With the rise of functional brain imaging in the 1990s, neuroscientists began designing experiments that contrasted self-referential mental states with non-self states. In the scanner, people might be asked to judge whether adjectives applied well to themselves or others—questions such as, “Am I honest?” These studies repeatedly identified activity along the cortical midline from front to back. Because these regions were more active when people thought about themselves than when they performed externally focused tasks, some researchers proposed that they formed a neural core of the self.
First, the same regions are active during many cognitive tasks that are not necessarily about the self. Second, different kinds of “self” tasks activated overlapping but not identical patterns of brain regions within the network. These findings led many researchers to conclude that what was being localized was not the self, but processes related to self-reference: self-evaluation, autobiographical recall, perspective-taking, and narrative construction. The consensus is that the self has not been localized by these sorts of brain scanning studies.
Dennett was comfortable to consider the self to be useful fiction. “We are all virtuoso novelists,” he quipped. “We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one’s self.” His theory rejected the idea of a single, unified “theatre” in the brain where experiences are somehow presented to an inner observer – the self. Instead, Dennett proposed that what we call conscious experience of the self is actually the outcome of many parallel, distributed, and competing neural processes—multiple drafts”—none of which is intrinsically privileged as the final version.
These ideas have had great influence but also attracted fire. One important criticism of the view of the self as a fictional narrative and an emergent property of multiple, independent brain processes is that this does not explain why the self feels singular, not fragmented. As the NYU philosopher David Chalmers has argued, these models don’t explain the experience of being a unified self – the first-person subjective experience of being who we are. They deal with the “easy problem” of how cognitive functions operate in the brain, but not the “hard problem” of conscious experience. Why and how is any of this brain processing accompanied by subjective experience, such as what it feels like to see red, feel pain, or even be “oneself”? No amount of reductionist explanation, Chalmers argues, logically entails the existence of experience. You could, in principle, explain everything the brain does and still be left with this question about the self unanswered.
Michael, for example, is a patient who came to see me in my clinic because he was worried about his increasing difficulty in finding the right word in conversation. To begin with, he seemed to be highly articulate, and it was difficult to appreciate what he was concerned about. As we talked more though, it began to be evident that he didn’t understand the meaning of some words that he really should know. When we got onto the topic of sports, for example, he told me he used to play rugby, but he couldn’t understand what I meant when I asked him which position he used to play in the team.
What do stories such as Michael’s reveal about our selves? At one level, they demonstrate that the self can be altered. People behave differently if their semantics and understanding of concepts are eroded. Similarly, for individuals whose perception might be impaired, start to experience visual hallucinations, have difficulty recalling information, or become disinhibited in their behavior. All these types of dysfunction in a limited cognitive module can lead to profound changes in a person’s identity. They can also alter how they appear to others and have a huge impact on their social identity and how they fit in their social circle. Crucially, though, none of these people lose their entire sense of self through the loss of any one cognitive module. They still have a first-person perspective on the fact that they are a person with a sense of self.
And we don’t know whether philosophy, neuroscience, or both will be the discipline that helps us answer this question once and for all.
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