How Our Brain Preserves Our Sense of Self
By Robert Martone for Scientific American
We are all time travelers. Every day we experience new things as we travel forward through time. As we do, the countless connections between the nerve cells in our brain recalibrate to accommodate these experiences. It's as if we reassemble ourselves daily, maintaining a mental construct of ourselves in physical time, and the glue that holds together our core identity is memory.
Our travels are not limited to physical time. We also experience mental time travel. We visit the past through our memories and then journey into the future by imagining what tomorrow or next year might bring. When we do so, we think of ourselves as we are now, remember who we once were and imagine how we will be.
Psychologists have long noticed that a person's mind handles information about oneself differently from other details. Memories that reference the self are easier to recall than other forms of memory.
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