Rubber Hand Illusions Shed New Light on Our Bodily Sense of Self

The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the idea of a permanent and fixed essence that constitutes the "true self," the "real me."

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

Contemporary neuroscience identifies a particular part of the brain, sometimes called “the interpreter,” as the source of the familiar internal narrative that gives us our sense of self. Two prominent neuroscientists have recently characterized the quirky, undependable quality of the tale told by the interpreter. Antonio Damasio describes it this w

In other words, there is a network in the brain devoted to inner experience, and a network devoted to exterior experience, and usually activation in one is associated with reduced activation in the other. Typically, being lost in your interiority means being less attuned to exterior experience, and vice versa. But during non-dual experience, when y