Neuroscientists are discovering what Buddhists have believed for ages: our self is not constant, but ever-changing. A new paper, published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences this month, links the Buddhist belief to physical areas of the brain. There’s scientific evidence that “self-processing in the brain is not instantiated in a particular region or network, but rather extends to a broad range of fluctuating neural processes that do not appear to be self specific,” write the authors. As Even Thompson, a philosophy of mind professor at the University of British Columbia, says, “There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”
This article was originally published on September 21, 2015
