“The surprising ways the body works with the brain to shape our sense of self,” by Anil Ananthaswamy in Quartz (3/3/16):
German philosopher Thomas Metzinger has argued that the feeling of being embodied is a pre-reflective, pre-linguistic form of selfhood — a sense that our ancestors must have had long before humans gained the capacity to use the personal pronoun in phrases like “I think.” There is no narrative in this kind of bodily self; just the ability to feel anchored in a body and distinguish between the self and the non-self.
Eventually, evolution gave us memory, cognition, culture and the ability to construct narratives. All of this has allowed us to form a psychological self that works in conjunction with our bodily one.
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