Science News

Why think about the self being optional then? When we focus too heavily on the self, our life often gets worse not better. Think of how you feel when you’re focusing on yourself more than others. You typically feel selfish. Your world grows smaller. How do you feel when you focus on others? You often feel generous. Your world gets bigger. Humans have a fundamental need for social connections. When we feed that social beast, we feel more human. The world makes sense. When we focus inward, we shrink a bit of our humanity.

Articles about SELF: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=self

The secret to excelling in a job interview may not hinge on how much your interviewers like you, but in how much you like yourself. Narcissists scored much higher in simulated job interviews than non-narcissists, researchers found.

Brain science is everywhere. The ‘neuro-’ prefix has been used to jazz up approaches to self-help, ethics, aesthetics, marketing, economics, even parenting.

Articles about NEUROSCIENCE: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?page=1&tag=neuroscience

With the help of a hammer-wielding scientist, Jennifer Aniston and a general anaesthetic, Professor Marcus du Sautoy goes in search of answers to one of science's greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are? While the thoughts that make us feel as though we know ourselves are easy to experience, they are notoriously difficult to explain. So, in order to find out where they come from, Marcus subjects himself to a series of probing experiments.

Students rated their emotional states before and after reading each of the eight passages. Response times and error rates to comprehension questions showed that when individuals read stories written from the “you” perspective, they were not only more likely to connect emotionally with the passage, but they were also better able to remember spatial details about the physical environment described in the story.

Inspiration and interpretation are inevitable. As metaphor is basic to what we do, so emerging results in neuroscience will be taken well beyond the intentions and even meanings of their authors. Much caution and critique will be needed. Yet at the same time, I want to preserve a space for this other mantle, from science to art and humanism. To creation and design and expression.

A revolution based on neuroscience? No. A recognition of our bodies and experiences and senses? Yes. And thus much closer to metaphors that inspire us every day. Like HOME or WARMTH. And maybe even a tree or two.

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves.

Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his work on decision-making, has elegantly demonstrated how our brain is designed in such a way that we often cannot trust our preferences to reflect our interests. His work vividly shows how this is a consequence of having two mental operating systems, an experiencing self and a remembering self.

Mystics in all ages and cultures describe the self as infinite, stable and ever-present phenomena. Modern physics describe the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness, a dance. We, as a society, relate to the self mostly as an individual, unique, time bound form. Our common sense, as individuals and society, hasn't caught up with this picture and it still based on long-held biases and stories. The Earth is clearly round but we still act as if it was flat...

We live at the dawn of a scientific revolution, every day brings new findings from a wide range of scientific disciplines about what it means to be human. Modern science now gives us the detailed descriptions of the mechanisms our brain needs to construct what we call the self.

Could it be this illusionary image of ourselves as separate beings that is keeping us in this perpetual state of anxiety, scarcity, fear, dissatisfaction and leading us, as a society, at this very delicate point in evolution?

Imagine playing a video game controlled by your mind. Now imagine that game also teaches you about your own patterns of stress, relaxation and focus.

Baggini is trying to save the self from neuroscience, which is admirable considering that neuroscience continues to show how convoluted our brains are. I am not sure if he is successful – argument by metaphor can only go so far, empirical data wins at the end of the day – but I like the idea that personal and neurological change and inconsistency does imply an illusion of identity. In this age of cognitive science it’s easy to subscribe to Whitman’s doctrine – that we are constituted by multitudes; it takes a brave intellect, on the other hand, to hang on to what Freud called our “naïve self-love.”