Are You Really You, or Just a Pattern Your Brain Built with Dr. Masud Husain

Smart People Podcast

Smart People Industries

Society & Culture, Business, Education

4.6 • 736 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What actually makes you who you are? In this episode, we get into one of the biggest questions a person can ask, not in a vague or philosophical way, but through the lens of neuroscience. Our guest is Dr. Masud Husain, Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford, Editor-in-Chief of Brain, and the award-winning author of Our Brains, Our Selves, which won the Royal Society Trivedi Best Science Book Prize. Dr. Husain explains how your sense of self is built through memory, attention, motivation, perception, concepts, and relationships. In other words, who you are is not just something you have, it is something your brain is constantly creating. That is what makes this conversation so gripping. Because if the brain creates the self, then what happens when part of that system changes? We talk about real patients whose identities seemed to shift after changes in the brain, including one man who lost nearly all motivation after tiny strokes, and another who began losing not just words, but the concepts behind them. Their stories are fascinating, but they also raise a deeply personal question: how much of who you are depends on brain processes you rarely notice? We also get into why we become more risk-averse over time, why discomfort starts to feel less worth it, and whether changing how we think can actually change who we are. This episode will make you think differently about personality, memory, identity, and the story you tell yourself about yourself. Listen now, then subscribe and follow Smart People Podcast so you don’t miss what’s next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, before we get started, just wanted to let you know real quick. You may have noticed we haven't
0:05.5	been releasing on our standard schedule. And you also might know we've been podcasting for
0:12.5	almost 20 years and we're pretty consistent. Due to some recent things, for the first time
0:18.4	in almost two decades, things just got a little crazy.
0:25.9	But we are doing our best to get back on schedule so that you can satisfy your curious mind every other week with a new episode. So make sure you're subscribed or follow wherever you
0:30.2	listen. Thanks for sticking with us. Let's get into it.
0:35.7	This is Smart People Podcast, a podcast for smart people, where we talk to smart people, but not
0:42.3	necessarily done by smart people.
0:48.5	Hello, welcome to Smart People Podcast Conversations that satisfy your curious mind.
0:53.2	Chris Stemp here, thanks for tuning in.
0:55.5	The question for this episode is, who are you? Like, who are you really? Not your job title,
1:02.5	not where you live, not the version of yourself you put on display for others. The deeper question,
1:08.1	what makes you, you?
1:12.4	And why does it matter?
1:17.3	In this episode, we talk with neurologist and neuroscientists, Dr. Massoud Hussein,
1:26.3	about how the brain builds identity, personality, motivation, memory, and all of that adds up to your sense of self.
1:32.2	Now, what makes this fascinating is he doesn't just explain it in the science theory.
1:38.4	He's worked with patients whose brain injuries have fundamentally changed who they are.
1:40.4	What is their sense of self?
1:47.4	And so I found myself asking throughout this conversation, why does sense of self matter?
1:54.9	How do we define it? What creates it? And how fickle is it? This is one of those conversations that makes you think differently about your habits, your personality, your choices, and really the
1:59.2	story you have made up about who you are.
	...

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