Self Delusion - The Library of the Uncommons

English language

Published March 21, 2022 by Basic Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-5416-0230-4

(1 review)

A New York Times–bestselling author reveals how the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, are critical to our lives We all know we tell stories about ourselves. But as psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns argues in The Self Delusion, we don’t just tell stories; we are the stories. Our self-identities are fleeting phenomena, continually reborn as our conscious minds receive, filter, or act on incoming information from the world and our memories. Drawing on new research in neuroscience, social science, and psychiatry, Berns shows how our stories and our self-identities are temporary and therefore ever changing. Berns shows how we can embrace the delusion of a singular self to make our lives better, offering a plan not centered on what we think will be best for us, but predicated on minimizing regrets. Enlightening, empowering, and surprising, The Self Delusion shows us how to be the protagonist of the stories we …

A New York Times–bestselling author reveals how the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, are critical to our lives We all know we tell stories about ourselves. But as psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns argues in The Self Delusion, we don’t just tell stories; we are the stories. Our self-identities are fleeting phenomena, continually reborn as our conscious minds receive, filter, or act on incoming information from the world and our memories. Drawing on new research in neuroscience, social science, and psychiatry, Berns shows how our stories and our self-identities are temporary and therefore ever changing. Berns shows how we can embrace the delusion of a singular self to make our lives better, offering a plan not centered on what we think will be best for us, but predicated on minimizing regrets. Enlightening, empowering, and surprising, The Self Delusion shows us how to be the protagonist of the stories we want to tell.

3 editions

4thace reviewed Self Delusion by Gregory Berns

The detail of neuroscience research was the best part

3 stars

I picked up this book because I saw it praised on social media as featuring a novel way of thinking about personal identity as something less fixed and more mutable. Much of what the author describes I had already gleaned such as the way the mind actively creates memories by stitching together disconnected perceptions over time based on some predetermined model of external reality.

I liked the sections on the research his lib did using fMRI to image activity in brean regions to try to uncover what is the mechanism of brain operations making up thought, will, and perception. It was especially good to hear about times the team had some hypothesis going in to the experiment, but obtained results not supporting what they had believed. I was less enchanted with the sections on storytelling and Joseph Campbell's monomyth, which I feel has been overhyped already and is peripheral to …

I picked up this book because I saw it praised on social media as featuring a novel way of thinking about personal identity as something less fixed and more mutable. Much of what the author describes I had already gleaned such as the way the mind actively creates memories by stitching together disconnected perceptions over time based on some predetermined model of external reality.

I liked the sections on the research his lib did using fMRI to image activity in brean regions to try to uncover what is the mechanism of brain operations making up thought, will, and perception. It was especially good to hear about times the team had some hypothesis going in to the experiment, but obtained results not supporting what they had believed. I was less enchanted with the sections on storytelling and Joseph Campbell's monomyth, which I feel has been overhyped already and is peripheral to the neuroscience content. Though there are myths worth breaking about the way the mind works, this book doesn't really present a blockbuster insight that hasn't in some form already been discussed by philosophers of mind before. I am not sure whether I am going to read this author's other books on brain science.

The audio narration by Byron Wagner was clear and restrained but I think I got the same thing out of the material as I would have from the print word edition.

Subjects

Neurosciences
Cognitive neuroscience