NEUROSCIENCE
How Our Brain
Preserves Our
Sense of Self
One brain region is crucial for our ability to form
and maintain a consistent identity both now and
when thinking about the future
We are all time travelers. Every day we experience
new things as we travel forward through time. In
the process, the countless connections among the
nerve cells in our brain recalibrate to accommodate
these experiences. It’s as if we reassemble our
selves daily, maintaining a mental construct of our
selves in physical time, and the glue that holds to
gether our core identity is memory.
Not only do we travel in physical time; we also
experience mental time travel. We visit the past
through our memories and then journey into the
future by imagining what tomorrow or next year
might bring. When we do so, we think of ourselves
as we are now, remember who we once were and
imagine how we will be.
A new study, published in the journal Social
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN),
explores how a specific brain region helps to
knit together memories of the present and future
self. Injury to that area leads to an impaired
sense of identity. The region—called the ventral
medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—may produce
a fundamental model of our self and place it in
mental time. In doing so, this study suggests,it may be the source of our sense of self.
Psychologists have long noticed that our mind
handles information about one’s self differently
from other details. Memories that reference the self
are easier to recall than other forms of memory.
They benefit from what researchers have called
a selfreference effect (SRE), in which informationRobert Martone is a research scientist with expertise
in neurodegeneration. He spends his free time kayaking
and translating Renaissance Italian literature.KTSDesign/Science Photo Library/Getty ImagesOPINION