Here's a simple question: Who are you?
Erm.
I'm Georgia. Bill.
Okay, but those are just words.
Who are you? Where does your sense of self come from?
I guess my brain.
I see through my eyes. So I think I'm in my head.
Where inside your brain do you think is you?
Christ alive, Max.
Where?
We all seem to know who we are on the outside.
Like a large beige jellyfish, but a lot cleverer than a jellyfish.
But it's often difficult to tell who we are on the inside.
If you were to ask me, I might say:
I am someone who occupies my physical body, a consistent inner me that began
with my birth and will end with my death.
That's me.
But what if I'm wrong? What if you're an entirely different person from one
moment to the next?
What if your brain could be severed in half so that there were two
consciousnesses occupying your mind?
What if you are simply an illusion?
That would be unpleasant.
It would, wouldn't it?
Now we know that our personalities change over time, so perhaps it's our
memories that give us a coherent sense of self.
After all, even when we change, we remember who we were previously.
But research shows that our memories aren't fixed.
They're constantly imagined, altered and distorted in our minds.
When we remember ourselves in the past, we're concocting a story that often
isn't true. So if we want to locate the self inside of us, we have to look
deeper than our fluctuating personalities or shifting memories.
We want to find something more fundamental.
That consistent call that moves through moments and years.
So where exactly inside of you is you?
Now, most people probably feel like they exist somewhere behind their eyes in
this region of space, and this makes sense.
Conscious experience almost feels like being a little person within the person,
the operator of the flesh machine, watching your thoughts go by and
controlling your limbs.
But where within our brains can we find that little person?
Where is the physical root of our consciousness?
Well, amazingly, we don't really know for sure.
Some of science's most popular theories, integrated information theory and global
workspace theory, propose that our conscious experience arises from
different parts of the brain working together.
To operate effectively, the brain needs to unify many different unconscious
sections of itself, from your memory to your vision to your emotional responses,
and the combination of this information creates consciousness, an experiencing I
. In which case...
I am the accidental byproduct of various parts of my brain processing a huge
amount of information.
But there's a problem here.
You see consciousness and awareness of yourself, and your environment is sort
of like a gradient.
You can be a little bit conscious or a lot conscious.
Other mammals, birds, molluscs and even the occasional little ant guy sit
somewhere on this spectrum.
But there's an important thing that seems to separate us from most of the
animal kingdom. We humans are not just aware of ourselves and our environment.
We're also aware of our own consciousness whilst ants aren't,
hopefully.
So perhaps we're looking in the wrong place.
Consciousness might be spread out across the brain, but could we perhaps
locate this rarer phenomenon?
Where in the pink fleshy muck we call our minds, can we find self-awareness?
Well, a lot of scientists have cast their eyes towards the very boringly
named medial prefrontal cortex, which from here on out I'm going to call the
MPFC. In 2021, scientists took a bunch of people and asked them to use
adjectives, which are words like groovy and lame to describe themselves.
But you see, some of this particular bunch had suffered damage to their
MPFCs, and these people, whilst entirely conscious and functional, had
little or no ability to ascribe traits to themselves.
They didn't really know who they were.
It seemed then that the MPFC was involved heavily in our sense of self.
This experiment shone some light on a tiny part of your brain that could be
responsible for creating your sense of me.
But it also raised more interesting questions, with the people with damaged
MPFCs lacking a consistent self.
Were they existing without that inner core that moves from one moment to the
next and more horrifyingly, what if the
self, manufactured in the MPFC, is just a trick, an illusion of unity and
identity? What if brain injury or no brain injury?
There really is no you.
Well, another more disturbing theory has an answer to those questions, and it's
about those big monkeys that aren't actually monkeys.
According to the social brain hypothesis, the size and complexity of
our brains is basically the result of hanging out with other apes.
As our primate ancestors began to live in larger groups, it became necessary to
understand the minds of others.
If you wanted to cooperate, have sex, or just generally not be bashed to death
with a stick or fist, you needed a sense of how others were thinking.
So primate brains needed to evolve from being things that experience thoughts
and sensations to the observer of those thoughts and sensations.
The I needed a Me.
All right, that's enough.
But here's the horrible bit.
According to neuroscientist Michael Graziano, this me is an illusion.
Primate brains simply began to run a simulation of an observer, creating the
model of a mind so they could understand other minds.
In this way, self-awareness isn't a higher form of consciousness.
It's just another trick of your own machine brain drawing its own ridiculous
self caricature.
This sense of self, evolved over millennia, is just an illusion.
There is no unified you.
When you have that sense of self, you're just becoming conscious of a
simulation. Confused yet?
I am a constant state of simulation produced and ran by my evolutionary
brain as a means of understanding of a primate brains so I can have sex and
stay alive better.
Okay, maybe it's time to play a little game.
Consider this thought experiment: right now you've got a few thoughts floating
around your head, but you also assume that there's a thinker having them.
You exist above your thoughts, almost like a third party considering them and
making decisions from above.
But if the self is illusory, you are just your thoughts.
Now, close your eyes and focus very hard on the thinker inside your head.
The person that's having these thoughts.
Now keep focusing.
You might find that you can't really locate them anywhere.
All that's left is well, thoughts.
And this is what many scientists and philosophers mean when they say the self
is an illusion, they mean you are only your thoughts.
There is no thinker having them.
In which case is there really a you at all?
Now, no one is more convinced of his own non-existence than psychologist Bruce
Hood. So I travelled to Bristol to see if this charming man could dissolve me
into a sad little puddle.
So, Bruce, this is a confusing situation because I'm sitting here across from
you, but on some fundamental level, I don't exist.
Physically, you exist but what you think you are is not what it really is.
So that's why we call it an illusion, because illusions don't mean you don't
have an experience. It's just not what it really is.
Most people, when they think about themselves, have this experience or this
very powerful phenomena that they exist inside their heads, sort of looking out
across through their eyes, controlling their hands and their limbs like a
puppet master. But in fact, there is no solitary unitary little self inside your
head. That's what we call the homunculus, and for reasons of logic,
there couldn't be a single homunculus inside your head.
Because the question then is, well, who's inside their head and their head
and so on. So, it becomes like the Russian doll problem.
I think the majority of mental processes are basically unconscious.
You can bring them into consciousness or they can emerge into your
consciousness if they have a priority.
But most of the time you're not aware of all the various processes that are
operating in the background.
It's only when we draw our attention towards them that they become mindful of
it. So we're not always clear of the decisions we're making or what's
influencing those decisions.
Yet we have that profound experience that we are making the choices when in
fact they could be rather unconscious.
So sure, the self isn't real, your sensation of consistency, the you, you
feel is a big old lie courtesy of your developing animal brain.
But here's a much stranger thought.
For this entire video, we've been talking as if you have one conscious
experiencing self inside of you.
But what if right at this moment there's more than one you in your head?
Let's take a quick trip back to the 1940s, when an American doctor came up
with a pretty out-there idea:
Treating epilepsy by removing the connection between patients left and
right brains. Over the decades to come, scientists noticed that this procedure
created some very strange side effects for many patients.
Their two hemispheres suddenly seemed to have their own individual perspective
and impulses. These people weren't necessarily one person anymore.
This famous patient, known as Joe, was shown a variety of words to the right
field of his vision and could easily read them.
Gun.
But when shown a word like 'phone' on the left side of his vision, which is
confusingly the field processed by the right hemisphere, he was unable to
repeat what it was.
Didn't see it.
This is because his left hemisphere, dominant in verbal processing, wasn't
aware of the image. However, shockingly, Joe could draw a telephone
with his left hand controlled by his right hemisphere, but he was unable to
vocalize what the drawing was.
I don't know what it is, I can't tell.
It's not very good, whatever it is.
Other patients could even seem to argue with themselves.
In fact, one infamous patient apparently tried to hug his wife with one arm
whilst attempting to attack her with the other.
So who was the person in question, the hugger or the attacker?
Conclusions from split-brain experiments vary massively.
To some scientists, they're evidence that it's possible to harbour two
consciousnesses simultaneously and independently in one brain.
Two experiencing minds in one body.
Other scientists disagree, claiming that these are just strange physical side
effects. There remains only one single conscious agent.
Michael Gazzaniga, the pioneer of split-brain research, came to a pretty
amazing conclusion.
He said the idea of dual consciousness is actually reductive because there are
hundreds or potentially thousands of processing systems all active at once in
the brain.
Which raises the rather unsettling question:
What if there are other parts of your brain experiencing and being right now
that the you hearing these words is unaware of?
I am one of many experiencing modules in my complex and frightening brain.
There are others too, but they're not talking to you right now, and I don't
know why.
Perhaps our sense of self is just a simulation.
Perhaps we have many selves that give a false impression of unity.
Perhaps you are a machine mind that just occasionally notices itself.
Either way, these aren't the most pleasing things in the world to hear,
are they? So can we perhaps find a modicum of hope in not being completely
real?
Say some problem you're currently considering.
Maybe it's financial, maybe it's a relationship, and say to yourself, I am
worried about whatever your problem is because it makes me upset.
If you then reflect upon your feelings, you're probably going to feel a bit
upset. But if you immediately change that from being the first-person
perspective of I and talk about yourself in the third person.
So, Bruce is worried about this interview because he thinks he's making
a fool of himself, then that becomes less stressful.
Somehow, switching from this egocentric self-perspective into one which is more
from someone else's perspective, seems to reduce the emotional impact of it, as
it were. So that's the sense of self changing.
Funnily enough, neuroscientific research around the illusory self seems to have
found an unlikely ally: Buddhist philosophy.
Within the spirituality of Buddhism, the experience of a consistent self is
illusory. Instead, we are a constantly changing stream of consciousness, and
this is why meditation, brief bouts of thoughtlessness, can be used as a tool
to disassociate from your manufactured identity and live a more peaceful life.
If you deny the existence of the self as Buddhism teaches us, then in many ways
it removes a lot of that effort to try and kind of satisfy something which
doesn't really exist.
And researchers at UCL have used psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient
in magic mushrooms, to treat depression using a similar method.
In trials, the drug was used to deliberately dissipate people's sense of
self, a form of ego dissolution that Buddhist scholars also refer to as the
great death. This allowed participants to dissolve and rebuild parts of their
self-image and profoundly reduce their depressive symptoms.
It's not particularly nice on the surface, is it?
Humouring the idea that you don't exist in any fundamental or fixed way?
Your sensation of moving coherently from one moment to the next is an illusion
born retrospectively out of your weird little brain.
But if you'll allow me this saccharin platitude, perhaps indulging in the
illusory self can demonstrate our incredible capacity for change, our
ability to become happier or more empathetic, and to move beyond our
subjective experience of the world and ourselves.
So the next time someone asks you:
Who are you? Think hard.
Because maybe the answer is:
I am an illusion of consistency meshed together in a barely comprehensible way.
For all intents and purposes, I, as I know myself, don't really exist.
And that's okay, I think.