The illusion of the self

Lecture by Francisco J. Rubia at the Royal Academy of Medicine (Madrid) on May 7th, 2013.

We are so familiar and satisfied with the experience of our self that that wondering if that self really exists seems to be the question of a moron. Yet modern neuroscience arises precisely this issue, namely that the self, as said by Hindu philosophy over three thousand years, is maya, the Sanskrit word which means deception, illusion and what is not. Vedic philosophy coined the word Ahamkaara, a word compound by Aham, which means "I", and Kaara, which means "everything that has been created". The self would be an illusory construction that isolates the subject from its surroundings into thinking it has an autonomy that is not real. As British psychologist Susan Blackmore says, the word "illusion" does not mean that it does not exist; it exists as a result of brain activity that apparently generates this illusion for our own benefit.

When we get up in the morning, our self wakes up joined to our consciousness. Our previous day's memories and our future plans return. In a word: we become that person we identify with the word "self". We all have the subjective impression that lurks within us the person we call "I" and receives all sensations, makes all the decisions, rethinks, plans, approves or rejects. It's a kind of homunculus that controls all brain functions. The American philosopher Daniel Dennett called this process the Cartesian Theater, i.e. a kind of illusion that somewhere in the brain there is a place where all mental events converge and are experienced.

In the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume said that there was no evidence that this place existed. Furthermore, it has been argued that the existence of a homunculus would require another homunculus inside the first and so on. David Hume said: "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never get myself without a perception, and I can never observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions disappear for a while, like when I'm sound asleep, during that time I am insensitive to myself and can actually say I do not exist ". As we see, for Hume the self is nothing but a bundle of perceptions. Twenty-four centuries before Gauthama Buddha had come to the same conclusion.

Naturally there is the hypothesis of an immaterial entity, which has been called soul, which would control all brain functions. The problem is that it does not resolve anything. First, because the Cartesian dualism always had trouble explaining how an immaterial entity is able to move the brain matter without energy, which would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Second, because the hypothesis of the soul gives us an explanation, but invalidates any further investigation because the belief in it makes superfluous any effort to know what are the reasons and mechanisms of what we call the illusion of self.

Furthermore, the hypothesis of the soul is not a scientific hypothesis because it is neither confirmable or falsifiable, according to the criteria of the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. We have no evidence of the existence of something permanent in ourselves. Everything around us and all that we are, biologically speaking, is fleeting and perishable.

If the self is the sum of our thoughts and actions, then that self is the result of brain activity. Severe brain injury can cause a personality change, and the same effect can occur with drug intake. Despite the self is a brain product, there is no place in the brain where it can be located. Most likely, our brain creates the experience of the self from a multitude of experiences, both those that come through our senses as well as those we have stored in our memory. We know that the brain constructs a model of the outside world and weaves the experiences to form a coherent story in order to interpret and predict future actions. We generate a simulation of the outside world what we are going to do in it in the future and thus, ensure survival. That would be the reason why we prefer a model of reality rather than reality itself.

We do not have a direct connection with reality, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant said. Kant argued that even before there is a thought, before we can know something about the world or about ourselves, there must be a unified self as subject of experience. He placed that primary and unified self in the centre of his own philosophy and argued that this internal self created consistency and helped to lend our experience and our perception.

Today we know that everything we experience is processed in neural activity patterns that make up our mental life. And we have no direct connection with external reality. We live, then, in a virtual reality. Hindu philosophy also considers external reality as maya, illusion. In the past it was known that the so-called secondary qualities depended on the subject who experienced them, as Descartes said. And the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico puts it clearly in his book The ancient wisdom of the Italians as follows: "if the senses are faculties, by seeing things we make the colours, by tasting them, the flavours, by hearing them, the sounds, and by touching them, we make cold and hot".

We only know what we perceive

The Irish empiricist philosopher , Bishop George Berkeley said that we only know what we perceive , so that his contemporaries debated whether when a tree fell in the forest and nobody's there to hear it would make some noise. As we now know, there would be no sound, because the sound quality is no absolute reality, but only ours. The colours, sounds, tastes and smells are not out there, but they are powers of our mind. Out there, there are only electromagnetic radiation in different wavelengths, that impinging on our receptors produce electrical potentials, action potentials, which are all alike coming from eye, hearing, taste, smell or touch. It is in the different regions of the cortex where the secondary qualities are attributed. Hence the injury cortical region that processes colour vision will result that the patient becomes achromatic and see not only colours but do not even dream about them.

In the construction of this inner world, if information is missing, the brain supplies to generate a plausible story although not entirely accurate. In the same way, the brain creates the self conscious, but still do not know how from neuronal activity such an abstract concept like that is created. The self would be an illusory construction that isolates the subject from its surroundings into thinking it has an autonomy that is not real. Both what we call self and consciousness are brain structures that enclose the big problem in neuroscience, namely, how neuronal activity goes to the subjective impressions. This is what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers has called the "hard problem" of consciousness. The move from the objective to the subjective.

What would that illusion of self? It has been argued that the reason is simply the function to predict the behaviour of others. If I believe that within me there is a person who behaves like any other, I can predict the behaviour of others by observing that person inside me. Self-consciousness would therefore be the invention of the self to know what others will do.

The Indian U.S. based neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran believes that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain, but emerges from the activity of a series of circuits that are distributed throughout the brain and interconnected. The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, says that self-consciousness is a second parallel mechanism developed to generate representations of other older representations. And the English psychologist Nicholas Humphrey assumes that our capacity for introspection may have been developed specifically for modelling the minds of others in order to predict their behaviour. This last statement would lead us to relate the self-consciousness with mirror neurons, which I reported two years ago in this very place, allowing us to "reflect" on the brain motor acts, but also emotions and intentions of others. In this Ramachandran also agree.

One wonders if there is only one self. Not so long ago was memory eagerly sought, assuming it was a single entity. Today we know that there are different types of memory with different locations in the brain.

Several types of intelligence

The same has happened with the intelligence, and today we define various types of intelligence. So you have to wonder if the same will happen with the self. Ramachandran speaks, for example, about  various selves, or at least about  various aspects of the self, such as the sense of unity, or at least different aspects of the self, such as the sense of unity, the multitude of feelings and beliefs, the sense of continuity in time, the control of one's actions (the latter related to the issue of freedom or free will) the sense of being anchored in the body, the sense of self-worth, dignity and mortality or immortality. Each of these aspects may be mediated by different centres in different parts of the brain and, for convenience, we group them all in a single word: self. Precisely the most bizarre of all: being aware of oneself is what supposed Ramachandran depends on mirror neurons.

There are case reports showing that there are many brain regions that play a role in the creation and maintenance of the self, but there is no centre where all physically meet. Apart from the frontal lobe, where these neurons were discovered for the first time, there are many mirror neurons in the inferior parietal lobe, a structure that has undergone a major expansion in the great apes and humans. This region was divided into two gyrus: the supramarginal gyrus that allows us to "reflect" our actions in advance, and the angular gyrus, which allows us to "reflect" our body, in the right hemisphere, and other social and linguistic aspects of the self in the left hemisphere.

The hypothesis of the relationship of these neurons with self-consciousness would we use mirror neurons to look at ourselves as if someone were doing so. And the same mechanism that was developed to adopt the point of view of other turned inward to look at the own self. So "being self-conscious" would be to be aware of others being conscious of myself.

That the unified self might be a cerebral construction is shown by the experiments conducted by Roger Sperry (Nobel 1981) and Michael Gazzaniga on divided or split-brain subjects. In patients suffering from epilepsy, with a focus in one hemisphere, and to prevent crease a "mirror focus "in the other hemisphere, American surgeons decades ago sectioned the corpus callosum and in some patients also the anterior commissure. The experiments showed that the surgeons did literally split into two the self, because there were two different people with different tastes and interests and sometimes contradictory. In these patients could be that a hand opened a drawer and the other tried to close it. The division of the connections between the two hemispheres had created a second self hitherto unknown because the speaking or dominant hemisphere self had been considered the only one.

One of the most striking results of these experiments was the interpretation ability of the left hemisphere of the behaviour initiated by the right hemisphere. If a signal saying "walk" was sent to the right hemisphere, the subject began to walk. And, when asking the subject why was he doing so (walking), the left speaking hemisphere replied that he was going to get a coke or any other excuse, or simply that he felt like doing so. This phenomenon is similar to what happens when a person is hypnotized and ordered to crawl on all fours. If at that point, the hypnotist awakes him and asks what was he doing crawling on all fours, the subject can answer that because he had dropped a coin. The left hemisphere, when does not know the reasons for the behaviour of the organism makes up a story plausible to interpret. In other words: for that self on the left hemisphere a suitable story, though false, is better than none.

This ability, which led to its discoverer Michael Gazzaniga dominant brain called "the interpreter" is even clearer in the following experiment: if we project to the right hemisphere of one of these patients a snowy landscape, and the head of a chicken to the left hemisphere and then asked to choose in each hand between several images that were projected the one more related to what they have just seen, the right hand, controlled by the left hemisphere, chose a chicken and the left hand, controlled by the right hemisphere, a shovel. But if the patient was asked why he had chosen a shovel with the left hand, he responded to clean up the mess of the henhouse.

To the left self, I repeat, it is better to have a plausible story, however false, that not having any. The ability to replace missing information by the brain is what constitutes both optical and other deceptions to which we are accustomed. Think, for example, how the brain covers the missing information in that part of the retina that has no visual receptors in the optic nerve exit, that is, the blind spot that is not translated into a scotoma in the visual field.

Before, we were talking about clinical cases in which there is a self fragmentation or the loss of one of its aspects. One such case is the asomatognosia, or the lack of recognition of a body part,  which usually happens after a stroke with extensive lesions of the cerebral cortex. The asomatognosia is a fragmentation of the self. Another example is the hemispatial neglect syndrome, which occurs when the right parietal lobe is injured, in which the patient ignores, or rather not answers, to the left half of his visual field. Another symptom that affects the personal self is anosognosia or denial of illness. A special case of anosognosia is Anton syndrome, or unawareness of blindness. Gabriel Anton described one of the first examples of lack of awareness of blindness in 1899. Generally, the three conditions: asomatognosia, and anosognosia hemispatial neglect often occur together due to right hemisphere lesions.

The limits of the personal self are more dynamic than rigid. There are things self-close, as the body itself, the wife or husband, the family members. Moreover, the objects that do not have special meaning for us are considered self-distant. Examples of changes in the relations of the self are the phenomena known as déjà vu and jamais vu, in which the patient has the impression of having already seen something that has not been seen before, or on the contrary, the impression of having never seen something that he does know. This is related to the sense of familiarity, an emotional sense depending on the limbic system, specifically the amygdala.

The healthy individual has an integrated and normal relationship with the world. Our relationships with the world and other people are in a delicate balance, and that balance is maintained automatically and unconsciously. We are not aware of it until it is violated.

The illusion syndrome

In 1923, the French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras described one case, that of Madame M., a 53 year old woman who complained that impostors had replaced her husband, her children and even herself. Her husband had been killed and impostors had replaced him by someone else. This phenomenon was called "l’illusion de sosies". Sosias is the Spanish for a person who is so much like another that is confused with it. The name comes from Greek mythology in which Zeus became physically Amphitryon to seduce his wife Alcmene. Fearful that Alcmene's maid, Sosias, alertase her of the deception, Zeus made Hermes become Sosias. The deception was successful and Alcmene gave birth to twins: a son of Zeus: Hercules, the other son of Amphitryon: Iphicles. Hence the name sosies means in French "double".

Capgras syndrome is probably generated by the loss of the connection between the recognition of faces, located in the fusiform gyrus and the limbic system, especially the amygdala that gives emotional significance to sensory stimuli. The patient recognizes faces, but they are not familiar to him, so he supposes they are impostors or doubles. Four years after the publication of Capgras syndrome, two French doctors, Courbon and Fail, published an article entitled: Thesyndrome of the Frégoli  illusion and schizophrenia". Courbon and Fail named it after Leopold Frégoli, an Italian actor famous in France for his extraordinary capacity for impersonations. These patients were to know people around, but they had never seen before, i.e. the opposite of the Capgras syndrome patients. Frégoli syndrome can be interpreted as a super-relation with others and in that sense resembles the phenomenon of déjà vu. The boundaries of the self are malleable, not rigid. The self has been compared to an amoeba that changes its shape and margins. An example is the case with experiments using a rubber hand. If you hide the left hand of a subject and simultaneously caress the left hand and the rubber hand with an awl or brush, after a few minutes the subject feels that the rubber hand is part of his body. The fusion of tactile and visual information in the brain creates this illusion.

The memories of all experiences in life are very important to the creation and maintenance of the self. Our identity is the sum of our memories, but those memories are modified by the context in which they occur and sometimes they are just conspiracies. In other words, we cannot rely entirely on them, so that the self is questioned. Moreover, without a sense of the self memories have no sense and yet, that self is a product of our memories.

Personally I think there are at least two types of self or consciousness: one that I call "ego-consciousness", which is the normal consciousness we usually have in vigil, although there are also different levels in it, and is characterized by a dualistic thinking intrinsic to our logical-analytical ability. And a second consciousness I call "limbic consciousness" which is what allows us to access a "second reality", the one reached by the shaman, or the mystic, through certain techniques and generates a feeling of transcendence. I name it Limbic consciousness due to the hyperactivity of certain limbic structures that are in the depth of the temporal lobe. Its electrical or magnetic stimulation can produce experiences called spiritual, religious, numinous or transcendent. Both consciousnesses are antagonistic and a condition to produce the latter is the cancellation of egoic consciousness, which is known by Eastern philosophy for centuries.

Presumably egoic consciousness is dependent on the modern filo-genetically  brain structures such as the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas limbic consciousness relies on older structures belonging to the limbic system or emotional brain.

To sum up, the self, as brain construction, does not have an exact location in the brain, and there may be different types of self or consciousness. Its boundaries are not fixed and thus certain experiments and diseases show its fragility. Of note is the fact that we attribute the self the majority of brain activity, when in fact the rational self is a later instance compared with the unconscious that governs the vast majority of our brain activity in the service of survival. 

Need to know why it is that self unified generated by the brain, and what is its function.

Thank you for your attention.

Francisco J. Rubia Vila is Professor of the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and so was of Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich as well as Scientific Advisor to this University. He studied medicine at the Complutense University and Düsseldorf University in Germany. He has been Deputy Director of the Hospital Ramón y Cajal and Director of its Research Department, Vice President for Research at the University Complutense of Madrid and CEO of Research Madrid . For several years he was a member of the Executive Committee of the European Medical Research Council. His specialty is the physiology of the nervous system, a field in which he has worked for more than 40 years, and which has more than two hundred publications. He is Director of the Multidisciplinary Institute of the Complutense University of Madrid. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine (chair # 2), Vice President of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, with headquarters in Salzburg, as well as its Spanish delegation. He has participated in numerous scientific papers and lectures, and is author of the books: "Handbook of Neuroscience", "The Brain Deceives us", "Social Perception of Science", "The Divine Connection", "What do you know of your brain ? 60 answers to 60 questions "and " Sex in the brain. The fundamental difference between men and women. "

Sources:

http://www.tendencias21.net/neurociencias/La-ilusion-del-Yo_a29.html

http://www.ranm.tv/index.php/video/389/la-ilusi%C3%B3n-del-yo-%C2%B7-sesi%C3%B3n-cient%C3%ADfica-madrid-7-de-mayo-de-2013/