FIELD OF RESEARCH
What enables a human being to remain in touch with themselves as time changes them?
This question has run through Sauro Tronconi’s research for over forty years, connecting memory, consciousness, attention, automatic patterns, culture and technological change.
The starting point is not an opposition between reason and spirituality, tradition and science, or human beings and machines. It is the need to distinguish different languages and levels of explanation, to understand what each can actually tell us about experience.
Memory, time and identity
Memory is more than a storehouse of the past. It selects, connects and reworks experience, contributing to continuity of identity and the ability to recognise ourselves across time. A recollection does not provide a neutral recording: it is reconstructed in the present and helps shape how we encounter the future.
The research distinguishes possessing a biographical narrative from conscious continuity. We may remember precisely what happened without recognising the state from which we acted, the intentions that guided us or the consequences we continue to produce.
Vertical memory
In the essay Il Principio della Memoria, vertical memory names a philosophical and experiential model. To the question “what happened?” it adds others: “who was I as it happened? what did I perceive? what did I not want to see? what intention was at work? what consequences remained?”
It is not proposed as a new neuroscientific faculty. It describes an attempt to integrate the event, bodily and emotional state, intention, contradictions and consequences, so that the past does not remain merely a story told but becomes experience available to inform choice.
Individual memory and cultural memory
No identity takes shape alone. Language, myths, rituals, symbols, works, archives and institutions transmit ways of remembering and forgetting. Cultural memory makes a shared past available, but also selects what a society leaves at its margins.
Studying memory therefore means observing both the person and the symbolic environments in which they live. Continuity concerns not only how an individual remembers themselves, but also how a culture turns lived experience into shared meaning and responsibility towards the future.
Attention and automatic patterns
Much of life unfolds through reactions, habits and states that do not fully communicate with one another. Automatic patterns are not a mistake: they allow us to act without deliberating over every movement. The problem arises when they continue to govern us after the situation has changed.
Attention creates the interval in which the mechanism can become visible. Freedom does not mean always adopting the opposite behaviour, but not mistaking repetition for destiny.
Technology and the cognitive environment
Tools, writing, archives, platforms and intelligent systems extend different capacities. The question is not a categorical choice between delegating and not delegating. It is to understand when this extension complements human beings and when it reduces the exercise of memory, judgement and responsibility.
Digital environments do more than distribute information. They organise attention, anticipate preferences, suggest directions and intervene in decision-making. Artificial intelligence amplifies an existing economic and design structure; it is not described as an agent endowed with a malicious will.
The Research & AI — Human Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence research line examines memory, metacognition, bias, cognitive delegation and responsibility. It presents development matrices for intelligent systems as an exploratory working hypothesis.
Consciousness and freedom of choice
Freedom is not absolute independence from causes. It is the intermittent but real possibility that recognition, memory of consequences and more than one possible direction may emerge between stimulus and response.
This perspective shifts the question from “are we free or not?” to “under what conditions does the space expand in which we can see what conditions us and respond more responsibly?”
The human future
The horizon is not humanity against the machine. It is the development of human capacities in an environment populated by artificial cognitive systems. Some functions may beneficially be delegated; others will need to be exercised, reconsidered or protected so that they remain alive.
The future will also depend on the quality of the environments we build: which forms of attention they reward, which dependencies they make advantageous, and what memory of consequences they incorporate into individual and collective decisions.
Research predating the current debate on artificial intelligence
The question of the relationship between tools, information, automatic patterns and consciousness did not begin with the present media attention to artificial intelligence. In the early 2000s, Al di là del peccato di incoscienza already addressed the gap between technological development and the evolution of consciousness. Going backwards was considered impossible and senseless; the issue was the ability to receive information, process it and turn it into understanding.
In 2010, Sauro Tronconi co-authored a pilot study on self-awareness published in Psychological Reports and indexed in PubMed. In subsequent years, books, articles, lectures and seminars developed the themes of self-remembering, states, automatic patterns, memory and attention.
In 2026, Zombificazione digitale extended this research to environments designed to capture attention. Il Principio della Memoria explores the complementary aspect: how experience can become continuity, consciousness and choice.
The page on the Self Method documents its origins and development within Sauro Tronconi’s research journey.
Works within the research journey
Il Principio della Memoria. Tempo e nascita della coscienza
Examines how scattered experiences can become personal continuity.
Zombificazione digitale
Observes the environment that can fragment attention, memory and choice.
La specie inaffidabile turns the enquiry towards individual and collective responsibility and the ability to correct mistakes. These essays belong to a broader journey that also includes self-knowledge, inner life and fiction.
Each work retains its autonomy. The bibliography documents their development over time; the Research journey page introduces the author and the experiences and encounters that have nourished this research.
Fiction and the practice of presence
The research also takes shape in fiction, where situations and characters allow a question to be followed without exhausting it in a definition. Seminar work brings it into observation, practices of attention and exchange between people. Each form retains its own language and the context in which it arose.
How sources are handled
In Sauro Tronconi’s work, scientific data, philosophical interpretations, hypotheses, cultural traditions and personal experiences are not presented as though they had the same status.
- Scientific evidence: findings and methods supported by primary sources and relevant literature, without extending conclusions beyond what the data allow.
- Philosophical interpretation: a conceptual connection proposed by the author and identified as such.
- Research hypothesis: an exploratory idea open to testing, discussion or refutation.
- Cultural or contemplative tradition: a myth, doctrine, practice or symbol placed in its own context, not turned into scientific proof.
- Personal or seminar experience: a phenomenological observation that may guide questions but does not automatically become a general law.
This distinction does not impoverish dialogue between disciplines. It makes that dialogue possible and open to scrutiny.
Dialogue and collaborations
The research welcomes dialogue with publishers, newspapers, universities, festivals, foundations, institutions and research centres. The main areas for collaboration concern memory and identity, the cultivation of attention, the digital environment, artificial intelligence and cognitive delegation, culture and the human future.