Experience without self: Phenomenology and neural correlates of selflessness

The present dissertation project concerns the relationship between self and consciousness. Specifically, it concerns the phenomenal sense of self and if this is a necessary component of all experience or not. What is it to have a sense of self? This can refer to several things, such as the sense of being a continuous person through time, the sense of having a body, the sense of being in control of your actions, the sense of being located in a specific place, or the sense of being a recipient of experiences. All these aspects have in common a sense of separation or duality between self and not-self.

In order to answer the overarching question about whether there can be experience without self, I present three papers. For Paper I, I interviewed persons who had undergone self-transcendent experiences – transient episodes of strong alterations of the sense of self that can be induced by, for example, meditation or psychedelic drugs. The aim was to identify which of the various aspects of self that were reported to be changed or lost during the experience. For Paper II, I interviewed persons with varying meditation background about their sense of self in everyday life. Here, the aim was mainly to explore the sense of being a recipient of experiences, what is referred to here as perspectival ownership of experience, and how this relates to other aspects of self. Paper III is a brain imaging study, where participants interviewed for Paper II underwent brain scanning (fMRI) while resting and performing two tasks. The aim was to look for neural correlates of various aspects of self.

Paper I showed that the self reported to be altered or lost in self-transcendent experiences can encompass one or several aspects of self in different combinations. One conclusion was that studies that investigate altered self-experiences ought to define better the exact aspect of self that is targeted, as terms such as “ego-dissolution” can refer to many different things. Paper II revealed that perspectival ownership of experience showed a quadratic relation to the general level of selflessness in everyday life, so that participants in the middle range of selflessness described a salient sense of being a recipient of experiences, whereas participants in both the low and high end of selflessness did not. Paper III revealed quadratic relations between brain data and overall selflessness, for example so that connectivity within the brain’s default mode network was higher for participants in either end of selflessness compared to those in between.

In conclusion, this project adds to the understanding of the relationship between self and consciousness through exemplifying experiences lacking one or several aspects of self and clarifying the relationship between these aspects, a relation that – it seems – is not necessarily linear.