The brain and its self – empirical investigations and conceptual implications

Background: The social function of the brain and its self has long been neglected. Recent neuroimaging studies show clear overlap between regions involved in the self and those implicated in social cognition. This suggests that the concept of self implicates social functions and vice versa and hence is thus intrinsically related to the context. This means that such embedded self relates to other persons implicating empathy.

Methods and Results: I present various imaging studies about the self from our group. First, I present an imaging study on self-relatedness and reward and their relationship, e.g., anatomical overlap. This will demonstrate that reward regions also mediate self-relatedness while reward induces neural activity in self-relatedness so that one may assume a close relationship between self and reward. Second, studies on self-relatedness will be presented in healthy and depressed subjects showing that the level of resting state neural activity may crucially impact the degree of subjectively experienced self-relatedness. And it is this level of resting state neural activity which seems to be abnormal in depressed patients which is psychologically mirrored in their abnormally increased self-relatedness and self-focus. 

Conclusion: Our results indicate close relationship between self and the environmental context which implicates cultural sensitivity. The implications for an empirically plausible concept of self as well as future designs for a culturally sensitive approach to the neural study of the self are discussed.