I am posting this without knowing if the issue presented bellow has already been discussed. If so, my apologies.
What do you see when you look in a mirror? “Myself, of course,” you reply. But what is your self?Strictly speaking, when you look in a mirror, you see a face that you recognize as your own. This in and of itself is a remarkable feat—other animals generally can't do this. A dog looking in a mirror sees another dog. (At least, that’s what we infer from observing its behavior.) Human infants don’t seem to recognize their own faces, either.But recognizing yourself is more than just identifying the face in the mirror as your own. When you flip through your photo album, you see yourself in that snapshot of a toddler on a tricycle, that picture of a grade-schooler standing behind a science fair project, the high school yearbook portrait of an awkward adolescent, and that photo of a svelte young adult in a college graduation gown. None of these look like the face staring back in the mirror. Yet somehow your self ties all these disparate persons together...
A subjective experience may be compelling, but that doesn’t mean it’s real. The perceptual illusions that regularly spread through social media clearly demonstrate that subjective experience doesn’t always match physical reality: Was that dress really gold-and-black, or blue-and-white? Still, we can’t dismiss our sense of self as just an illusion. It probably is, but the important question is how the brain produces it—and why?
In a recent article, Ataria argued that our sense of self derives from language. We use language to communicate with other people and to think to ourselves. At around age 2 or 3, children begin talking out loud in a way that’s clearly not intended to communicate to others. They seem to use this self-talk to direct their own behavior. Within a few years, they learn to turn that self-talk inward, and from then on they maintain an internal monologue instead.
