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Understanding the Self Biologically

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BRAIN-MIND MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, NO. 1, WINTER 2013
Understanding the Self Biologically
Yi Zheng and Gonzalo Munevar
Abstract—In Total Recall the hero discovers that his good-
guy self is just implanted memories. His body used to be
occupied by another, vicious self, whose allies want back. This
fantasy gains some plausibility from the traditional conception
of the self as a collection of experiences kept in memory — a
unified conscious self that makes our experiences feel ours. Great
fiction, bad neuroscience. There is no central brain structure
that corresponds to that self, and some scientists have concluded
that the self is an illusion. The notion that the self tags our
experiences as ours seems to be wrong. And the idea that the
self is a collection of remembered experiences turns out to be
false. We propose instead a revolutionary biological conception
of the self: The brain has evolved to constitute a self that is
mostly unconscious and distributive, which does away with the
paradoxes, explains all the seemingly contradictory experimental
results, and opens up new avenues of research in neuroscience.
Index Terms—Self, evolution, neuroscience, distributive, brain-
imaging
In the last three decades neuroscience has undergone a
radical transformation, thanks in part to the availability of new
brain imaging technologies. Questions about the mind that
seemed to be the province of philosophy have now become
amenable to experimental research. Since understanding the
self would offer unquestionable value, it is not surprising that
the new science tried to discover the biological counterparts
to the insights gained after hundreds of years of introspection.
But when scientists attempted to put those insights to good
use, they turned up either paradoxes or contradictory results.
We could throw up our hands and declare that understanding
the self is beyond the reach of science [1]. In this paper,
however, we will suggest a more fruitful alternative: since
neuroscience deals with the brain, we should have a notion
of the self grounded in biology. If we do so, the paradoxes
will disappear and the experimental results will make sense.
To see the difficulties of the traditional conception of the
self, let us consider three of its most basic, and apparently
obvious, insights: (1) each of us thinks of himself as unified,
and thus we conclude the self is a centralized entity; (2) we
also think that the self is aware that our experiences are indeed
ours, and thus we presume that the self tags them as ours, that
it serves as a monitoring agent; (3) we intuit that each of us is
constituted by the collection of his experiences (this collection
is stored as what psychologists call “episodic memories”).
In connection with Insight (2), for example, developmental
psychologists have suggested that a childs self emerges as he
learns to distinguish his experiences from those of others. As
for Insight (3), it would seem that if we replaced a man’s
collection of episodic memories with a different collection,
we would turn him into a different person: we would give him
a different self. That is precisely the main plot device in the
movie Total Recall: the hero, a truly decent guy, discovers that
his episodic memories were implanted. He used to be a villain
until his episodic memories were replaced by the false ones.
1
And the villain’s allies now want to put his old evil self back
into his body by re-implanting the old episodic memories.
This traditional conception provides for good fiction. But it
leads to bad science. A problem with Insight (1) is that there
is no structure in the brain that corresponds to a centralized
entity. In brain imaging studies in which the investigators ask
the subjects to attribute personality traits (e.g. kindness) to
themselves or others, the main activation of the brain in self
attribution seems to take place in a region called the medial
prefrontal cortex [2]. But that same region no longer seems
so important when the task is to distinguish photos of oneself
as opposed to photos of others [3]. As the variety of kinds
of questions multiplies so does the variety of answers, and
thus one may wonder whether the neuroscience of the self is
a field in disarray, or even whether there is any such thing as
the “self.”
Moreover, the introspective philosophy tends to conflate the
self and the sense of self (“I think, therefore I am,” said
Descartes). Experience gives us direct access to the properties
of the self, presumably. To the famous New York University
neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas, this means that the sense of self
(and thus the self) is a form of internal perception [4]. But the
neuroscience of perception has shown that a perception is an
“illusion” (or construction) created by the brain. And given
that the brain exhibits no central or centralizing area, Llinas
concludes that the self is nothing but an illusion!
Whereas Insight (1) seems to lead to a paradox, the other
two are simply refuted by experimental research. Insight
(2) comes into question even at the level of introspective
experience. When immersed in an intense perceptual expe-
rience, such as listening to beautiful music, we simply have
the experience without any accompanying tags to the effect
that the experience is ours. Crick and Koch tried to rescue
the “monitoring” function of the self by suggesting that the
tagging may be done unconsciously, most likely by the frontal
areas of the brain [5]. Goldberg and his colleagues, however,
have shown that the activation of the frontal lobe actually
diminishes during the performance of demanding perceptual
tasks [6]. As Insight (3), which made Total Recall possible,
Stanley Klein has demonstrated that patients who are com-
pletely unable to form new episodic memories (because they
have no working hippocampus) may nevertheless gain a fair
understanding of their own personalities [7]. The self must be
constituted by something other than episodic memories! And
the villain, even with implanted new memories, would have
remained a villain.
From a biological perspective things look completely differ-
ent. In an evolutionary context, we realize that any brain worth
its salt has the function of analyzing external information
while taking into account information about the internal states
of the organism, in the context of its personal and genetic
2 BRAIN-MIND MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, NO. 1, WINTER 2013
Fig. 1. The anterior cingulate cortex is highly activated during the Self-Bill
Gates contrast.
history [8]. Performing these functions is what allows the
organism to interact more successfully with its physical and
social environments, while distinguishing itself from other
individuals. But these are the very characteristics that we
would demand from a self. Accepting something along these
lines as a biological conception of the self, we notice that the
experimental results are consistent with it. To begin with, we
should expect that there are many ways in which the brain
needs to distinguish the organism from others, i.e. trying to
tell the self apart will require a great many different kinds of
tasks carried out by a distributive system (which the brain is).
Brain imaging research thus yields exactly what we should
expect of a biological self. Next, as we know, most of the
brain’s functions are performed unconsciously; a conscious
experience, to paraphrase Crick, is the bottom line of many
unconscious operations [9]. So we should expect that the self
is mostly also unconscious. Our sense of self, then, is just
a perception of the self, not to be confused with the real
thing any more than a perception of an elephant should be
confused with an elephant. Llinas’s argument is unnecessary
under this biological conception. Nor are we unpleasantly
surprised to discover that a collection of episodic memories do
not constitute the self. None of these problems are problems
from a biological point of view.
Such a perspective also allows us to make new discoveries,
to pursue new lines of investigation, and to make interesting
new connections. We will provide several examples in what
follows. First, in our own recent fMRI study of self-attribution,
performed at Harper Hospital of Wayne State University,
we asked 15 subjects in the 3-Tesla scanner whether they
would attribute a series of personality and non-personality
traits to themselves, their best friends or a celebrity (Bill
Gates). As it turned out, in comparing Self vs. Bill Gates, the
area most activated was the anterior cingulate cortex (Figure
1), which was also the area most activated in distinguishing
Best Friend vs. Bill Gates (Figure 2), although the level of
activation is much greater in distinguishing the Self. This
result is in harmony with an evolutionary perspective about
social animals, for empathy and other mechanisms will give
us a certain degree of identification with those closest to
us, although not as large as the identification we would feel
towards ourselves. To make matters even more interesting,
the anterior cingulate cortex is anatomically diminished in
schizophrenics, who are notorious for failures to distinguish
Self from Other.
Another interesting result was that in distinguishing Self vs.
Best Friend we detected a highly activated Brodmann Area
31, which other researchers have found to be the area where
the brain objectifies its orientation by tying it to landmarks
and other features of the environment [10]. We also found a
connection with the motion reward system of the basal ganglia
(high activation of the dopamine producing substantia nigra)
which might be expected from the view that the brain was
evolved for action. A failure of this system causes Parkinson’s
Disease. And in future research we hope that we or others will
examine, for example, the extent to which schizophrenic brains
fail to tell the difference between self-motion and motion
generated by others.
As we have seen, using the traditional conception of the self
in neuroscience leads to paradox, confusion and refutation.
Using a biological conception leads to more consistent results
and opens up fruitful avenues of investigation.
Fig. 2. The anterior cingulate cortex is also activated during the Best
Friend-Bill Gates contrast, although not as much as during the Self-Bill Gates
contrast.
R EFERENCES
[1] S. B. Klein, The Self and Science. Is It Time for A New Approach to
the Study of Human Experience? Current Directions in Psychological
Science, 21:253, 2012.
[2] G. N. Macrae, T. F. Heatherton, and W .M. Kelley. A Self Less Ordinary:
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Gazzaniga, and C. N. Macrae. Mike or Me? Self-recognition in A Split-
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[4] R. Llinas. I of the Vortex, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001.
BRAIN-MIND MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, NO. 1, WINTER 2013 3

[5] F. Crick and C. Koch. A Framework for Consciousness. Nature Neuro-

science, 6(2): 119-126, 2003.
[6] I. I. Goldberg, M. Harel, and R. Malach. When the Brain Loses Its
Self: Prefrontal Inactivation During Sensorimotor Processing, Neuron,
50:329339,2006.
[7] S. Klein. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Knowing Ones Self, In M.
S. Gazzaniga. (ed.)The Cognitive Neurosciences III, MIT Press, Cam-
bridge, MA, pp. 1077-1089, 2004.
[8] G. Munevar. A Darwinian Account of Self and Free Will. In F. Weinert
and M. H. Brinkworth. (eds.) Evolution 2.0: Implications of Darwinism
Gonzalo Munevar received his Ph.D. in Philosophy
in Philosophy and the Social and Natural Sciences, Springer,Berlin, pp.
of Science from University of California, Berkeley,
43-63, 2011.
1975. He is with Psychology Program Lawrence
[9] F. Crick. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul,
Technological University, Southfield, USA. His re-
Scribners Sons, New York, pp. 265-268, 1994.
search interests include Theoretical and Experimen-
[10] O. Baumann and J. B. Mattingley. Medial Parietal Cortex Encodes
tal Neuroscience, Philosophy of Space Exploration,
Perceived Heading Direction in Humans, The Journal of Neuroscience,
and Evolution. He has published many books about
30(39):12897-12901, 2010.
science and a novel, The Master of Fate. The honors
he received include the Ethel Wattis Kimball Fel-
lowship, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford Uni-
versity, 1983-84, the Distinguished Research Award,
University of Nebraska at Omaha 1986, the Nebraska Foundation Profes-
Yi Zheng was Dr. Gonzalo’s research assistant sorship, 1986-89, Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities,
at Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, summer 1989, and the Black Heron Press
USA. She is now completing her psychology degree Award for Social Fiction 1999.
at Zhejiang Normal University in China. Her main
area of interest is cognitive neuroscience.

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