The Symphony of Self

As we awaken from sleep, our consciousness undergoes a radical transformation composed of dramatic adjustments in neural processes. Some neural circuits go quiet while others come online. The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor, Damasio posits that the decentralized process does have hot spots of top-down modulation linked by connections built over evolutionary time. These “command centers,” for lack of a more accurate but succinct term, do one thing really well: They create our sense of self, our sense of being a protagonist in a continuously unfolding nonlinear narrative through which we can travel again and again in our memories and plan possible and even impossible futures. These circuits have been specially designed by natural selection to work with the rest of our perceptual, attentional, and memorial machinery to allow us incredible feats of counterfactual reasoning, from mere day dreaming to building highfalutin philosophical treaties or richly decorated fantasy worlds of pure fiction. At the center of these abilities lies our “self”: that lonely kid in the playground of fantasy populated by his or her imaginary friends and foes. Thus, as you awake, you become self-aware. Your “self” becomes defined — its position situated within the context of your surroundings and unfolding timeline of events — and your streams of thought come into focus. You become the pinnacle of embodied cognition.