Just looked at a blurb for your book.

You may not know that research on attentional differences between the right and left hemispheres has advanced massively since the pop literature of the 1970s.

Iain McGilchrist has been, for over 3 decades, studying the different ways of attending to the world correlated with the hemispheres.

What you're talking about - both in terms of consciousness and sentience - are left hemisphere functions, an abstracting process that actually came into prominence around 40,000 years ago (the initial emergence of homo sapiens 250K years ago most likely did not involve the same kind of abstraction)

This came more into prominence at the beginning of the Axial age, around 600 BC, in China, India and Greece in particular, but elsewhere around the world as well.

Jean Gebser refers to the form of consciousness predominant since the so-called 'Enlightenment" the 'Deficient form of the mental structure of consciousness," which indeed does relate to mental illness (which McGilchrist goes into in great and brilliant detail)

Gebser, Aurobindo and others have articulated the emergence of a new "'integral" structure of consciousness which is radically different from anything Harari ever dreamed of!