The Return

A Different Perspective on Alzheimer’s Disease

Mart Wijn — April 2026

Imagine you live in a house. A large, busy house with a voice speaking in every room. One room tells you who you are, another warns you about what might go wrong, a third repeats what happened yesterday, and a fourth worries about tomorrow. The house is never quiet. You have lived in it for so long that you no longer recognize the voices as voices. You think that is simply how the house sounds. You think silence means something is wrong.

But beneath that house, in the foundation, there is a room that was always there. A room without voices, without commentary, a room of light, warmth and stillness. You were there first, long before the other rooms were built. It was your first home, but you have forgotten it, but it is still there.

Alzheimer’s disease takes the house apart, room by room, the voices fall silent, one by one. First the complex ones, planning, analyzing, abstract reasoning. Then the everyday ones, names, faces, words, and finally the simplest ones, how to walk, eat or even how to swallow.

Everyone watching sees destruction. A house collapsing. A person disappearing.

But what if that is not the whole story?

What if the person does not disappear, but returns?

Science calls it retrogenesis — the process by which Alzheimer’s disease reverses human development in reverse order. The skills that were learned last disappear first. The brain regions that matured last are affected first. The pattern is so precise that researchers can map the stages of Alzheimer’s one-to-one onto the developmental phases of a child.

What does that mean? It means that at the end of that process, when all the later-built rooms have fallen away, the very first room remains. The room of the foundation. The room where you were before you had a name, before you had a story, before you knew you were an “I.”

The consciousness of a newborn.

Not empty. Not nothing. But full — in a way we have forgotten. A baby experiences the world with an intensity that most adults never reach again. Every touch is an event, every sound is new., every nearness is everything. Without judgement, without comparison, without fear of tomorrow, just pure, unmediated experience.

That is natural human consciousness. It was there before language came. Before the story came. Before the left hemisphere took control and built a construction we came to call “the self.”

There is something science has discovered but cannot properly explain.

Alzheimer’s patients are often happier than expected. Family members report that their loved ones in mild to moderate stages display more positive emotions than before. Researchers found that patients experience elevated levels of joy that persist long after the memory of what caused that joy has completely vanished. The less they remembered, the longer the feeling of happiness remained.

Science calls this a paradox.

It is not a paradox. It is exactly what you would expect if you understand what is truly happening.

The system that produces unrest falls away. The inner critic goes silent. The comparison with others stops. The fear of the future disappears, because the system that simulated the future is no longer running. The regret about the past dissolves, because the system that endlessly replayed the past has been switched off.

What remains is not nothing. What remains is what was always there, beneath all the layers of commentary and construction: a quiet, fundamental state of presence. Not euphoric, not dramatic, but simply, being there. Feeling, being present in the moment without anything or anyone disturbing that moment with a story about it.

Happiness not as achievement. Happiness as what remains when you stop blocking it.

This changes everything about how we can look at dementia.

The family sitting at the bedside saying: “He doesn’t recognise me anymore” is probably wrong. The recognition through names and faces, through the story of who this person is in your life, that may be gone, but that was the system of the left hemisphere, of language and category.

But there is another recognition, older, deeper, such as recognition through warmth, scent and the timbre of a voice and even the energy of one’s presence. The way a baby recognizes its mother long before it knows her name. This does not work through words, but through the body, through feeling, through something that needs no name.

The Alzheimer’s patient who no longer responds to your name may still respond to your hand, to your voice, or to the simple fact that you are there. Not because there is some leftover cognition that happens to still work, but because the system through which this is perceived, the right-hemispheric, sensory, direct consciousness, is the oldest system., the foundational system, thus the first that was there and the last to go.

What would change if we understood this?

We would stop trying to pull the patient back into our world, the world of words, names, dates and logic, but instead step into their world, go to them, to their world of touch, music, presence, rhythm, warmth.

We would not see incontinence as humiliation but as a logical consequence of the return to an earlier developmental level, back to where life once began, and calmly adapt care accordingly, as we do with a baby, without shame.

We would adapt nutrition to the level where the patient is, not wait for a crisis, but proactively transition to softer, liquid food when swallowing becomes more difficult, essentially the way you gradually introduce a child to solid food, but in reverse order.

We would use music not as entertainment but as communication. Music is processed by areas deep in the brain that Alzheimer’s affects last. A patient who no longer speaks a single word can sometimes still sing along to a song from their youth. That is not a leftover of memory, but proof that someone is still home — just in a different room.

We would see presence not as powerless watching but as the most powerful intervention there is. A calm, warm, unhurried presence is exactly what right-hemispheric consciousness needs. It is the same presence a baby needs — no words or explanations, just being there, tangibly, reliably and warmly.

And perhaps most important of all: we could take much of the sharpness away from the fear of dementia.

Not by denying that it is a serious disease. Not by trivializing the devastation it causes in lives and families. But by recognizing that the story does not end in nothing. That beneath the loss there is something that is not lost. That the person you love does not disappear into a void, but returns to something that was always there, something older than language, older than the story, older than the self we so desperately try to hold on to.

Natural human consciousness.

Quiet – present – whole – in peace!

This perspective is not intended as a replacement for medical research or professional care. It is meant as a complement — a different lens through which we can look at what happens when Alzheimer’s disease changes someone’s life. A lens that does not only see loss, but also return. Not only deterioration, but also revelation.

Because perhaps the deepest thing Alzheimer’s teaches us is not something about disease. Perhaps it is something about consciousness itself: that it was there before we were, and that it will still be there when everything we added to it has fallen away.