What if the “you” you feel so certain about isn’t real in the way you think? Author Annaka Harris argues that the brain’s constant dialogue with the world creates a shifting process, not a fixed identity, and how this discovery changes how we see our choices, our memories, and our place in nature.

Harris also explores why quieting the brain’s default mode through meditation, altered states, or deep focus can dissolve the boundary between self and world.

ANNAKA HARRIS: When we feel like a self that is actually somehow separate from the physical world, even though we intellectually understand that that's not the case, there's this intuition, there's this feeling, there's this illusion that there's this "I." This is related to the illusion of free will, and the illusion of free will and self are really two sides of the same coin. It's the sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body, and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, which we know to be the case. And this illusion confuses us about our place in nature and the state of reality on many different levels.

- [Narrator] Debunking the illusions of self and free will.

- So, when I talk about the illusion of self, this is often very hard for people to grasp what that could even mean. I'm obviously a person over here and you're a person over there, and we talk about ourselves all the time and what we do and how we spend our days and our histories and our futures. And so, I first like to just be very clear about what I'm not talking about when I talk about the illusion of self. And all of those things that I just included are obviously things we can call a self. We can talk about our autobiographical histories, we can talk about things we tend to do, our likes and dislikes, and all of that is in the description of a self, and that makes perfect sense, and that piece of it is not an illusion. And so, we can talk about ourselves in the same way that we can talk about a cat as another organism in nature, or we can label a wave as a system in nature. And the truth is that the experience of being a self is actually much more analogous to an ocean wave than to something static in nature like a rock. And so, this starts to get at what I am talking about when I talk about the illusion of self. And so, in the same way that an ocean wave is a process in nature, it's dynamic, it's ever-changing, even though we can label it a wave and we can call it a wave, and talk about the types of things waves do, we all understand that a wave is not a static thing in nature, it's a process. And our brains are very much the same thing. They are processes in nature that are ever-changing, ever-evolving. And so, all of our experiences take place across time and are continually arising so that if I became unconscious, or if something happened to my brain, immediately, my experiences would change. And the truth is that our experiences are changing all the time in every moment. And we're, in fact, in dialogue with the external world in every moment too. So, the sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body, and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, which we know to be the case, that is where the illusion lies. This is related to the illusion of free will, and the illusion of free will and self are really two sides of the same coin. The illusion of free will is the fact that we feel like a self that is separate from the physical world and separate from the cause-effect relationships that we know to be in place that could somehow freely make a decision, or freely intervene in the physical world outside of the relationships of cause and effect, and outside of what we know to be the way the physical world works. And this illusion confuses us about our place in nature and the state of reality on many different levels. And so, on one level, it blinds us to the fact that we are in constant communication with the external world and that the boundaries between ourselves and the world, and ourselves and each other are not as solid and firm as they appear to us, or that they feel to us to be, especially when we feel like a static self. And I often wish that these connections were made visual to us. I think we'd have a better sense of how we exist in the world if we could actually see certain things. So, if you could see the sound waves moving from my mouth to your eardrum and the effect that was having on your eardrum, and then the subsequent processing in your brain and how that was making you feel. If we could see the air molecules going in and out of my mouth, if when you're in a room full of people, you could see the air being shared by everyone in the room and the microorganisms, and there's so many levels to our interconnection and to the ways that we are embedded in nature that would give us a visceral sense that we aren't actually embedded in nature, but we are nature, we are a part of this thing we call the universe. We're not separate from it. So, I think that free will, for the most part, is an illusion, but when I talk about free will, I like to distinguish between conscious will and free will, because the illusion is really contained in this feeling that it's the consciousness that is the will. So, I use the term free will to talk about decision making processes in nature, which there clearly are, and I'm happy to call that free will, although in the end, I'm not sure how free those processes are. But there's this decision making process that humans experience at a very complex level. But you can see simpler versions of this in nature as well. So, if you look at something like a pea tendril, when it senses that it's close to a branch that it can wrap itself around, it starts growing more quickly in that direction and then it changes the growth so that it wraps itself around a branch. There is a very simple form of decision making that goes into that process. The pea tendril needs to sense the branch nearby, it also needs to be in the light for this process to take place. So, there are many elements to this moment where the pea tendril decides to move in a certain direction, to start growing more quickly, and to start coiling. Most of us wouldn't consider that to be a free decision making process. It's a cause and effect process that occurs in nature. And as you move up in complexity to the level of brains and then human brains, the number of factors that come into play are so expansive that it would be impossible for us to track them all. So, the state of the brain at any given moment, the interaction with the outside world, the set of beliefs that brain has, I mean, this list goes on and on and on. And if you're talking about a complex decision, there could be a simple decision, whether to pick up a glass of water or not, whether to change your position in your chair, or something much more complex about a job you've been offered and you're trying to figure out whether to take it or not. There are so many elements that are taking place in this process in nature that it would be impossible to track, but it is a process, and it's a process by which the brain is interacting with the exterior world and measuring the different outcomes of the different possible futures, and then ultimately making a decision. This is something that I think we can refer to as free will and what many people mean by free will. The problem with having free in the title is that it's not free in the way we feel it is, and this is where the illusion comes in. And so, we begin with this illusion of self, of being this solid, concrete entity that lives somewhere in the head. And even though we know better, it feels as though it's separate from the physical world and that this self can kind of swoop in and change the course of history, or somehow make decisions that are free of the physical world that we're embedded in. And that I think is clearly an illusion. And I call that conscious will because it is this feeling that my conscious experience is this self and is the thing that has this freedom. There was a very interesting study done in 2013 in which they put participants in an FMRI machine and showed them a screen and presented two numbers on that screen. And they gave them the option of either adding or subtracting these two numbers. And they were scanning the activity of these participants' brains while they were doing this calculation. And the result of this study was that based on the information from the MRI, the experimenters could tell up to four seconds, not only when this person was going to make the decision, but whether they decided to add or subtract. So, there've been other studies like this that are also interesting, but in my view, these studies aren't actually necessary to prove the point. Based on the neuroscience we currently have, we should expect to get more and more results like this, but even if we didn't, if you pay close attention to your moment to moment experience, and you don't have to be a meditator, but watching the mind make a decision, you get the sense viscerally that there's no self or free will making decisions behind the scenes, but that in terms of your conscious experience, a decision really arises. And so, you can do the simple exercise, just give yourself the option of moving your big toe or moving your pointer finger. And in the next 30 seconds, decide to either move your toe or your pointer finger. And if you kind of rest in your conscious experience, you will notice that that decision simply arises in your conscious awareness. There's no self who's deciding to make the decision. So, the neuroscience is really still in its infancy, but we're starting to learn more and more about how this illusion of self gets created. The neuroscientist, Anil Seth, wrote a book called "Being You," which gives a wonderful and and thorough description of how this experience of self gets created. Part of it has to do with something called change blindness, which we know about in vision. We have a blind spot in our visual field that we are not conscious of, that we don't detect. And neuroscientists are just now starting to understand that there is a change blindness with respect to our experience over time so that we don't notice how different each of our experiences in every moment are from every other. And so, that adds to this illusion of being a solid entity that moves through time unchanged. We're also learning a little bit more about what neuroscientists refer to as the default mode network. So, we know that when the default mode network is active, we are highly aware of this illusion of self, and it tends to quiet down when we're experiencing what people talk about as a flow state, so when we're very immersed in our work, if we're very immersed in a sport, when we are not so aware of self versus other, or self versus world. We also know through some studies using FMRI, functional MRI machines, when people are using various meditation techniques that quiet down the default mode network, they report experiences of feeling more at one with the universe. They report experiences of no longer feeling like a self, no longer feeling the boundary between themselves and the rest of the world. This is also something that happens when people are under the influence of some psychedelic substances. In an FMRI machine, we can see that the default mode network has quieted down and people report very similar experiences. So, this experience that people have when the default mode network is quieted down and they've dropped this experience of being a solid self is actually much more in line with what we know the underlying reality to be, which is an endlessly fluctuating process that gives rise to each new present moment we experience and is much more analogous to an ocean wave as a phenomenon in nature rather than a static thing. And we also know that memory plays a role in creating this experience of self as well. There's a sense in which all of the memories that we have access to over time were being experienced by the same subject, by the same self. And you can imagine, if your memories weren't strung together and your experience was just of each present moment, there'd be much less of a sense of a self moving through time. And something similar happens in a practice like meditation where one is focusing on experiences arising in the present moment, one after the other, without getting lost in thoughts about the future or thoughts about the past. And we now know also from studies of meditators that have been put in FMRI machines that when someone is in a concentrated state of meditation, attempting to stay focused on the present moment, this also quiets the default mode network and people regularly report dropping this illusion of self. So, many people find this realization to be quite disconcerting, which is understandable. And I think one way to address that is levels of usefulness. And the vast majority of the time,. it is not useful or helpful to realize that there's an illusion of sorts taking place. There are places where it's useful, it's useful obviously for the sciences and for neuroscience, but it actually can also be useful psychologically in certain circumstances. And again, this isn't something you wanna remind yourself of in every moment, but there are moments where realizing that there's an experience of conscious will taking place can be quite liberating. And there are a few examples here. So, one is many people get stuck in feeling responsible for their psychological state. And there's a way in which simply being with whatever uncomfortable emotions you're experiencing, whether it's sadness, or frustration, or anger, and being aware that those processes are playing out and being with them rather than believing that you are controlling them, can be extremely beneficial for psychological wellbeing. There are also ways that we can apply this in our relationships with other people. I sometimes talk about the fact that you would never get angry at a tornado, and that doesn't mean anger doesn't have a place in society and culture. But there are times when anger can overcome us and start to rule our lives in a way that is incredibly unhelpful and unhealthy. And there isn't a solid self to every person that is somehow evil or worthy of blame, can also be liberating to notice in certain circumstances. This realization certainly doesn't mean that people shouldn't be held responsible for their actions, but it might actually inform wiser ways of dealing with people who act violently or people who cause harm. And sometimes I draw the analogy to AI, or something like a self-driving car. If a self-driving car hit someone accidentally, we would want to understand the mechanics of that. We would want to understand whether something had gone wrong with the software or the programming. And so, I think there are places in society and in our relationships where blame and anger and punishment aren't necessarily useful. And so, being aware of this could potentially inform wiser policymaking.