The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

4. Privacy: Your qualia and mental life are your own, unobservable by others. You can empathize with your neighbor’s pain thanks to mirror neurons, but you can’t literally experience his pain. Yet, as we noted in Chapter 4, there are circumstances under which your brain generates touch sensations that precisely simulate the sensations being experienced by another individual. For instance, if I anesthetize your arm and have you watch me touch my own arm, you begin to feel my touch sensations. So much for the privacy of self.

5. Social embedding: The self maintains an arrogant sense of privacy and autonomy that belies how closely it is linked to other brains. Can it be coincidental that almost all of our emotions make sense only in relation to other people? Pride, arrogance, vanity, ambition, love, fear, mercy, jealousy, anger, hubris, humility, pity, even self-pity—none of these would have any meaning in a social vacuum. It makes perfect evolutionary sense to feel grudges, gratitude, or bonhomie, for example, toward other people based on your shared interpersonal histories. You take intent into account and attribute the faculty of choice, or free will, to fellow social beings and apply your rich palette of social emotions to their actions on that basis. But we are so deeply hardwired for imputing things such as motive, intent, and culpability to the actions of others that we often overextend our social emotions to nonhuman, nonsocial objects, or situations. You can get “angry” with the tree branch that fell on you, or even with the freeways or the stock market. It is worth noting that this is one of the major roots of religion: We tend to imbue nature itself with human-like motives, desire, and will, and hence we feel compelled to supplicate, pray to, bargain with, and look for reasons why God or karma or what have you has seen fit to punish us (individually or collectively) with natural disasters or other hardships. This persistent drive reveals just how much the self needs to feel part of a social environment that it can interact with and understand on its own terms.

6. Free will: You have a sense of being able to consciously choose between alternative courses of action with the full knowledge that you could have chosen otherwise. You normally don’t feel like an automaton or as though your mind is a passive thing buffeted by chance and circumstance—although in some “diseases” such as romantic love, you come close. We don’t yet know how free will works, but, as we shall see later in the chapter, at least two brain regions are crucially involved. The first is the supramarginal gyrus on the left side of the brain, which allows you to conjure up and envisage different potential courses of action. The second is the anterior cingulate, which makes you desire (and helps you choose) one action based on a hierarchy of values dictated by the prefrontal cortex.

7. Self-awareness: This aspect of the self is almost axiomatic; a self that is not aware of itself is an oxymoron. Later in this chapter I will argue that your self-awareness might partly depend on your brain using mirror neurons recursively, allowing you to see yourself from another person’s (allocentric) viewpoint. Hence the use of terms like “self-conscious” (embarrassed), when what you really mean is being conscious of someone else being conscious of you.

These seven aspects, like the legs of a table, work together to hold up what we call the self. However, as you can already see, they are vulnerable to illusions, delusions, and disorders. The table of the self can continue to stand without one of these legs, but if too many are lost then its stability becomes severely compromised.

How did these multiple attributes of self emerge in evolution? What parts of the brain are involved, and what are the underlying neural mechanisms? There are no simple answers to these questions—certainly nothing to rival the simplicity of a statement like “because that is how God made us”—but just because the answers are complicated and counterintuitive is no reason to give up the quest. By exploring several syndromes that straddle the boundary between psychiatry and neurology, I believe we can glean invaluable clues to how the self is created and sustained in normal brains. In this regard my approach is similar to that used elsewhere in the book: considering odd cases to illuminate normal function.⁵ I do not claim to have “solved” the problem of self (I wish!), but I believe these cases provide very promising ways it can be approached. Overall, I think this is not a bad start for tackling a problem that is not even considered legitimate by many scientists.