24 Jennifer Ouellette - Is The Self an Illusion, or Is There Really a “You” In There?

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2014

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Who are you?The question may seem effortless to answer: You are the citizen of a country, the resident of a city, the child of particular parents, the sibling (or not) of brothers and sisters, the parent (or not) of children, and so on. And you might further answer the question by invoking a personality, an identity: You're outgoing. You're politically liberal. You're Catholic. Going further still, you might invoke your history, your memories: You came from a place, where events happened to you. And those helped make you who you are.Such are some of the off-the-cuff ways in which we explain ourselves. The scientific answer to the question above, however, is beginning to look radically different. Last year, New Scientist magazine even ran a cover article entitled, "The great illusion of the self," drawing on the findings of modern neuroscience to challenge the very idea that we have seamless, continuous, consistent identities. "Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel," declared the magazine. "Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self."What's going on here? When it comes to understanding this new and very personal field of science, it's hard to think of a more apt guide than Jennifer Ouellette, author of the new book Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Not only is Ouellette a celebrated science writer; she also happens to be adopted, a fact that makes her life a kind of natural experiment in the relative roles of genes and the environment in determining our identities. The self, explains Ouellette in this episode, is "a miracle of integration. And we haven't figured it out, but the science that is trying to figure it out is absolutely fascinating."This episode also features a discussion about a case currently before the Supreme Court that turns on how we determine, scientifically, who is intellectually disabled, and of the recent discovery of a 30,000 year old "giant virus" frozen in Arctic ice.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Friday, March 7th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.
0:05.3	I'm Chris Mooney.
0:06.3	And I'm Indravis Gontes.
0:07.6	Each week we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.
0:13.1	We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.
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0:32.2	I also want to let you know that this episode of Inquiring Minds is sponsored by
0:36.4	audible.com, a leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment with over 150,000 titles to choose from. And exclusively, for listeners to this episode, Audible has a great offer. They're going to give you a free audiobook. You just have to go to this specific URL to get it. Audiblepodcast.com
0:57.2	slash inquiring minds. Once again, that's audiblepodcast.com slash inquiring minds. So please avail
1:04.8	yourself of this opportunity. So this week, I spoke to a great science journalist, Jennifer
1:10.1	Willett, who has a new book out about the science of, quite literally, who we are.
1:15.2	It's called Me, Myself, and Why, searching for the science of self.
1:19.9	And in it, Willett explores what she can find out from genetics, from neuroscience, from personality research about her own self, and at the same time,
1:28.8	she takes on the question of what the self itself, if you will, what the self itself actually
1:34.1	is, because from the perspective of modern science, it turns out that the key question here
1:39.0	might not simply be who we are, but also if we are at all, if the self is really a thing that can be defined as
1:47.1	continuous and constant over time. And that's a really, really broad question and a very
1:52.8	difficult one. So here's a clip from our interview. We all have many, many layers to the self,
1:57.4	and that was one of the biggest challenges, I think, in writing this book. How do you define self? And it really is an onion. And so what I kind of did was kind of peel
2:05.7	back the layers and kind of broke it down to little bits and pieces and tried to figure out all
2:09.6	the different, what science has to say, but all these different little pieces that collectively
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