Neuronal self

Self-concept is our mental representation of who we are (identity) and what we are like as a person (personality). This representation plays a central role in our life – it allows us to learn from past personal experiences, predict future encounters, and generate complex behaviors. However, the neuronal and computational mechanisms of how we represent ourselves remain largely unknown.

Apart from its general relevance to all of us as thinking individuals, self-concept is important from a clinical perspective. For example, depression is characterized by increased self-focus and negative self-evaluations, whereas people with autism have problems inferring about their own as well as other people’s mental states. Other maladies of the self include depersonalization, dissociative identity, and borderline personality. Current treatments of these disorders are not always effective, which poses serious personal and socioeconomic challenges. Formulating a neuroscientific model of the sense of self is a necessary step toward designing new, brain-stimulation-based therapies.

The aim of this EU project funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action is to use the state-of-the-art method of intracranial electrophysiology to identify and characterize single neurons in the human brain that represent conceptual information about the self. We record electrical brain activity from awake human subjects implanted with depth electrodes for pre-surgical assessment. Our cognitive experiments are conducted during this clinical monitoring period, with no added risk to the patients. This project is a collaboration between the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) and the University of California, Los Angeles (USA).