
Gregory Berns
ONE DAY WHEN HE WAS 16, Gregory Berns was riding his bike on a road parallel to an interstate highway when a tractor-trailer suddenly veered off course and came straight at him. The driver swerved at the last moment, which is how young Gregory lived to talk about it. In his latest book, The Self Delusion, he tells us how he saw himself on his bike from above, then saw the truck jackknife in slow motion, slamming the cab into a hillside and ejecting the driver and another man. He doesn’t know if they lived or died. What he remembers is that he felt disembodied, watching it all happen as if to someone else. He was having what is known as an out-of-body experience, a state that has often been considered evidence of the paranormal.
Feelings of dissociation are among the stranger sensations the brain can generate—but there’s nothing particularly unusual about them, and as Mr. Berns points out in this intelligent and provocative book, they are hardly the only delusions we experience. Memories are not the faithful playbacks we assume they are. To store them, the brain has to compress the actual sequence of events, losing detail in the process. Later we reconstruct them on the fly, with a lot of input from the imagination. Little wonder then that the stories that result from this process of memory and compression—stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us—should be suspect. Are you who you say you are? Are you even who you think you are? Mr. Berns—having grown up to become a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta as well as the author of four previous books on neuroscience, two of them involving dogs—makes a convincing case that the answer is no.
This may seem startling, but Mr. Berns is not the first to point out that our sense of self is a construct made up of narratives we tell ourselves and others, jumbled up with scenarios we consume from TV, online and the movies. Like the MP3, stories are a “lossy” format: They leave a lot out. Much as the brain fills in the missing data in a digitally compressed music file with its own approximation of what the song should sound like, it fleshes out a story retrieved from memory with its best approximation of what happened in the spaces that didn’t get saved.
The technical term for this is “confabulation.” In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes a patient with a severe memory disorder who covers his confusion with endless confabulations, nimbly bridging the enormous gaps in his memory without the slightest awareness that he’s making it all up. But it’s not just people in mental institutions who confabulate; we all do it, and for much the same reason—to bring some sense of order to our existence. As Mr. Berns puts it, the stories we tell ourselves and others are “the glue linking together what would otherwise be a frighteningly random world.”

THE SELF DELUSION: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent—and Reinvent—Our Identities
by Gregory Berns
Basic Books, 304 pages, $30