My wife's grandmother has dementia and it's honestly crossed my mind before, in thinking about the relationship between behavior and whatever is memory, along with whatever the notion of the Self is and what that means Identity actually is. Not to mention the sort of "parallels" in thinking about this in terms of what immortality does to Nonmen in Bakker-verse.
In my typical way, I put together all sorts of loose associations here, but it does have me think about a sort of idea like Sartre's notion of "radical freedom," Rosenberg's (and other's) notion that behavior (and thought itself) is a form of conditioning, and then what memory is really doing in all that.
Makes me wonder if the Self, if what we consider Identity, is not just the conditioning effect of memory or one based on memory. That then, our "radical freedom" is really neither radical, nor free, but rather is the conditioned response to external stimuli given an internal state. But, then to come back around, I do think we are capable of doing things to which we are not conditioned, specifically because we are not conditioned to them. There we return back to a sort of notion of "radical freedom" but in the form of a sort of determinate negation. That is, we consider the conditioned response, then condition the opposite, the unconditioned response and perform it. In this way, we could think of the Identity as the "collection" of normative conditioned responses. But, as humans, we are capable of performing the "deliberate" reversal, so the speak, and act directly contrary, so in a manner, we can "recondition" on the fly. Memory is the functional "log" of this conditioning, so, if one loses the accounting of it, one enters the place, possibly, nearest to Sartre's actual "radical freedom." Except, not exactly, because as dementia patients show, it does not eradicate all memory. They can still walk, talk, and so on, for the most part. So, in that way, it does not expunge all conditioning, it somehow seems to suppress some forms of it....
I think now I am rambling quite a bit, as I am sure vastly smarter people have considered this and it's likely nonsense.