Self Comes to Mind

for the self phenomenon we are generating. The protoself and its primordial feelings are the likely foundation of the material me and are, in all probability, an important and peak manifestation of consciousness in numerous living species. But we need some intermediate self process placed between the protoself and its primordial feelings, on the one hand, and the autobiographical selves that give us our sense of personhood and identity, on the other. Something critical must change in the very state of the protoself for it to become a self in the proper sense, that is, a core self . For one thing, the mental profile of the protoself must be raised and made to stand out . For another, it must connect with the events that it is involved in. Within the narrative of the moment, it must protagonize . As I see it, the critical change of the protoself comes from its moment-to-moment engagement as caused by any object being perceived. The engagement occurs in close temporal proximity to the sensory processing of the object. Anytime the organism encounters an object, any object, the protoself is changed by the encounter. This is because, in order to map the object, the brain must adjust the body in a suitable way, and because the results of those adjustments as well as the content of the mapped image are signaled to the protoself.
    Changes in the protoself inaugurate the momentary creation of the core self and initiate a chain of events. The first event in the chain is a transformation in the primordial feeling that results in a “feeling of knowing the object,” a feeling that differentiates the object from other objects of the moment. The second event in the chain is a consequence of the feeling of knowing. It is a generation of “saliency” for the engaging object, a process generally subsumed by the term attention , a drawing in of processing resources toward one particular object more than others. The core self, then, is created by linking the modified protoself to the object that caused the modification, an object that has now been hallmarked by feeling and enhanced by attention.
    At the end of this cycle, the mind includes images regarding a simple and very common sequence of events: an object engaged the body when that object was looked at, touched, or heard, from a specific perspective; the engagement caused the body to change; the presence of the object was felt; the object was made salient.
    The nonverbal narrative of such perpetually occurring events spontaneously portrays in the mind the fact that there is a protagonist to whom certain events are happening, that protagonist being the material me. The portrayal in the nonverbal narrative simultaneously creates and reveals the protagonist, connects the actions being produced by the organism to that same protagonist, and, along with the feeling generated by engaging with the object, engenders a sense of ownership.
    What is being added to the plain mind process and is thus producing a conscious mind is a series of images, namely, an image of the organism (provided by the modified protoself proxy); the image of an object-related emotional response (that is, a feeling); and an image of the momentarily enhanced causative object. The self comes to mind in the form of images, relentlessly telling a story of such engagements . The images of the modified protoself and of the feeling of knowing do not even have to be especially intense. They just have to be there in the mind, however subtly, little more than hints, to provide a connection between object and organism. After all, it is the object that most matters in order for the process to be adaptive.
    I see this wordless narrative as an account of what is transpiring, in life as well as in the brain, but not yet as an interpretation. It is, rather, an unsolicited description of events, the brain indulging in answering questions that no one has posed. Michael Gazzaniga has advanced the notion of “interpreter” as a way of explaining the generation of consciousness. Moreover, he has related it, quite sensibly, to the machinery of the left hemisphere and to the language processes therein. I like his idea very much (in fact, there is a distinct ring of truth to it), but I believe it applies fully only to the level of the autobiographical self and not quite to that of the core self. 9
    In brains endowed with abundant memory, language, and reasoning, narratives with this same simple origin and contour are enriched and