I'm sure you have wondered, at some time or the other, "who am i?" Probably, you are the kind of person who has meditated over it, or you might be the kind who does not give it a second thought. Probably you were born in a culture, like the Indian culture, where you have heard this question from your elders, or from stories in your childhood. Probably you have gone one step further and wondered or heard questions like "why am i here?" or "what am i here for?"

But have you ever wondered what does it mean to "be me"? Over any period of time, be it short or long, we are continuously changing. Changing physically - children grow up, adults grow old; emotionally - our moods keep changing constantly; and in many other ways - life is change! But there is one thing that never changes, the feeling of "me". No matter where we are, in what place, in what situation, we always know our "selves". How does this happen? In fact, what is this self?

These questions can be looked at from both a philosophical as well as a scientific point of view. Today we are going to look at it from the scientific angle and delve further into questions like "what is consciousness?", "what does it mean to say 'i am me'?", "where does this consciousness come from?", "can we point to a point or location in the brain which generates consciousness?", and the like.

Lets start with the question of "Do other creatures, have a sense of self?" It appears that there are a few animals and birds that do have a recognition of self. It has been found that they can identify themselves and know the self from the others. It is very interesting to know how scientists figure out whether animals, or birds, can identify themselves. In fact, it's a simple but very clever trick; it's called the mirror test developed by Dr. Gordon Gallup while doing some studies. Consciousness, or self, is a very intellectual thing. In the mirror test, the animal is able to create a representation of itself that floats free of its body. It can't touch it or smell it, but just by seeing it, it knows that "that's me". This is very fascinating!

Professor Julian Keenan has been able to pinpoint the location of where the idea of the self is generated in our brains. He created an experiment using some morphing software and images of famous people like Albert Einstein and Bill Clinton to find out that if you

press your thumb to the bridge of your nose. Now draw it slowly over the crown of your head to about where you might have a ponytail. That area under your skull is where 'you' are.

Professor V. S. Ramachandran, a world renowned neurologist, says that "self is the activities of the neurons." Although, simple when stated that way, it is, he says, one of the greatest realization in the last 100 years. He explains how the human brain is different from that of other animals. A worm, for example, does not have a brain big enough to form any sort of images in its mind. A monkey, on the other hand, although able to form images, cannot manipulate them in his mind. A human being, however, has a much more powerful brain. Only man can take images from the real world, pull them into his head, divide them into parts and then start turning those parts into abstractions, or tokens. He can manipulate these tokens and juxtapose them in counterintuitive ways; he can create even outlandish scenarios - what we call imagination. We are not different from other animals, we are only more than them. We are imagining so often and so thoroughly, that we can eventually imagine ourselves! He says, self is the ability of humans to spin a story around themselves. We can take experiences, memories of good and bad events, and abstract a story out of it - that is self!

photo attribution

Readers of classic novels are not unaware of The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. He said that he used to dream of "little people" who helped him write his stories. He trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books. Dreams bring us to a very interesting question about consciousness. If we think about this in modern terms, like when you see a movie, you, the viewer, has no idea what is going to happen next. You scream at the scary parts, laugh at the jokes, and cry during the sad scenes. But in order for you to have that experience, someone needed to write the movie, someone needed to direct it, someone other than you. How is it, when we dream, that we do all 3 at the same time? We write, direct and watch the film as if we've never seen it before.

This is how Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab, in their episode "Who Am I?" find it:

If you look scientifically into a brain, what you encounter is hundreds of thousands of players, not just little people, but teeny teeny teeny teeny brain cells which do others fashion back and forth. If you would go to any one of the cells and say, "so, are you the author of 'Jackyl and Hyde'?", the cell would just go on or off. It is only in the group that you can see the electrical outline of a thought, or ultimately of a self. While you think of yourself as a 'one', even the thought, 'I am a one', springs from a 100 million cells connecting through a trillion synapses and that all of this multiple activities, paradoxically, creates the you of this moment. You are always plural!<

There is also a medical side to our consciousness. There is a condition of the brain called cerebral aneurysm in which the person loses his sense of self; he becomes a completely different person. Writer and producer Hannah Palin writes about her experience when her mother suffered from aneurysm in "The day my mother's head exploded". I like the following paragraph from the passage a lot:

But then those moments pass and you're consumed by the trivia of daily life once again. Sometimes, when i'm overwhelmed by making my way through the world, i try to focus on the fact that the electric bill does not matter. The idiot driver glued to his cellphone, does not matter. The mind numbing day job, truly, does not matter. But welcoming the strange and the different, being open and available for my husband, my friends, my family, experiencing love and laughter as often as possible - that's what matters. Because it can all be taken away in one brilliant flash.