First, the same regions are active during many cognitive tasks that are not necessarily about the self. Second, different kinds of “self” tasks activated overlapping but not identical patterns of brain regions within the network. These findings led many researchers to conclude that what was being localized was not the self, but processes related to self-reference: self-evaluation, autobiographical recall, perspective-taking, and narrative construction. The consensus is that the self has not been localized by these sorts of brain scanning studies.
This comes as no surprise to many people. Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, famously argued that searching for the self in the brain was a category mistake, akin to searching for the center of gravity of an object. The self has no physical properties. It is not a real thing but a theorist’s fiction. “No one has ever seen or ever will see a center of gravity. As David Hume noted, no one has ever seen a self, either,” Dennett proclaimed. The self, according to Dennett, is a useful abstraction: a narrative construct that we create to explain who we are, not a biological object waiting to be found. It emerges from the stories we tell— to ourselves and to others—about our actions, beliefs, intentions, and experiences. It is illusory.
