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Heart or head: where is your sense of self, your sense of I-ness?



Is your sense of self in your heart or in your head—or some other part of your body? Is your sense of self within your body at all, or is it a nebulous feeling and not really part of you? An article in Discover asked this very question (December 2014, www.discovermagazine.com), seeking to find the answer in children.

When Emma Harris, science writer, asked her four-year-old daughter where her “self” was, the child immediately pointed to her heart. This surprised Harris because she identified her “self” as “sitting behind my eyes.” When she asked her friends to ask their children, the answers ranged from the side of the head, inside the eyes, or their heart. So who is right?

In 2008 Italian researchers asked 59 participants, through structured interviews, to point on a human model “the I-that-perceives.” It resulted in 83% of them pointing between and behind their eyes.

In 2011 two German researchers showed 87 online participants a silhouette of a human form and asked them to indicate a spot where they believed their “self” was. Most indicated a point near their brain, while others indicated a point near their heart.

Two Danish researchers from the University of Copenhagen used physical pointers to locate the position of “self” with their participants. The sliding pointer travelled over their body and participants were asked to call out when the pointer hit a spot believed to be the “self.” However, they found that if the researchers began the movement of the pointer from the top of the body, most participants stopped at the upper face. When the researchers started the movement of the pointer from the feet, the same participants stopped the pointer at the upper torso (body). When questioned about the discrepancy, they said, “both felt right.”

How can researchers answer the abstract question without bias? And what does a sense of “self” mean anyway? Is it the same notion as consciousness as defined by philosophers studying consciousness and the self? The early philosophers, such as Rene Descartes believed that our conscious selves (our minds) are separate from our physical bodies, but recent philosophers don’t necessarily agree with this dualist view. Neurologists, the brain scientists, indicate that “self” is a result of all activities from the brain and body of a person. Philosopher Daniel Dennett calls it the multiple draft model because the sense of “self” changes constantly.

We are no clearer—is a sense of self the place where we think, or the place where we feel, or is it where we act, or hear, or see, or touch, or know …


So, where is your sense of “self” – the point where you say this my “I-ness”—this is me: the heart or the head or a multiple model or a separation schema? Try asking your children.


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