154 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”inputs from the outside world are filtered to extract the salient and
generalized features — from concrete sensation to structured perception
to conceptual idealization. Take an example from vision. The first step is
the sensory data of brightness, colors, shapes, texture, etc., arriving in the
occipital primary visual cortex. The second step takes place in the inferior
temporal cortex where individual views of a face from different angles are
integrated to represent the face of a person. Finally, the general concept
of a given person (say, Jennifer Aniston, a movie star) is encoded in the
entorhinal cortex and hippocampus of the medial temporal lobe, where a
special group of neurons called concept cells are activated. Concept cells
form an invariant response to multimodal sensory input, attending only
to the relevance (meaning) of the stimulus while leaving out the particu-
lars. The same “Jennifer Aniston neuron” responds to different pictures
of her in multiple poses, and to her name in writing and in spoken lan-
guages as well. The neural mechanism of this stepwise abstraction has
been demonstrated by single cell recording in live persons. It is believed
that concept cells do not act in isolation. Rather, each concept is assem-
bled in a network that overlaps with networks of other concepts, building
different degrees of association, a process important for episodic mem-
ory.^23 We can speculate that neuronal assemblies representing increasing
degrees of abstraction — covering such items as gender (female), profes-
sional group (actress), ethnicity (Caucasian), and even humanity — could
be present. The hierarchical nature of neuronal networks makes possible
the stepwise abstraction of information.
7.9 Singularity of Self and Oneness of Psychic
Experience
When I wake up in the morning, even before opening my eyes, I feel like
I am one person. This feeling of self continues throughout the day —
and my whole life. Even when I am dreaming, I never experience multi-
ple selves. In fact, self is always one, never two thirds, or one and a half.
When Penfield stimulated the temporal cortex of his epileptic patients to