My Self and My Brain: the neuroscience of self-consciousness

What are you and how did your brain create you? Although everyone has (and is) a self, it is not easy to explain how selves came to arise in the world. Most people associate the term ‘self’ with personality and identity, but what lies at its core – what is its deep biological basis?

In this talk, Professor Jane Aspell will argue that the self is grounded in the brain’s model of the body: that the physical self is the foundation for the mental self. She will discuss how disturbances in the links between the body and the brain give rise to disorders of self - such as ‘out of body experiences’. Studies of the brain bases of these conditions, and virtual reality experiments that perturb the self are starting to reveal how the brain generates the foundation of our consciousness: our self.