Science of self: In a series of Lynne Malcolm's favourite All in the Mind programs
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What is the purpose of this special All In the Mind retrospective episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hi, Lynne Malcolm here on RN. As you may have heard, I'm leaving the ABC and my role as host on All In The Mind. To mark the past nine years, we're bringing you a selection of highlight programs until the new All In The Mind host joins you next year. Today, a program from December 2016, The Strange New Science of the Self.
Okay Lynn, so your left hand is in normal position. You can't actually see your right hand because it's behind the screen. And in front of you, I've put a rubber prosthetic hand. Now, what I'm going to do is show you how malleable your sense of body is. I'm going to start brushing, stroking your right index finger at exactly the same time as the rubber finger. Right now you're feeling touch on your right hand, but after a minute or so, you'll start to feel...
Oh, that feels very strange. I'm starting to feel it in that hand.
You feel that I'm touching you
where? On the
hand. On the rubber
hand. Yeah. Very strange.
Now, I get you to quickly close your eyes and point to your index
finger. You hit my hand.
And the illusion is actually strong enough that if you threaten or strike
this hand,
you actually have a genuine physiological response.
That was very strong. My heart's going.
That's right.
Dr. Lee Walsh from Neuroscience Research Australia. He studies how our brain determines our sense of self. And in this classic rubber hand illusion experiment, he's certainly shown me how easily a sense of my own body can be manipulated. And more on that later. Defining the self has obsessed humanity for millennia. And it's a topic which has deeply intrigued journalist Anil Ananthaswamy. He grew up in India, where the major religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, are very much concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of the nature of the self. He then became interested in how this is reflected in neuroscience today.
There are a couple of things that neuroscientists, philosophers wonder a lot about, and these have to do with the kind of unity of experience that we have of being a self. So one is just a kind of unity that we feel in the moment,
How does the rubber‑hand illusion demonstrate the brain’s malleable sense of body?
If you think about all the various experiences we are having, whether it's visual, tactile, auditory, all the different perceptions that are arising, they all seem to be experienced by the same entity. So there's a kind of unity to the experience of being someone or something at any given moment, and philosophers call this synchronic unity. It sounds trivial because we all experience that as being the case, but when you try to explain How it might happen neuroscientifically or philosophically, it's a conundrum. And there's also another kind of unity we experience, which is the unity of our existence over time. So when we think back to our earliest memories, and also when we think ahead to some future imagined self, whatever perceptions arise within us when we are either remembering or thinking ahead, again, they seem as if they're happening to the same person or entity.
And this is something called diachronic unity. And so these two kinds of unities that we are always experiencing is something that needs to be explained. And it's because we feel this kind of unity, people, philosophers, religions, and others have often posited that there must be something that experiences all of this as something that's happening to itself. So this is part of the reason why people posit the existence of a self. And then neuroscience is taking it on and trying to answer, is there really something like the self underlying all our experiences?
Was there ever a moment where you thought that, say, brain scans can actually prove some place in the brain where the self exists?
No. Very early on when I was doing the research, it became very clear that there is no one place in the brain that is the domain of the self. I think we have to distinguish a little bit between the self and the sense of self. The sense of self is how we perceive ourselves to be. And that sense of self is definitely not the outcome of any single brain region. I think there are various parts of the brain that are involved in that and the body.
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