual word choices.

The likeness with Hume stops at changing states. The Gita affirms indestructible life (2.16–17; paraphrase of Arnold), whereas Hume finds perceptions and admits difficulty explaining their unity. These are incompatible answers, respectively a religious teaching and a philosophical position. We do not merge them, choose a winner or turn either into a claim about how someone with dementia must experience themselves.

VIII. The butterfly dream: who wakes up

Hume noted that in sound sleep he is insensible of himself. The Daoist book Zhuangzi also speaks of sleep, but differently: not of a gap in experience but of a dream in which experience is different. At the end of the second chapter, Zhuangzi tells how he dreamt he was a butterfly, flitting here and there with no awareness of being a man, and how, when he woke, he was himself again: “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” (tr. Herbert A. Giles)

The parable asks the same question as the section on memory, but from another side. There is no forgetting here: Zhuangzi remembers the dream. There is doubt about which of the two perspectives is the original one. Right afterwards the text adds that a man and a butterfly are nonetheless divided by a boundary (paraphrase of Giles). The word Giles uses for the transition itself is his interpretation, and we build no conclusion on it. On our reading, the parable does not erase the difference; it shows that the certainty “I am I” does not rest on uninterrupted experience alone.

Hume describes absent perceptions in deep sleep; Zhuangzi describes another experienced perspective. We read the latter’s “I do not know” as a caution against rushing to settle the question. Our interpretation is that waking recognition can involve several links—body, yesterday, unfinished tasks, close people—without a proof of uninterrupted consciousness. The parable offers no explanation of amnesia.

IX. Character: what people take to be their “true self”

The next candidate is character: kindness, honesty, habitual inclinations. The phrase “he has become a different person” may refer precisely to character, while memory and body have hardly changed.

Fernandez-Duque and Schwartz first asked 172 US residents to compare central and peripheral selves. The central self was judged more brain-based, less willfully controlled, more moral and more stable. A second survey asked 210 people about 18 particular traits: centrality related to perceived desirability, brain dependence and stability, but not morality or controllability.

It does not follow that a person really has a moral core. These are correlational data about the beliefs of residents of one country, collected on MTurk, and the link between “central” and “moral” did not hold at the level of specific traits. What the data do show is that, in these surveys, the idea of a “true self” goes together with an expectation of stability: what participants regarded as central in themselves, they also rated as more stable over time.

Haehner, Wright and Bleidorn’s 2024 review covers 30 longitudinal studies of deliberate trait change. Wanting change related only weakly to actual change; dedicated interventions shifted traits on average, with limited evidence and exceptions (paraphrase). This does not establish stability across decades, identify a dementia symptom or prescribe changing someone’s personality.

X. Montaigne: contradicting oneself without contradicting the truth

Michel de Montaigne, in the chapter “Of Repentance” (Essays, Book III, ch. 2), describes himself as an object that cannot be held still. Other writers, he says, shape man; he merely gives an account of one (paraphrase). The world, for Montaigne, is in perpetual motion, and “Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion.” (tr. Charles Cotton)

Hence his honesty about his own contradictions. He describes his writing as a register of shifting circumstances and wavering thoughts that at times contradict one another — “whether it be that I am then another self, or that I take subjects by other circumstances and considerations: so it is that I may peradventure contradict myself, but, as Demades said, I never contradict the truth.” In the same passage he notes that he may change not only through chance but also by his own design (paraphrase).

Montaigne builds no theory of personal identity, and we do not ascribe one to him. But his stance is useful for our question. To say “back then I thought differently” is neither to lie about one’s former self nor to disown oneself.

Paul’s epigraph uses another genre: the same speaker describes childhood and adulthood, putting away childish things within a chapter about love. Montaigne describes himself. Both tell a changing past in the first person. Neither passage makes an adult with memory difficulties a child or authorises treating them as one.

XI. What the feeling “this is still me” is made of

Hong, Sedikides and Wildschut examined nostalgia and self-continuity in five studies (N = 254, 250, 250, 174 and 146). Three were correlational, with US/UK online samples and Korean students; two experimentally induced nostalgia. They tested narrative meaning, associative links with the past and belief in stability as possible grounds of continuity.

The authors conclude that nostalgia predicts or strengthens continuity chiefly through narrative (Studies 2–5), less through associative links (2 and 3), without mediation through stability. The first experiment’s group difference missed the conventional 0.05 threshold (p = 0.056). Stability itself still correlated with continuity; its absence as mediator does not mean it was irrelevant. Narrative’s indirect association remained after controlling rumination in Study 3. The proposed explanation—that nostalgia can highlight change—is interpretation, not a universal mechanism.

The authors name the limits themselves: continuity and its grounds were measured with single items. Associative links showed up in the correlational data but not in the experiments. We would add that the samples were online and student samples.

For these participants, continuity related to seeing life as a story as well as believing in stability. Narrative was measured through a single self-report item, without testing storytelling skill. Article I03 considers building and testing such stories; this finding creates no duty to produce a coherent biography.

XII. The link with the future self

Yang and colleagues (2024) examined future self-continuity and delayed money choices. In Study 1, 370 Chinese online participants aged 18–35 (mean about 19.5) completed questionnaires. Greater felt continuity predicted less discounting of delayed money only when self-concept clarity was high. This was a correlation, without establishing cause.

In Study 2, 234 students read a stability or change account of personality, then described present/future similarities or differences over ten years. The authors’ model linked continuity to choice through consideration of future consequences, depending on self-concept clarity. Future-consequence consideration was measured, not manipulated. Clear self-knowledge making the future vivid is their proposed interpretation, not a verified mechanism.

These were young Chinese samples and money tasks; response times also affected data. The work does not establish wise life management, an older-adult intervention or a test of decision-making capacity. Its narrower finding concerns taking a future self into account within the studied tasks.

What this means in practice

This comparison gives no method for “finding yourself.” Body, memory, character and story illuminate different links; none settles every change alone. Hume and the Gita disagree about an unchanging core, and we leave that dispute open. Feeling continuous and needing help can coexist. The following are bounded editorial suggestions, without a treatment promise.

When you feel like saying “I am not the same person anymore,” it helps to specify which link has changed: the body, memory, character, relationships or the story you tell about yourself. Changes in different links mean different things, and they do not necessarily all change at once.
Gaps in memory do not by themselves cancel the fact that the forgotten days were your life. This is Hume’s philosophical argument, not a medical statement.
The sense of continuity, judging by the work of Hong and colleagues, is related not only to a conviction that nothing has changed but also to whether a person sees their life as a story. You might try to put into words how earlier events led to present ones; this step itself was not tested in the study, and the result is not guaranteed. More on the story in article I03.
Before a decision that concerns the future, you can picture yourself a few years on as a continuation of who you are now. In an experiment with Chinese students a similar task was related to money choices, and the link depended on self-concept clarity; this does not carry over automatically to other decisions.
If someone close to you has dementia, it may help to know that studies describe preserved components of self-representation. This is not medical advice: decisions about care and treatment are made together with doctors.
Discuss worrying or disruptive gradual memory changes with a doctor. Sudden confusion needs immediate medical help: do not wait for it to persist or explain it away through philosophy or age. The article establishes no cause and gives no diagnosis.
The responsibility and promises of a changing person are the subject of article W-22-N02 Anātman and the Continuity of Experience; we do not repeat them here.

Key quotation

“I do not paint its being, I paint its passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute”

— Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book III, ch. 2 “Of Repentance,” opening paragraph; tr. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt. Project Gutenberg #3600

The quotation sums up the article: a person recognises themselves not in a motionless being but in a connected passage. It does not follow that the self does not exist or that change removes responsibility: Montaigne describes his own manner of self-portrayal, not a doctrine of the person.

Connections between traditions

Comparison (side A ↔ side B)	Meeting point / similarity	Essential limit
Locke, Essay, II.XXVII § 11 (PG numbering) ↔ Platel et al. 2021, Stramba-Badiale et al. 2025 (neuropsychology of Alzheimer’s disease)	Both sides tie the self to memory of one’s life	Locke defines what a person is; the studies measure self-representation in patients and find it partly preserved despite memory impairment. This is no refutation of Locke; moreover, Platel’s sample is small, and both works concern a clinical population
Plutarch, Theseus, ch. XXIII ↔ Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:11	Both passages concern what continues when parts (the ship’s timbers) or ways of speaking and thinking (child — man) are replaced; in Plutarch identity is disputed, in Paul it is carried by the narrator’s “I”	Plutarch reports a philosophers’ dispute about a thing and does not settle it; Paul uses an image of growing up in a chapter about love and offers no theory of identity
Bhagavad Gita 2.12–13 and 2.16–17 ↔ Hume, Treatise, I.IV.6	Both start from the succession of states: infancy, youth and age — a flux of perceptions	The Gita teaches an indestructible soul passing through bodies (religious teaching); Hume finds nothing in experience but perceptions (philosophical position). The answers are incompatible
Questions of King Milinda II.2.1 ↔ Hume, Treatise, I.IV.6	Continuity without an unchanging self: “Neither the same nor another.” and Nagasena’s lamp flame — Hume’s bundle of perceptions	Nagasena gives Buddhist teaching in the context of rebirth; Hume reports introspection; we claim no historical link. The Buddhist answer in full: article W-22-N02 Anātman and the Continuity of Experience
Zhuangzi, ch. II ↔ Hume, Treatise, I.IV.6 (on sleep)	Sleep takes away the self-evidence of the “I”: in Hume, deep sleep without perceptions; in Zhuangzi, a dream with another perspective	Zhuangzi leaves both perspectives open and notes a barrier between man and butterfly; Hume draws an empirical conclusion about perceptions
Montaigne, Essays, III.2 ↔ Hong, Sedikides, Wildschut 2022	Connected passage (in Montaigne, “passage”; in the psychologists, narrative) serves as a ground of the sense of self	Montaigne describes his own practice of self-portrayal; the psychologists measure a sense of continuity with single items in online and student samples, and in Hong and colleagues belief in stability was also related to continuity. We claim no anticipation of science
Locke, Essay, II.XXVII § 28 (PG numbering) ↔ Fernandez-Duque, Schwartz 2016	The self is tied to moral evaluation of actions and character	Locke gives a philosophical definition of the person as a term of accountability; the study describes beliefs of US residents, and the link between centrality and morality did not hold at the level of specific traits

The rows compare passages that were read, not whole traditions. A shared word or image does not mean a shared teaching: in each row the limit shows where the likeness ends.

Primary sources

Entries 1–14 and their reading scopes are inherited from preserved I02 revision 1. All three language versions were read in full for this revision; this does not mean all primary works were reread. Selected Platel passages and the NHS communication page were checked again; exact bounds and the unavailable repeat retrieval of the 2025 review are recorded in the local research log.

John Locke. An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, vol. 1 (first edition 1690). Project Gutenberg #10615, ed. Steve Harris, David Widger; English original. Read: Book II, ch. XXVII “Of Identity and Diversity,” §§ 10, 11, 17, 28 in this edition’s numbering (some modern editions number the sections differently). Text
David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740). Project Gutenberg #4705. Read: Book I, Part IV, Sect. VI “Of Personal Identity”; Appendix (paragraphs on the section on personal identity). Text
Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives, vol. I — Life of Theseus, tr. Aubrey Stewart, George Long (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894, per the title page of the copy). Project Gutenberg #14033. Read: Theseus, ch. XXIII. Text
Milindapañha. The Questions of King Milinda, Part I (Sacred Books of the East, vol. XXXV), tr. T. W. Rhys Davids (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890); archive.org scan, OCR text layer. Read: Book II, ch. 2, dilemma 1 “Identity” (Trenckner p. 40; SBE XXXV pp. 63–64). Used in one row of “Connections between traditions.” Text
Zhuangzi. Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, tr. Herbert A. Giles (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1889). Project Gutenberg #59709. Read: end of ch. II (the butterfly dream). Text
Bhagavad Gita. The Song Celestial, or Bhagavad-Gîtâ, verse rendering by Edwin Arnold; edition date not given in the copy. Project Gutenberg #2388. Read: ch. II (verses 12–13 and 16–17 in the standard numbering; context — the beginning of Krishna’s reply). Text
Paul the Apostle. First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:11: King James Version, 1611 (Project Gutenberg #10) and the Russian Synodal translation (azbyka.ru) used in the Russian edition. Read: 1 Corinthians 13:11. KJV; Synodal translation
Michel de Montaigne. Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete, tr. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt. Project Gutenberg #3600. Read: Book III, ch. 2 “Of Repentance,” opening paragraph. Text
Diego Fernandez-Duque, Barry Schwartz. Common Sense Beliefs about the Central Self, Moral Character, and the Brain. Frontiers in Psychology 6:2007 (2016), doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02007; copy PMC4709419, CC BY. Read: Studies 1 and 2 — method, results, discussion; general discussion; conclusions. Article
Emily K. Hong, Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut. How Does Nostalgia Conduce to Global Self-Continuity? The Roles of Identity Narrative, Associative Links, and Stability. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 48(5) (2022), doi:10.1177/01461672211024889; copy PMC9066684, CC BY 4.0. Read: abstract; introduction (definitions of nostalgia and of narrative as a basis of continuity); Studies 1–5 — method, results; general discussion; limitations. Article
Ying Yang, Liangxiangwan Zhang, Weiguo Qu, Wei Fan. The effect of future self-continuity on intertemporal decision making: a mediated moderating model. Frontiers in Psychology 15 (2024), doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1437065, CC BY. Read: Studies 1 and 2 — method, results, discussion; general discussion; limitations. Article
Hervé Platel, Marie-Loup Eustache, Renaud Coppalle, Armelle Viard, Francis Eustache, Mathilde Groussard, Béatrice Desgranges. Boosting Autobiographical Memory and the Sense of Identity of Alzheimer Patients Through Repeated Reminiscence Workshops? Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021), doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.636028, CC BY. Read: abstract; methods (participants, procedure, assessment of the sense of identity and of memories at the sessions); results (workshops, individual memory assessment, sense of identity); discussion of the main study. Article
Chiara Stramba-Badiale, Fabio Frisone, Diana Biondi, Giuseppe Riva. Autobiographical memory in Alzheimer’s disease: a systematic review. Frontiers in Neurology (2025), doi:10.3389/fneur.2025.1546984, CC BY. Read: methods (selection criteria, search results), results, discussion, limitations. Article
Peter Haehner, Amanda Jo Wright, Wiebke Bleidorn. A systematic review of volitional personality change research. Communications Psychology 2:115 (2024), doi:10.1038/s44271-024-00167-5; copy PMC11608366, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — paraphrase only, no quotations. Read: methods, results (including the meta-analysis of interventions), discussion, limitations. Article
NHS. Communicating with someone with dementia. Complete substantive page read, including response time, participation, respectful communication and the condition on touch; last stated review 13 February 2023, next due 13 February 2026, now past. Role: communication support, without diagnosis or family authority. Page
NHS. Sudden confusion (delirium). Complete substantive page read under AGE-027; its immediate-contact boundary is reused. Reviewed 28 May 2024, next due 28 May 2027. Role: urgency, without determining cause. Page

About the authors

Andrey Zarinsh is the author and founder of United Wisdom. He explores inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut is a co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside her research, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding work in real life between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.