Who do you think you are? Why your sense of self is an illusion

Humans

Most of us are convinced that we're coherent individuals who are continuous in time. There's just one problem with this sense of self – it can’t exist

By Catherine de Lange

11 December 2019

Invisible reflection

LET’S be honest, it is what we think about the most: ourselves. What we want to eat or do, how we feel and whom we love. It is the essence of being.

This selfhood generally feels like a continuous “me” sitting somewhere in our heads: a me that is the same today as yesterday. “Most people feel that they are a coherent, integrated individual. They have free will, they are making their choices and they’re looking out through their eyes at the world around them,” says at the University of Bristol, UK, author of The Self Illusion.

And that is just what selfhood seems to be – an illusion. “You are actually a collection of conflicting messages and signals and thought processes,” says Hood. “And these are somehow brought together to experience as unified self.” Fine, so your self is just the “you” experiencing that, right? That becomes a Russian doll problem, says Hood. “There’s someone inside the head who’s having these experiences taking place inside their head and so on,” he says.

Neuroscience tells us that our subjective sense of self must be a distributed experience, involving various bits of the brain. Although experiments have taught us much about the brain areas involved in creating it, how exactly it is conjured up still eludes us.

We do know that a sophisticated sense of self and others only comes on us gradually. “Understanding that your thoughts are different from someone else’s and being able to reflect on your own thinking, that’s a higher order skill and it doesn’t emerge until you are 3 or 4,” says at Oregon State University. Even then, the brain areas involved in our experience of the self don’t fully mature until we become adults.

The continuity of our sense of self seems to have something to do with autobiographical memory. Very young children have little sense of self and also very limited autobiographical memory, while the experience of people with amnesia lays bare the role of memory in selfhood. “If we suffer amnesia, the self becomes frozen in time because it can’t form new memories,” says .

“Ironically, the self’s main advantage might not be for ourselves”

The unreliability of memory might help explain why even our illusory self isn’t very, well, self-aware. “Most of us have distorted self-images,” says Hood. “Most people think that people are more interested in us than they really are. Most people think they have an above average sense of humour, above average intelligence. We can’t all be above average.”

So why have a self at all? Because it is the interface between a complex outer world and a complex inner world, says Hood. Without it, we would be bombarded with conflicting information.

Ironically, the self’s main advantage might not be directly for ourselves. “Having your ‘self’ means you can behave as an individual and be part of a group,” says Conway. “But not just a mindless part of a group like an ant is, rather an individual who is in a group and can make their own individual contributions or walk away.” That ultimately allows us to form our complex human societies – making the self, if it is an illusion, an extremely useful one indeed.

Cutting-edge science throws up all sorts of controversial, nebulous and mind-bending concepts. Here’s your guide to how to think about some of the fiddliest of them:

Topics: Consciousness / Mind / Neuroscience / Psychology

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