Who am I? Let the identity crises begin

Your unique identity is the only thing that can never be taken away from you.

Even if it turns out you can’t find a job after college to pay off your tuition loans, even if you end up homeless on the streets around campus with all of your dreams dead and only a buck in your pocket, even if that too is stolen from you in a mugging — at least you will still have ownership of who you are. You are you. Say it aloud: I am me.

Relish the fact for a minute, because I’m about to take it away.

As crazy as it sounds, neuroscientists are discovering that the feeling of being oneself is a neural construct — an illusion.

“Despite all the pride that your self takes in its individuality and privacy, the only thing that separates you from me is a small subset of neural circuits in your frontal lobes interacting with mirror neurons,” wrote the well-known neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran in an Edge Foundation article. If you tamper with these circuits, he explained, your sense of self begins to blend with those of other people.

In other words, the only reason you feel as though you have a distinct identity is because your prefrontal cortex — one of the most evolutionarily modern brain region — inhibits your mirror neurons, which are brain cells that fire not only when you do something but also when you see somebody else doing something.

For example, if you were to watch your chemistry professor burn his finger on a Bunsen burner, your brain activity would mimic his — as though you yourself were burning your finger. Some believe that mirror neurons are responsible for empathy.

Of course, you wouldn’t actually feel the pain your professor would feel. Your skin receptors would send messages to your brain indicating that everything is quite fine on their end. As a result, your prefrontal cortex would stop the output from your agitated mirror neurons so that you wouldn’t feel pain in your skin, even though you could still identify with your professor.

But here’s where things get interesting. Researchers have learned that if that system is disrupted somehow — say, by inhibiting the feedback from your skin receptors — then your sensory perceptions actually merge with other people’s.

Matteo Marjoram | Daily Trojan

To return to the professor analogy: If your finger were anesthetized while you watched him burning his, then you actually would feel the pain in your anesthetized finger because your skin receptors would not be sending messages to your brain saying that they’re okay.

Ramachandran’s findings are supported by the fact that children, whose prefrontal lobes are not yet fully developed, often show an uncontrollable tendency to mimic the actions of others. The inclination survives into adulthood, but we are able to control ourselves with our developed prefrontal cortexes. You can probably recall various occasions where you were watching a football player at the Coliseum lurching forward for the ball, and you had to suppress your involuntary urge to move as he did.

The discovery that the self might not be a real, unitary entity is literally mind-blowing. It could plummet us into the black despair of the worst existential crisis ever known to man. But I think this research has extremely positive implications.

It‘s common for people to treat others negatively — especially in our society, where we are encouraged to be egotistical, to look primarily after our own needs. It is very easy to shut off the activity of our mirror neurons and feel detached from other people. Thus, we can hurt them, ignore their needs and be selfish.

If science proves that our identities are not as monolithic as we once thought they were — that in fact, our fields of study, favorite music, memories and other tastes have nothing to do with who we are — the human species could become a much kinder one. Selfish selflessness might replace survival of the fittest.

Many eastern religions, like Hinduism, advocate the belief in an all-permeating energy. Each distinct self is only a manifestation of this greater, universal identity, so that to hurt or think negatively of others is literally to hurt oneself.

This new research about the self seems to be compatible with that idea. Ramachandran hypothesized that when the circuits he described become hyperactive, “the result would be an intense heightening of the patient’s sensory appreciation of the world and intense empathy for all beings to the extent of seeing no barriers between himself and the cosmos — the basis of religious and mystical experiences,” he wrote. “You lose all selfishness and become one with God.”

Sure, the discovery that our previous concepts of self are false could mean we are smaller than we ever imagined. It could reduce each one of us to nothing. But it might mean that each one of us is everything: that each one of us has God inside, that we are all each other and that we are as large as the universe.

Jean Guerrero is a senior majoring in print journalism. Her column “Scientastical” runs Mondays.