Where Does Your Sense of Self Come From? A Scientific Look | Anil Ananthaswamy | TED

About a decade ago,

I met someone who had experienced a few episodes of schizophrenia.

They had felt that their sense of self,

of what it feels like to be them,

changing somewhat.

The boundaries of their body began to feel a bit nebulous.

Even their psychological self felt a bit porous at times.

They were experiencing what could be called an altered sense of self.

Over the years, I met many such brave and insightful people

who shared what it's like to live with their altered selves.

And by "altered," I mean "different,"

not "deficient,"

while acknowledging that coping with altered selves

can be a struggle at times.

So speaking with them,

and with theologians, philosophers, neuroscientists,

I came to understand that this self that each one of us takes oneself to be

is not as real as it seems.

The self is a slippery subject.

We all intuitively know what it means.

It’s there when we wake up.

It disappears when we fall asleep.

It reappears in our dreams.

It's what makes us who we are.

It seems solid, unchanging, permanent.

And yet, we can examine aspects of the self

that seem real to us,

and ask, “Just how real are they?”

Take, for instance, the question "Who am I?"

The most likely answer you will get or give to such a question

will be in the form of a story.

We tell others -- and indeed, ourselves -- stories about who we are.

We take our stories to be sacrosanct.

We are our stories.

But a condition that most of us, sadly, will be familiar with --

Alzheimer's disease --

tells us something quite different.

Alzheimer's begins by affecting short-term memory.

Think about what that does to someone's story.

In order for our stories to form, to grow,

something that just happens to us has to first enter short-term memory,

and then, get incorporated

into what's called long-term episodic memory.

It has to become an episode in our narrative.

But what if the experience doesn't even enter short-term memory?

That's exactly what Alzheimer's does.

In the beginning,

Alzheimer's impairs the formation of short-term memory.

It impairs the growth of the narrative.

It's as if our stories begin stalling upon the onset of the disease.

Eventually, Alzheimer's eats away at all the long-term memories.

So if you were to meet someone with mid-stage Alzheimer's,

they will likely be able to tell you stories about who they are.

But if you know their real stories,

you'll be able to tell that they sometimes scramble up their narrative,

that they sometimes mix up the sequence of episodes from their lives.

It's as if they are recalling their own stories

in ways that are not quite accurate.

It's important, at this stage,

to realize that there is still a person experiencing that scrambled narrative.

Sadly, Alzheimer's goes on to destroy one's narrative,

and so much more.

And towards the end,

it's unclear whether there is still someone experiencing something,

because the person cannot communicate verbally anymore.

And yet,

Alzheimer's tells us that these stories that we take ourselves to be,

what philosophers call the “narrative self,”

these are spun by the brain and body.

They are constructions.

Sometimes, the constructions are disrupted, even destroyed.

And while that is horrific for the person experiencing it,

and for their caregivers,

it is nonetheless a window

onto the constructed nature of our narrative self.

And when the construction goes wrong,

we perceive our own stories in ways that are not quite real.

From the narrative self, let's talk about our body.

Let's take a very basic aspect of our bodily self.

This feeling we all have,

that we are owners of our body and body parts,

that our bodies and body parts belong to us.

It seems such a strange thing to think that it could even be otherwise.

If I were to ask you, "Does your hand belong to you?"

you're going to say, "Of course it does. What a foolish question."

But not everyone would agree.

Early on in my research,

a neuropsychologist alerted me to a condition called xenomelia,

or foreign limb syndrome.

You may have heard of something called phantom limb syndrome,

in which people who have had an amputation

feel the presence of that limb, sometimes.

Xenomelia is somewhat of an opposite condition,

where people feel like some part of their body --

usually the extremities, their hands or legs --

don't belong to them.

So this neuropsychologist talked of phantom limb syndrome

as animation without incarnation.

So the limb is gone, it's not incarnate anymore,

but it's animated in your mind.

And he talked of xenomelia as incarnation without animation.

So the limb is present, healthy even, incarnate,

and yet, in your own mind, it feels like it doesn't belong to you.

So in xenomelia,

the brain and bodily processes

that give rise to our sense of ownership of our body parts,

they're misfiring, so to speak,

and the consequences can be serious.

People with xenomelia will sometimes take extreme measures

to get rid of, to amputate their foreign-seeming body parts.

From the perspective of the self, though,

xenomelia is telling us something very profound.

It's telling us that something as basic

as the sense of ownership of our own body parts

is a construction.

And sometimes, the construction goes wrong,

and we perceive our own bodies in ways that are not quite real.

Let's take another aspect of our bodily self.

It's called the sense of agency.

So when I do something like pick up a cup,

I have this implicit feeling that I am the agent of that action,

that I have willed that action into existence.

That feeling is the sense of agency.

But someone with schizophrenia may not have that feeling, always.

Someone with schizophrenia

might do something and not feel like they are the agent of that action.

So schizophrenia tells us

that it is possible to be someone who does something

but doesn't have an accompanying sense of agency.

So just like the narrative self and the sense of ownership of body parts,

the sense of agency is also a construction,

and it, too, can fail.

So you can see where this is going.

Let me take one more example to drive home this point.

Let's talk of what it feels to be a body here and now.

Not the feeling of being a story,

but the feeling of being a body in the present moment.

Psychologists estimate

that about five percent of the general population

will, at some point in their lives, have an out-of-body experience.

Let's assume that all of us right now are having an in-body experience.

(Laughter)

But what that means is having this feeling of being in a body,

being anchored to a body,

occupying a certain volume of space

and looking at the world from behind our eyes.

But if you are having an out-of-body experience,

you could possibly be feeling that you're up near the ceiling,

looking down at your own body sitting in the chair below.

People do report such experiences,

and mild versions of this have been replicated in labs.

But if you think, like I do,

that out-of-body experiences are the outcome of brain processes

that are misfiring,

then it stands to reason that the experience of being in-body,

of being embodied,

is itself a construction,

and that, too, can come apart.

So what are these experiences of altered selves telling us?

They're telling us

that just about everything we take to be real

about ourselves --

"real" in the sense that we think we are always experiencing

undeniable truths about our bodies, our stories --

well, that's just not the case.

So when theologians and philosophers tell us that the self is an illusion,

this is partly what they mean.

You may have realized by now that there still remains the question

of who or what is doing the experiencing,

even in the case of altered selves.

This experiencing “I” in the question “Who am I?”

is at the heart of the debate about the self.

This experiencing “I” doesn’t go away

if one or a few aspects of the self are disrupted.

But what if all of the aspects of the self that comprise us

were to be disrupted?

Would the experiencing “I” disappear?

We don't have a satisfactory answer to that question, yet.

It’s possible that the experiencing “I” is also an illusion,

in the sense of being a construction,

a construction without a constructor.

That debate, however, is somewhat unresolved.

Despite such doubts, I, personally -- whatever I am --

think that the self has no reality outside of the brain and body.

I think that the experiencing “I” will not persist after the body is gone.

So what does one make of such knowledge?

Well, firstly, these ideas will feel liberating to some

and might sit heavily upon others.

Regardless, I think we can all attend to the stories that we think we are.

Our feelings and emotions are modulated by our stories,

and in turn, our feelings and emotions become part of our stories.

And our stories, our narratives, are not just cognitive --

they live in our bodies,

and our bodies structure and shape our stories.

So knowing all this,

recognizing the constructive nature of it all,

maybe we can hold on less tightly to our stories.

Maybe we can learn to let go.

But that's easier said than done,

because the thing that is doing the letting go

is also the thing that has to be let go of.

(Laughter)

Maybe we can just marvel at the efforts of people over millennia,

from the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree

to the modern philosopher and neuroscientist

who has asked themselves the question "Who am I?"

But most of all,

I think we owe a debt to those amongst us

who bravely bear witness to our altered selves --

whether we do so voluntarily,

like monks and nuns do when they meditate,

or whether it's brought upon us by biology and circumstance.

There is something remarkably robust

about the processes that give rise to the totality of our sense of self.

But there's something frighteningly fragile about them too.

They can crack.

And any one of us, at any time in our lives,

may have to confront such cracks.

And that knowledge, I believe, should make us empathetic

towards those of us dealing with altered selves.

But I also believe that altered selves

should not be seen as the outcome of deficits,

or as the outcome of a lack of attributes considered normal.

They are different ways of being,

and it's the willingness of some of us to confront the self's constructed nature

that is helping make sense of the self for all of us.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.