Today, I came across a note on Substack by Karly V Studio that stopped me mid-scroll.

It was a single sentence: The more I work with AI, the less interested I am in whether it’s conscious and the more interested I am in what happens to human consciousness around it. 

That was it. No elaboration. Just the sentence sitting there. I read it three times, put my phone down, and spent the next hour thinking. This piece is the result.

There was a period when the question of AI consciousness felt genuinely live to me.

I have a background in psychology, I’ve spent years thinking about cognition and inner experience, and the question — does anything like experience accompany what these systems do? — seemed like one of the most interesting open problems of our moment.

I read the papers. I followed the debates. I found myself, occasionally, genuinely unsure.

At some point, without quite deciding to, I stopped. Not because the question got answered — it didn’t, and it may not for a very long time. But because a different question had started to feel more urgent, more observable, more real in my day-to-day life. Less philosophical, more immediate. The question I couldn’t stop turning over wasn’t about what’s happening inside AI. It was about what’s happening inside us when we’re around it constantly.

The question that displaced the other one

What happens to human consciousness when it operates alongside AI — not in the speculative sense, not the sci-fi sense, but in the specific, textured, daily sense? What happens to attention? What happens to the capacity to sit with uncertainty long enough to let it resolve into something? What happens to the experience of thinking something through, fully, from start to finish, when you know that a machine can generate fifty variations of your half-formed idea in the time it takes you to finish a sentence?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. I notice things now that I didn’t notice three years ago. A faint impatience when my own thinking feels slow. A slight deflation when I’ve worked something out and find that the AI had already gone there. A recalibration — gradual, unannounced — in what I expect thinking to feel like, and how long it should take.

Nicholas Carr documented something adjacent to this in The Shallows, his examination of how internet use rewires the neural pathways involved in reading and sustained attention. His argument, drawing on neuroscience and media theory, was that the medium isn’t just a vessel for content — it actively reshapes how the brain processes information. We adapted to search engines. We adapted to hyperlinks. The adaptation happened quietly, at the level of habit and expectation, and most of us noticed the change only in retrospect, if at all. AI is a different order of tool, but the principle holds — and may hold more sharply.

Cognitive offloading, turbocharged

There’s a well-established phenomenon in cognitive science called cognitive offloading — the tendency to stop retaining information you know you can retrieve later. We’ve done this with phone numbers for twenty years. We do it with dates, addresses, facts that used to live in memory and now live in a search bar. The research on this has been building for years, examining how external memory storage affects internal cognition and what we lose (and gain) when we outsource recall to devices.

What AI introduces is something more radical than retrieval offloading. It’s what I’d call reasoning offloading. You can now hand off not just “what is the capital of Portugal” but “work through the implications of this argument for me” or “tell me what I’m probably missing here.”

The cognitive steps between question and answer — the searching, the synthesizing, the holding of multiple possibilities in tension — can be skipped. The result arrives. The journey doesn’t happen.

I don’t think this is simply bad. There are genuinely liberating things about having a capable thinking partner available at all times. But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed a change in the texture of my own reasoning on the days I lean into AI heavily versus the days I work without it. There’s something different about the feel of an idea you arrived at slowly, on your own, compared to one you arrived at quickly, with assistance. I can’t prove that difference matters. But I notice it, and I think the noticing is worth something.

AI as an unexpected mirror

Here is the thing that has surprised me most, working with these tools as extensively as I do: being around AI has made me more aware of my own cognition, not less. The consciousness debate about AI centers almost entirely on whether the machine has inner experience. But there’s an underexplored symmetry at play. Being around something that processes, generates, retrieves, and responds at speed — without (apparently) any of the friction of genuine uncertainty, any of the experience of reaching for a word and not quite finding it — throws your own processing into relief.

I have started to notice the seams in my own cognition in ways I didn’t before. The moments where I’m genuinely generating something versus where I’m retrieving a cached response I’ve given a hundred times. The difference between thinking through a problem and pattern-matching to a solution I already hold. I had, before this, a vague sense that these were different activities. Working with AI has made the distinction feel specific and detectable. The tool, unexpectedly, became a mirror.

The observer the tool created

There’s something else specific that I’ve noticed, and it’s difficult to articulate without sounding either precious or alarmed, when really it’s neither. It’s more like: a thing worth paying attention to.

When you use AI for thinking tasks regularly, you start to notice the moment just before you think — the moment when you’re about to engage with a problem — and you catch yourself reaching for the AI instead. That pause, that noticing, is a form of metacognitive awareness that many people didn’t have access to before. The friction created the observer.

Metacognition — thinking about thinking — has a substantial research base linking it to better learning outcomes, improved self-regulation, and stronger decision-making, particularly when explicitly developed. What’s interesting about AI as a metacognitive prompt is that it’s not deliberate at all. It’s incidental. You reach for the tool. You notice yourself reaching. You get a brief, clear view of what you were about to do and why. That view is new. It wasn’t forced by a therapist or a mindfulness practice. It was forced by the availability of an alternative.

I don’t want to romanticize this. The pause doesn’t always lead anywhere useful. Plenty of times I notice it, ignore it, and hand the task over anyway — because that’s the right call, because the AI will do it better, because I have seventeen other things competing for the same attention. But sometimes the pause leads to a realization that I actually want to think this one through myself. That I’d lose something by not doing so. That the thinking is the point, not just the output.

What I’m watching

I’m not worried, exactly. I find all of this more interesting than alarming. The relationship between humans and cognitive tools has always been generative and strange — writing changed memory, printing changed authority, the internet changed attention, and we’re still sorting out what those changes mean. AI is the next chapter of that story, not a rupture from it.

But I’d rather pay attention to it than not. Because if the tool is changing the nature of thinking — changing what it feels like to have an idea, what it means to understand something, what we expect from our own minds — and we’re not watching that happen, we’ll notice the change only after it’s already settled in. Only after the new baseline has become invisible, the way all baselines eventually do.

The question of whether AI is conscious is still genuinely open. Smart people are still working on it, and I don’t dismiss it. But it has, for me, become the less pressing question. The pressing one is what’s happening in here — in the human mind that now has, available to it at all times, something that thinks alongside it, faster and without fatigue. What that does to attention, to patience, to the felt sense of cognition. What it makes visible that was always there. What it quietly changes that we won’t see clearly for years.

I’d rather be watching now.

And I’m grateful to the author of the Subtstack note for putting it into one sentence so cleanly that I had no choice but to think it through.

The first sign was never a thought.

It was visual. Something in the way the room looked. The walls would seem slightly farther away than they had been a moment before. Colours stayed, shapes stayed, the furniture stayed in exactly the right places — and yet something about the scene lost a quality I can only describe as immediacy. The world was still there. It just stopped feeling available.

This would happen before I felt afraid. Before I could name what was coming. Before any thought had formed that I could call anxious. Something changed in the way I was receiving the world through my eyes, and only later — sometimes much later — would the rest of the experience catch up.

I spent years not knowing what to call this.

I tried “dizzy,” which wasn’t right. I tried “tired,” which was too soft. I tried “dissociating,” which felt too clinical for something that happened in quiet moments, not only in crises. What I was looking for was a word for the way the world could go slightly flat. Not dark. Not frightening in any obvious way. Just — less textured. Less arrived. As if someone had turned the resolution of reality down just slightly, and I was the only one in the room who noticed.

The world went flat before I had words for it

What I was experiencing had a name. Derealization — the sense that the external world has become unreal, distant, or visually altered — is a well-documented symptom that occurs frequently in anxiety and panic, and in the broader condition known as depersonalization-derealization disorder. It affects a surprising number of people, though most, like me, spend a long time describing it badly before they discover it has a name at all.

What I did not expect, once I found the name, was to realize how early in the anxiety sequence it was arriving for me.

Most descriptions of anxiety lead with thought. The worry, the spiral, the catastrophizing. The racing mind. And for many people that may be accurate — the cognitive element comes first, and the body follows. But for me, the sequence ran differently. The visual alteration came before the worry. My eyes created distance before my mind could explain why. By the time I was consciously afraid, I had already been looking at the world through a kind of filter for several minutes. Sometimes longer.

The world went flat before I had words for what was happening.

Once I recognized this, I started paying attention to it differently. Not as a malfunction, but as a signal. Something my system was doing before it had time to speak.

Before anxiety had language, it had a way of altering sight

The neuroscience here is not fully settled, but the broad shape of it makes sense.

The brain does not passively receive visual information and then decide what it means. It actively constructs perception, using prior experience, expectation, and internal state to shape what we experience as seeing. When the nervous system is in a state of hyperarousal — even before that state is consciously registered — the way the brain builds the visual world can shift. Attention narrows. Certain details flatten. The sense of depth and richness that makes the world feel real can diminish, because the system is already doing something else with its resources.

The amygdala, which processes emotional and threat-relevant stimuli, is thought to receive threat-relevant signals very rapidly — in some models, before the slower analytical pathways that give us conscious perception have fully resolved what we’re seeing. This means the body’s threat response can activate before the thinking mind has noticed anything. The alarm goes off, the nervous system reorganizes, and the first sign you have — if you are paying attention to your body rather than your thoughts — might be something as subtle as the way the room looks.

That was my experience. I didn’t first think anxiety. I saw it.

The first thing anxiety stole, reliably, was the texture of the world.

Learning to read the signal

For years, the visual shift frightened me in its own right. The unreality was unsettling before any worry arrived to explain it. There were moments when I genuinely questioned whether I was losing something — my grip on reality, my trust in my own perception, something I couldn’t name. The derealization felt like a symptom without a cause, which is one of the lonelier things you can experience.

It is also disorienting in a specific way: when perception itself becomes the thing you can’t trust, you lose the ground you’d normally stand on to figure out what is wrong. You can’t think your way out of a problem that is currently happening in your thinking. You can’t look clearly at something when it is your looking that has shifted.

What changed was noticing the pattern.

Not during the episode, but afterward. Tracing the sequence: where had I been, what had I been carrying before I noticed the flatness, what came before the flatness itself. And what I found, slowly, was that the visual shift was not random. It was a leading indicator. Something had already been building in my nervous system — a stress response, a low-grade overwhelm I hadn’t consciously registered — and my eyes were the first thing that showed it. Before my thoughts caught up. Before my chest tightened. Before I would have said, if anyone had asked, that anything was wrong.

My eyes were filtering the world before I knew I needed a filter.

Maybe it was never malfunction

I am careful about what I claim here. I am not saying anxiety lives in the eyes, or that this is how it works for everyone. What I am saying is something smaller and, to me, more useful: for some people, the first felt experience of anxiety may be visual. Perceptual. Something that shows up in how the world looks before it shows up in what the mind thinks.

And if that is true — even sometimes, even for some people — then it changes where you learn to look for the early signs.

I used to search for the anxious thought. The belief I could challenge, the worry I could reframe, the cognitive distortion I could name and dispute. These have their place. But I kept arriving at them too late, after the nervous system had already been organizing itself around something I hadn’t consciously noticed. I was looking for the fire after the smoke had already been there for a while.

Now I know to check in with what I’m seeing. Whether the room feels arrived. Whether the world has its texture. Whether reality is still emotionally available, or whether it has quietly started to step back — a little flatter, a little more distant, a little less like itself — without explanation.

Those were never signs that something was wrong with my eyes.

They were signs that something in me was trying to protect itself before I understood what from. The nervous system, doing what nervous systems do — adjusting the aperture, reducing the input, creating a small buffer between me and a world it had decided, for some reason, was temporarily too much.

That is not a disorder. That is a system trying to survive.

It just took me a long time to recognize the signal for what it was, instead of fearing it as one more thing that was wrong.