“A neural understanding of human nature broadens rather than constricts our sense of who we are…”, says neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux:

Recently, there has been a growing interest in a more partitioned view of the self. One partition is between the minimum and the narrative self. The former is an immediate consciousness of one’s self; the latter a coherent self-consciousness that extends into the past and future. But these conscious partitions, which themselves may be based on different mechanisms, are, as Freud noted, only the tip of the iceberg. Terms such as the primitive, core, ecological and non-conceptual self, refer to unconscious aspects of personal identity that define who we are. The study of implicit or unconscious aspects of the self are now major themes in social psychology. In contrast to the narrative and minimal self notions, which depend on language to encode our awareness of who we are in consciousness, these implicit aspects of the self are not accessible for verbal self-reflection.

Although the self has not been a major research interest for neuroscientists, some have ventured into the territory. Michael Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio, for example, emphasise – as I do – the importance of understanding the conscious self in the context of the unconscious workings of the brain. But unlike Damasio and Gazzaniga, whose ideas are about the organisation of the mind and experience, I have been attempting to develop a theory that links the self to the detailed understanding of the cellular basis of brain function that is emerging in neuroscience. Before I can explain this, though, I need to discuss the relation of the self to consciousness in more detail.