Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923

ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCESIssue: Perspectives on the Self

What do you think you are?

Christina Starmans and Paul BloomDepartment of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Address for correspondence: Christina Starmans, Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT.christina.starmans@yale.edu

Here, what might be considered a universal belief in dualism is integrated with developmental perspectives on theemergence of identifying the mental and physical components of the self. Additionally, work to “localize” the self isintroduced.

“Pig valves.” Rabbit tries to hide his revulsion. “Wasit terrible? They split your chest open and run yourblood through a machine?”“Piece of cake. You’re knocked out cold. What’swrong with running your blood through a machine?What else you think you are, champ?”A god-made one-of-a-kind with an immortal soulbreathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battlefield of goodand evil. An apprentice angel.

—John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

Humans have long wondered about the natureof our conscious selves. Are we immaterial souls,essentially different from material things such aschairs and trees and our own physical bodies? Or ismental life the by-product of the physical workingsof the brain, in much the same way that the capac-ities of a computer emerge from low-level physicalprocesses? (The usual slogan here is “The mind iswhat the brain does”). Perhaps the right theory ofselves will be based on the interaction between ourbrains and our environments, especially our socialenvironments. Or, as some skeptical philosopherswould argue, Is the very notion of a self (and con-sciousness, and free will) an illusion, having no placein a mature scientific understanding of the universe?

This mystery is, perhaps fortunately, not the topicof our current paper. We are interested here in asimpler and more tractable question, one that runsparallel to the harder one: How do people naturallythink of themselves? What is the commonsense con-ception of self?

It is possible that there is no answer tothis question. Perhaps individuals have radically

different conceptions, depending on their reli-gious background, their scientific views, and theirphilosophical views, explicit or otherwise. It is alsopossible that most people have no conception of theself at all, simply because they have never given theissue any thought.

We will suggest here, however, that there is evi-dence for two universal beliefs about the self. Theseshow up in all cultures, emerge spontaneously in de-velopment, and are hard to shake, even by those ofus who consciously believe that they are mistaken.

The first belief is that the self is nonphysical(see Ref. 1, which is the basis for much of thediscussion that follows). In other words, we natu-rally subscribe to the philosophical doctrine knownas dualism, most elegantly articulated by ReneDescartes.2

Indeed, Descartes’ most famous argument for themetaphysical truth of dualism was based on his ownintuitions. In 1641, he embarked on his plan ofphilosophical skepticism. He knew that a lot of whathe believed could be false; after all, certain lunatics,“befogged by the black vapors of the bile,” believethat they are kings, or that their heads are madeout of clay, or that their bodies are glass. AlthoughDescartes refused to entertain the possibility thathe himself might be a lunatic, he noted that whenhe slept, he dreamed the same things that lunaticsimagine while they are awake. How could he be cer-tain that he was not now asleep? Or that everythinghe perceived and knew to be true was a result of thediabolical manipulations of an evil demon? How,then, could he trust any of his intuitions?

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06144.x44 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1234 (2011) 44–47 c© 2011 New York Academy of Sciences.

Starmans & Bloom What do you think you are?

Descartes concluded that the one thing he couldnot be deceived about was the fact that he, himself,existed: I think, therefore I am. He added: “So thisself, that is to say the soul, through which I am whatI am, is entirely separate from the body, and is evenmore easily known than the latter, so that even if Idid not have a body, my soul would continue to beall that it is.” Descartes concluded that he was nothis body and could exist even if his body did not.

This does seem to make sense in certain dis-cussions. Indeed, the afterlife beliefs expressed inmany of the world’s religions entail this dualistmetaphysics, in which the self is separate from thebody and can survive its destruction—we ascend toheaven, descend to hell, occupy another body, orenter a spirit world.

This metaphysical stance might be rooted in anearly-emerging distinction between the mental andthe physical. The psychologist Henry Wellman pro-poses that “young children are dualists: knowledge-able of mental states and entities as ontologicallydifferent from physical objects and real events” (p.50).3 His conclusion is based on a series of influentialexperiments. In one of them, young children weretold stories involving mental entities versus physicalentities. For instance, one tale was about one boywho had a cookie and another boy who was think-ing about a cookie. Even three year olds understandthe difference between a real cookie, which can beseen and touched by another person, and an imag-ined cookie; conversely, an imagined cookie can bementally transformed by the person who is thinkingabout it, but a real cookie cannot be transformed.

Now this is not the same as Cartesian dualism; ifchildren believe that these mental states are coexten-sive with physical states (specifically, brain states),then they are not dualists in the interestingly Carte-sian sense.

There is, however, some evidence for a strongerdualism in children. Jean Piaget found that up un-til the age of about eight, the children he studiedhad little understanding of what the brain was for.Modern American and European children are moreprecocious than this. Five year olds know where thebrain is, and they know that people and other an-imals cannot think without a brain. But they donot usually understand that the brain is needed forphysical action, such as hopping or brushing yourteeth, and they do not think the brain is needed foran activity like pretending to be a kangaroo. And

if you tell these children a story in which a child’sbrain is successfully transplanted into the head ofa pig, children agree that the pig would now be assmart as a person, but they think that it would stillkeep the memories, personality, and identity of thepig. Indeed, the natural conception of the brain bychildren, even after science education, is that it isa tool we use for certain mental operations. It is acognitive prosthesis, added to the soul to increaseits computing power.

Indeed, we doubt that this understanding is muchdifferent from that of many adults. Much excite-ment is generated by recent studies showing in-creased neural activity—certain parts of the brain“lighting up” in a scanner—when subjects thinkabout such intimate and important topics as reli-gion, or love, or race. The details of these findingsare plainly relevant for theories of the location andtime course of different mental activities, but peo-ple often seem fascinated by the mere fact that thebrain is involved at all. We are astonished becausewe feel that we love and hate and believe in God,not our brains. Such astonishment betrays the dual-ist intuitions of even the most scientifically literateadults.

The proposal so far is that people think that theyare immaterial; we are not identical to our physi-cal bodies. But there is an interesting way in whichour commonsense dualism departs from Descartes’dualism. Consider how Descartes summarizes hisconclusion: “I realized that I was a substance whoseessence, or nature, is nothing but thought, andwhich, in order to exist, needs no place to existnor any other material thing.” For Descartes, then,the soul “needs no place to exist.” But we wouldsuggest that our commonsense assumption is thatit does have a place. More specifically, the secondcommonsense assumption about our selves is thatwe exist inside our heads.

There has been little empirical research exploringour intuitions about the location of the self. To ourknowledge, the only study that has directly exam-ined this question was done by a group of Italianresearchers, who guided adult participants througha lengthy semistructured interview designed to gen-erate a verbal report of their phenomenological ex-perience of the location of the self.4 Not only werepeople perfectly able to make sense of the ideaof their self being “located” in a particular spotwithin the body, they also found it relatively easy to

Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1234 (2011) 44–47 c© 2011 New York Academy of Sciences. 45

What do you think you are? Starmans & Bloom

indicate a precise location, and their answers werehighly consensual. The vast majority of participantsindicated a precise point inside the head, midwaybehind the eyes, as the location for what the re-searchers called the “I-that-perceives.”

Furthermore, the researchers also recruited eightsubjects who were blind—some from birth, andsome who became blind later in life. These sub-jects showed the same pattern of responses as thesighted subjects, suggesting that the experience ofthe self as being in the head, near the eyes, is notentirely related to vision.

What can we conclude from these findings? Itseems that when asked directly, people have no prob-lem asserting that their conscious self is located in-side their head. However, it is highly likely that theseadult subjects were aware of the common contem-porary idea that the brain is responsible for pro-ducing all mental states. As such, it is possible thatdespite being instructed to focus on their phenom-enal experiences, these participants were simply us-ing their culturally acquired knowledge of the brainas the source of mental life to guide their responses.The overwhelming concurrence of the blind subjectsmay actually provide additional evidence that this isthe case, as blind subjects obviously have differentphenomenal experiences than sighted subjects, butprobably have the same cultural knowledge.

We were interested in whether, aside from thiscultural knowledge, there is an intuitive sense ofthe self as being located in a particular spot in thebody. One way of getting at these intuitions is tolook at preschool-aged children, who have little un-derstanding of the brain as the producer of mentalstates.5

There is some indirect evidence to suggest that,in fact, children at this age do have intuitions aboutthe location of the self. In a 1980 study investigat-ing children’s egocentrism, Flavell et al.6 found thatwhen 2.5- to 4-year-old children had their eyes cov-ered, they judged that an experimenter could notsee them. However, they acknowledged that the ex-perimenter could see their arm, despite the fact thatthe child themselves could not, suggesting that theywere capable of taking the experimenter’s perspec-tive at least some of the time.

In a related study, McGuigan and Doherty7 foundthat 2- and 3-year-old children claimed that theycould see a doll if its legs were occluded, but thatthey could not see the doll if its head was occluded.

The researchers interpreted this curious pattern ofresults as suggesting that children between the agesof about 2 and 4 may have a different notion thanadults of what it means to “see” a person. McGuiganand Doherty7 suggest that children may miscon-strue the concept of “seeing” a human target as anactivity that requires mutual engagement.

But there is another interpretation, first proposedin this journal by Neisser.8 Perhaps children intu-itively see the head or the eyes as the “location” ofthe individual and intend the claim that the exper-imenter “can’t see me” to mean the experimenter“can’t see my self .” This hypothesis predicts thatchildren would also claim that they could not seeanother person when that person’s eyes were cov-ered. A later study by McGuigan9 finds exactly thisresult: 2- and 3-year-old children claimed that whena doll was blindfolded, another doll could not seeit.

We are currently conducting three experimentsto further investigate the hypothesis that humanshave a natural inclination to think of the head, andperhaps the eyes, as the location of the self.10 Theseexperiments use two different implicit methods toprobe the intuitions of 4- and 5-year-old children, aswell as undergraduate adults. Both of these methodstake advantage of the idea that we understand thereferent of proper names such as “Sally” to be theperson’s self, which may correspond with some, all,or none of her physical body.

In one study we show 4- and 5-year-old children,and a group of Yale undergraduates, a stick-figuredrawing of a girl named Sally, and ask them to eraseas much of the drawing as possible while still leavingSally in the picture. Both children and adults tend toerase the elements of Sally’s lower body before thoseof her head. Children are equally likely to leave allthe parts of Sally’s head in the picture, while adultsmore often leave Sally’s eyes in the picture than hermouth.

In another study, we introduce children andadults to a cartoon character who has a fly posi-tioned on her body in different locations and askthem to judge when the fly was closer to her. Bothchildren and adults judge the fly to be closest to thecharacter when it is near her eyes. In a follow-upexperiment, participants make the same judgmentsabout an alien character whose eyes are located onhis chest. Again, both adults and children think thatthe fly closest to the alien’s eyes is the closest to the

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Starmans & Bloom What do you think you are?

alien. This suggests that both adults and childrenhave a strong sense that the self is located near theeyes, even when the eyes are not located in the head.Together, these three studies provide converging ev-idence that children and adults intuitively think ofa person as being located close to the eyes, and lendsupport to the idea that we think of the self as occu-pying a physical location within the body.

The indirect nature of the methods used in theseexperiments suggest that these judgments do notresult from a culturally learned understanding ofthe role of the brain in producing mental states, orof the location of the self. Participants were askedto make judgments about distance, and about theminimally essential parts of a person when depictedin a drawing. Neither of these questions should,a priori, cause participants to consciously reflect onthe location of the self, or the nature of the brain, andyet, a robust agreement among participants alignswith findings from previous research to suggest thatthere is a commonly experienced sense of the self asbeing located near the eyes.

If participants consider the self to be equally dis-tributed across the body, or if they think of the selfas an abstract idea with no spatial location, thenthey should judge that an object is equally close tothe person no matter where on the body it is posi-tioned. However, participants in our study judged afly to be closer to Mary when it was near her eyesrather than her feet. Thus we suggest that partici-pants were using the name of the person as presentedin the questions (“try your best to leave Sally in thepicture”; “Which fly is closer to Mary?”) as standingfor Sally’s/Mary’s self , and that this self is seen asresiding near the eyes.

While several questions yet remain about the pre-cise nature of our intuitions about the location ofthe self, these studies illuminate a previously un-known intuitive bias to see the self as located nearthe eyes, and provide a useful method for furtherinvestigations into our intuitive conception of theself and its properties and capabilities.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

1. Bloom, P. 2004. Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of ChildDevelopment Explains What Makes Us Human. Basic Books.New York

2. Descartes, R. 1641/1968. Meditations. In The PhilosophicalWorks of Descartes, Vol. 2. E. Haldane & G. Ross, Eds.: Cam-bridge University Press. Cambridge, MA.

3. Wellman, H. 1990. The Child’s Theory of Mind. MIT Press.Cambridge, MA.

4. Bertossa, F., M. Besa, R. Ferrari & F. Ferri. 2008. Point zero:a phenomenological inquiry into the seat of consciousness.Percept. Mot. Skills 107: 323–335.

5. Corriveau, K., E. Pasquini & P. Harris. 2005. “If it’s inyour mind, it’s in your knowledge”: children’s developinganatomy of identity. Cogn. Dev. 20: 321–340.

6. Flavell, J., S. Shipstead & K. Croft. 1980. What young childrenthink you see when their eyes are closed. Cognition 4: 369–387.

7. McGuigan, N. & M. Doherty. 2006. Head and shoulders,knees and toes: Which parts of the body are necessary to beseen? Brit. J. Dev. Psychol. 24: 727–732.

8. Neisser, U. 1997. The roots of self-knowledge: perceivingself, it, and thou. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 818: 19–33.

9. McGuigan, N. 2009. Does the direction in which a figure islooking influence whether it is visible? J. Genet. Psychol. 170:227–233.

10. Starmans & Bloom. In preparation.

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