Where Does This I Arise? Mountain Path, Oct 2011

The current October - December 2011 edition of Mountain Path,published by Ramana Maharshi's ashram in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India contains an article "i" wrote entitled "Where Does This I Arise?; What Does Current Science Say?". This is a neuroscientific perspective on the latest scientific research on where the "I" manifests in the brain.



The main conclusion of the article is "The point of all of this is to show that science has not been able to find any 'single and permanent' place for anything like a central controller, or "I". The "self" or "I" is found only as several different places where different functions occur. When those functions aren't being actively performed, there isn't anything 'active' really there - just apparently inactive portions of the brain.

Another important conclusion, IMHO, is "The 'I' has also been clearly identified as associated, perhaps even 'created' by memory. Where does memory reside in the brain? Perhaps that is where the "I" is. The hippocampus is normally considered to be where short-term memory is organized, managed and retrieved. If one looks at short term memory retrieval in progress, a schematic of what it typically looks like if an fMRI is imposed on the brain..shows that there is no single memory site, or location where the "I" resides. If one inquires into the question 'Where am I?', one would have to answer that 'I am all over the place in different places at different times depending on what memories are involved and what functions are being performed."

If one looks at how the brain functionally is segregated between the "I"/working memory/'Graphical user interface "secondary consciousness" which can handle only 7 +/- 2 dissimilar elements at a time and the "primary consciousness" composed of the 100,000,000,000 neurons and 35,000,000,000,000 synaptic interconnections between neurons comprising a massive hard drive and many high speed parallel processors, it is clear that the working memory/"I"/secondary consciousness only takes credit for what the primary consciousness does.

The entire article is available in four separate Google Docs links highlighted in this sentence.