The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity by
Bruce Hood. Oxford University Press, 2012 (29.95) When a newborn
baby's eyes scan a room, Hood writes, the infant does not decide
where to focus. Instead inborn cognitive mechanisms respond to
the environment and focus the baby's attention. Later in life,
the child develops self-awareness and the conviction that he
consciously controls his body and brain. Yet what if this belief
does not reflect reality? In The Self Illusion, Hood argues
precisely that. After exploring various definitions of self--a
soul, an agent with free will, some essential and unique set of
qualities--he concludes that what we experience as a self is
actually a narrative spun by our brain. To see why, consider an
experiment in the 1980s by physiologist Benjamin Libet. He
showed that neural activity reveals what an individual will do
before that person becomes conscious of having made a decision.
Perhaps our sense of free will is just a way for our brain to
organize our actions a