Cognitive Drift: Definition and Concept Paper

This paper defines Cognitive Drift as the condition in which human cognition remains active, adaptive, and internally coherent while becoming progressively less grounded in external reality through increasing reliance on compressed representations, mediated inputs, and recursive internal models. Cognitive Drift is not synonymous with irrationality, bias, misinformation, or mental illness. A person can reason coherently from inputs and feedback environments that have themselves drifted. As representations increasingly substitute for direct experience and validation shifts toward social, algorithmic, or symbolic signals, thought can become more self-referential even while each individual step appears reasonable. Within the Reality Drift framework, Cognitive Drift is the internal cognitive counterpart to system-level drift. It describes how coherence can persist or even increase while the stabilizing relationship between thought and external reality gradually weakens.