Altered Egos

How does the brain, an organ composed of billions of individual cells, create the subjective sense of a unified self? And where is the self located in the brain? Here, the author describes his search, from medical school through his career as a psychiatrist and neurologist, for answers to these questions. The result is a work that explores the fundamental relationship between the self and the brain. Beginning with vignettes of patients who have neurological perturbations of the self, Feinberg gives an account of how the human brain functions - and malfunctions - in people with psychiatric and neurological disorders. In doing so he presents a theory of the self that links the workings of the brain with unique features of the mind, such as meaning, purpose and being. Feinberg argues that computers will never be conscious or have selves because the self and the mind are unique constituents of the life of the individual.