Table of Contents
The New Neuroscience of How We (Re)Invent Our Identities
Discover the groundbreaking ideas from Gregory Berns’ “The Self Delusion” and learn how neuroscience reveals the illusion of a fixed self. Explore actionable strategies to reshape your personal narrative, minimize regrets, and unlock a more fulfilling future. Start your journey to self-reinvention today!
Ready to break free from outdated self-narratives and take control of your future? Dive deeper into these transformative insights and discover practical steps to rewrite your story-keep reading to unlock the science-backed secrets to a more empowered you!
Genres
Psychology, Science, Personal Development
Introduction: Discover a fascinating perspective on human identity.
The Self Delusion (2022) asks a mind-bending question: What if the “you” from yesterday, today, and tomorrow are actually three different people? It explains how our brains create the illusion of a single, continuous self – and how we can rewrite that story to shape our future.
Our understanding of the brain has come a long way. One of the biggest insights is that perception isn’t a direct snapshot of reality. Instead, our brains are constantly guessing, combining sensory input with memories and expectations to fill in the gaps.
The thing is, our senses, perceptions, and memories are all imperfect. And this extends to how we see ourselves as well. We create a self-image built on assumptions and guesswork rather than clear facts.
In this summary, we’ll explore our messy sense of self by looking at five key ideas: how we know things, store information, predict the future, occasionally detach from ourselves, and craft stories.
It’ll all come together with one powerful message – our self-narratives aren’t fixed. We can change the story, and in doing so, change who we become.
Starting the script
Have you ever thought about how you can’t physically feel your own brain, even though it controls everything you experience? You can feel your stomach ache or the pressure on your skin – but your brain? It runs the entire show without you ever directly sensing it. What you do feel is the simulation your brain builds: your body, your voice, your reflection. All of these things are crafted by the brain from imperfect guesses.
Think about how weird your voice sounds in a recording or how a mirror flips your image. These small distortions remind you that you live inside a mental model rather than pure reality.
Even the sense of “present-you” is a stitched-together illusion. Signals from different parts of your body reach the brain at different speeds, and your brain does its best to create a seamless version of now. But most of your mental energy isn’t spent living in this moment – it’s bouncing between memories of past versions of yourself and hazy guesses about who you might become.
And that past self? You know it from memories that are flexible and flawed, mixed with external reminders like photos and journals, which you reinterpret over time. The future self is even foggier. While the brain can make short-term predictions, imagining who you’ll be in five or ten years is guesswork built on shaky foundations. Yet this illusion of a continuous self – past, present, and future – keeps you moving forward.
At its heart, it’s a story – a narrative that started forming early in your life. The tales you heard as a child shaped the template you use for understanding yourself and the world around you.
The thing is, memories are far from perfect. The way you store memories goes like this: First, you encode experiences. Then, during consolidation, those experiences settle into long-term memory – often solidifying while you sleep. Finally, retrieval reconstructs the memory, sometimes blending in new details and reshaping the original event. Emotional memories feel especially real, but even they are prone to distortion. Memories are also fragile; the less you bring them up, the more they’ll begin to deteriorate.
But some memories are more impactful than others. Psychologist Susan Engel describes how storytelling, from sharing family tales to experimenting with personal narratives, helps children form a stable identity by around age nine. And in the end, those early stories become the lifelong scripts that shape who we believe we are.
Using imperfect data to make predictions
As much as you’d like to think your memories are perfectly recorded movies, they’re more like stitched-together snapshots with gaps that your brain smooths over. These simplified mental storyboards are necessary, though, because the brain can’t hold every detail.
That means your brain is like an editor working with blurry footage, simplifying and exaggerating details into cartoon versions of yourself and the world. It both compresses and generalizes in order to make everything manageable. And, quite naturally, you shape these compressed generalizations into the form of familiar stories. As mentioned earlier, this process starts in childhood, with the stories you absorb shaping how you interpret life.
At the heart of many of these narratives is causality. You instinctively connect events in cause-and-effect chains because it helps you predict what’s coming next. This is one of the brain’s main functions: to constantly take in sensory data and create a best-guess version of reality. In a way, it’s like a card-counting machine, updating the odds as a game of blackjack progresses. Every time new information comes in, the brain recalculates.
This predictive process even extends to your senses, and it can lead to strange experiences, like how touching your own cheek feels different from someone else doing it. Likewise, you’ll get a different sensation if you touch your right cheek with your left hand, versus going around the back of your head to touching the same cheek with your left hand. This is because your brain dampens sensations it expects but amplifies those it doesn’t.
Causality can move beyond your body as well. If you’ve driven the same car for long enough, it can begin to feel like part of your body. That’s your brain extending your sense of self through prediction.
In other words, your perception is yours and yours alone, but even this isn’t consistent. Whenever you rearrange events, the story – and your interpretation – changes dramatically. For example, two people in the same fender bender will tell completely different stories about what happened, each based on their own internal narrative.
Essentially, everything you experience is a messy cocktail of memory, perception, and prediction. In these various ways, your past-self and present-self aren’t well defined. But as you’ll see in the next section, things get even more complicated when you factor in the brain’s dissociative tendencies.
The group mentality
The idea that you’re not just one unified self, but a collection of different selves, isn’t exactly new. Freud broke the self down into three pieces: the id, ego, and superego. And Jung had his theory of the shadow self.
These ideas were about uncovering the hidden layers of who people are. Over time, the psychiatric community began to wonder if multiple distinct personalities could truly coexist in one person. This idea has captured our imagination ever since.
From superhero stories to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we’re drawn to the concept of transformation because, deep down, we all know we’ve got different versions of ourselves tucked away. You probably have a different version of yourself that you present at work, to someone you’re meeting for the first time, and to close friends and family.
All of this taps into your ability to have dissociative moments. For instance, maybe you’ve experienced periods of such intensity that you feel like you’re watching your life from the outside – almost like a movie. On the extreme end, there’s Dissociative Identity Disorder, where distinct personalities take turns running the show.
Dissociation is something we’re all capable of. It allows us to step into multiple narratives, which is something we humans are naturally drawn to. In fact, it’s practice for life and our ability to function in society.
We’ve always needed to get along with others to survive, so we’re wired to absorb ideas and attitudes from the people around us. Just like getting lost in a good movie or book, we blend other people’s thoughts and perspectives into our own until it’s hard to tell where their minds end and ours begins.
One big reason for this blending is something called Theory of Mind, or ToM – basically, our ability to think about what others are thinking. This mental superpower helps us collaborate and connect on a deep level. But the flip side? We’re constantly pulling other people’s opinions into our mental world. We evolved to follow the crowd because, more often than not, the crowd’s instincts have kept us safe. Going along with others is built into us.
But social situations inevitably turn into a juggling act, where we have to balance who we think we are, who we think others think we are – and even what others might think we think! The power of outside influence extends to our morals and so-called sacred truths that we also feel defined by. We may think of these as unshakable, personal beliefs, but they stem from the community we were raised in.
These days, political polarization is a prime example of what happens when morals are arrived at through community pressure. Each side’s sacred values harden and become nonnegotiable, leaving little room for compromise. This groupthink cements identity and makes it feel less like a personal choice and more like a rigid code that must be followed, with societal pressure amplifying it.
So, now we’ve got three factors shaping our ever-evolving sense of self: our messy memories of the past, our uncertain hopes for the future, and the reflections of everyone around us. And often, our present thoughts are borrowed, blended, and shaped by others without us even realizing it.
The power of a good narrative
At this point, we’ve looked at the internal and external influences that combine to create a sense of self that’s anything but consistent. Now, let’s focus on just how powerful a good story is to the human brain.
From an early age, we’re heavily influenced by the most popular narratives, like the hero’s journey, which can be seen in everything from the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh to Star Wars to the latest Marvel movie. And this sets a template that might not be in our best interest.
You see, these stories are more than just entertainment – they literally change our brains. In one experiment, author Gregory Berns had students read a historical novel, scanning their brains before and after. The result? Not only did areas linked to language comprehension become more active and connected, but even sensory and motor regions lit up.
Clearly, a good narrative doesn’t just live in our heads – it can make us feel, physically and emotionally, as though we’re experiencing it firsthand. Stories are deeply embedded into our mental frameworks; they act like food for our brains and shape the templates we use to understand life.
But this also comes with a warning: we need to be mindful about which narratives we “feed” ourselves. Whether we gravitate toward tales of hope and heroism or those of fear and mistrust, they will ultimately shape the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Remember the Theory of Mind? This fact of human nature, designed to help us cooperate and empathize, also leaves us open to manipulation by allowing others to sneak misinformation into our minds. Repeated exposure to false information can subtly warp our perception of reality – and if enough people believe a false story, it can become a widely accepted narrative, regardless of facts. So here’s a checklist for spotting false narratives: question the storyteller’s credibility, watch out for personal grievances, and be cautious when martyr figures are involved.
Stories are powerful – they can set us free or keep us stuck in illusion. In the final section, we’ll explore how shifting the narrative template can open the door to true liberation.
Creating a new story without regret
When looking at our life stories, we usually focus on “branch points” – the moments when we make decisions, big or small, that end up defining our paths. It might be choosing a career, deciding where to live, or even something as small as going to a party where we meet someone who changes our life. At the same time, for many of us, these pivotal moments can be filled with regret – either for the actions we decided to take, or the opportunities we missed.
The tricky thing about regret is that it isn’t just about looking backward. It’s basically a mental tool to help us make decisions for the future through a process known as “counterfactual thinking.” We imagine how things could have gone differently and use that mental exercise to make better choices moving forward.
As a result, the regret of omission – and the act of obsessively thinking about what we didn’t do – often feels heavier than the regret over actions we did take. That’s because the missed possibilities are endless and unknowable. But regret doesn’t have to weigh us down; it can also help reshape our narrative. By reframing past near-misses or mistakes as moments of luck or learning, we can change how they influence our future behavior. Finding joy in what could have gone wrong but didn’t, or viewing missed chances as motivation, can push us to make braver decisions.
All of this is to say, now is the time to make a conscious choice. Spend less time dwelling on past regrets and more time imagining future ones. Then use that vision to steer your choices today. Everything you’ve learned about how your brain works, and its love of narrative, can be leveraged to start a positive change – a path toward the version of the self that you most desire.
When you think about your own life story, you might picture it as a classic three-act arc: you’re born, you live, you die. But the fact is, most of the stories you love begin in media res – they’re already in progress.
So, what if you could start your story today? That means letting go of fairy-tale narratives and embracing a different framework – one rooted in the wisdom of thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, who saw fulfillment not in chasing a hero’s journey but in living a virtuous life. Meaning comes from creating, experiencing, and even struggling, as long as you grow from it. Instead of obsessing over rewriting the past, shift your focus forward and imagine the better version of yourself that you can become.
To make this even clearer, try a thought experiment: picture cloning yourself and sending this other you – complete with all your memories and experiences – into the future. What would you want them to achieve? Map out clear goals for the next five years and use that vision as a blueprint for a more meaningful life.
This exercise takes effort and patience, but it starts with a simple truth – your story is yours to shape. And the good news is, you have an edge. Your past experiences give you the ability to anticipate obstacles, spot patterns, and recognize where your weaknesses might trip you up. This awareness pairs perfectly with a “regret minimization” mindset. When faced with a decision, try looking at it from the future: What choice would you be glad you made?
At first, realizing how fluid your identity is might feel unsettling, but it’s also freeing. You’re not locked into a single narrative – you get to write the next chapters. Every choice you make shapes the person you’re becoming, and it’s never too late to start steering your story in a new direction.
Conclusion
The main takeaway of this summary to The Self Delusion by Gregory Berns is that you might think of yourself as one continuous person throughout your life. But your past-, present-, and future-self are really different people, constantly shifting as your body and brain evolve.
Your sense of self is held together by the narratives you tell yourself – stories shaped by memories, compressed patterns, and templates the brain uses to process experience. From birth, your mind is wired to form an identity based on what you remember, predict, and compare.
But these narratives aren’t set in stone; they’re flexible and can be rewritten over time. With conscious effort, you can take control of your stories and shape your future self with intention – giving yourself a better chance of more fulfillment and fewer regrets.