The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

Descartes’s dualism is passé. No one is arguing for a self that has an independent ontological reality, something that could exist even after the brain and body are gone. No one’s arguing either for a single privileged place in the brain as the sole custodian of the self. Yes, there are some brain regions that are more important than others for our sense of self—such as the insular cortex, the temporoparietal junction, and the medial prefrontal cortex—but none that can be said to be the singular domain of the self. There’s also little argument that our narrative self is a fiction—a story without a storyteller. In fact, anything that can constitute the self-as-object—including the sense of body ownership—can be argued as being constructed, sans a constructor. Instead of Cartesian dualism, which relegated the body to the status of a mere vessel, we now have a picture of the sense of self as the outcome of neural processes that are tightly integrated with the body—processes that combine brain, body, mind, and even culture to make us who we are. What remains to be satisfactorily explained is the self-as-subject or self-as-knower, and that’s where the differences arise.

It’s also unrealistic to expect a person with Alzheimer’s to cope with the loss of the narrative self by focusing on the fact that there is no narrator to begin with.

As we have already seen, the brain takes care of the body by maintaining homeostasis, which involves keeping the body’s physiology at an optimal state despite wide variations in the external environment.