Verified by The Stories We Tell Ourselves
By Tyler Woods published November 1, 2022 - last reviewed on January 3, 2023
Who are you? The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. In a new book, Emory University neuroeconomics professor Gregory Berns explores how our memories, and the narratives we build from them, continuously alter our identity over the course of our life. We asked Berns to demystify some of the core ideas of The Self Delusion.
You write that who we are is never fixed or stable. What are our different versions of self?
There are several ways to look at the versions of ourselves. In time, there are the past, present, and future versions. The central delusion we hold is that these versions are continuous and constitute a person’s identity. To create the illusion that you are continuous with the person you remember yourself as, you must create a narrative that binds all versions together.
What’s the most important function of memory in the narratives we construct about ourselves?
Our first experiences play an outsize role. You probably remember your first kiss, but not your second. The first kiss laid down a template from which subsequent ones have been stored as deviations. The brain does not hold an exact recording of everything that has happened to you. Instead, it stores a highlight reel. When we call up a memory, the brain unpacks it and does its best to reconstruct what happened. Early memories serve as templates for the narratives we construct to interpret what has happened to us, as well as where we expect to be going on the journey of life. But these are fictions, explanations we create to make sense of a life.
Our brains have remarkable processing power, yet we get a lot of stuff mixed up or just wrong. What purpose does this serve?
We spend a lot of time concocting explanations for things that happen. The curse of self-awareness means that we are also aware of our mortality. To keep existential anxiety at bay, we have to find meaning in the arcs of our lives, and that is what narrative lets us do. The beauty of this is that you can create any narrative from the same series of events.
