Close your eyes and think back to your earliest memory. Maybe you’re sitting on a kitchen floor, playing with blocks. Perhaps you’re running through a sprinkler on a summer afternoon. Whatever image comes to mind, you probably feel a deep certainty about one thing. That child was you. Not a different person. Not a stranger. You. But what if that feeling of sameness is wrong?
For thousands of years, Buddhist monks have taught something that sounds radical to Western ears. Your sense of a permanent, unchanging self is a mental construction. A trick your mind plays on itself. An idea that feels true but crumbles under close examination.
Modern neuroscience has started to agree. And researchers are finding that ancient meditation practices may have stumbled upon truths about the brain that laboratories are only now beginning to confirm.
A Stream, Not a Stone
Evan Thompson has spent his career studying where philosophy meets brain science. As a professor at the University of British Columbia, he works at the intersection of cognitive science, phenomenology, and Buddhist philosophy. His research has led him to a conclusion that challenges how most people think about themselves.
“Buddhists argue that nothing is constant, everything changes through time, you have a constantly changing stream of consciousness,” Thompson explains in an interview with Quartz. “And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”
Consider what happens inside your skull right now. Neurons fire in patterns that shift from moment to moment. Brain chemistry fluctuates with your mood, your hunger, your level of tiredness. Neural connections form and dissolve based on your experiences. Every thought you have changes the physical structure of your brain, however slightly.
Your body replaces its cells over time. Your memories shift and transform each time you recall them. Your opinions, preferences, and beliefs change as you encounter new information and experiences. Where, in all of that flux, would a permanent self hide? Buddhist teachers have been asking that question for millennia. Neuroscientists are now asking it too.
No Single “Self Spot” in Your Brain
Scientists once hoped to find consciousness in a specific brain region. Perhaps the prefrontal cortex with its a role in decision-making and personality. Maybe the temporal lobes, which process memory and emotion. Surely, researchers thought, some neural neighborhood must house our sense of self.
A 2013 paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences suggests otherwise. Researchers found that self-processing in the brain spreads across many different neural processes. No single region or network handles the job of creating your identity. Instead, a broad range of fluctuating activities throughout the brain contribute to your sense of being you.
Even more striking, these neural processes aren’t specific to self-awareness. Your brain uses some of the same circuitry for thinking about yourself as it does for thinking about others, imagining the future, and remembering the past. Your self isn’t stored anywhere. It emerges from a symphony of activity that never plays the same tune twice.
How Monks and Scientists Arrived at Similar Conclusions
Here’s where the story gets interesting. Buddhism and neuroscience developed their ideas about the self on completely separate paths. Buddhist monks didn’t have brain scanners. Neuroscientists weren’t reading ancient Pali texts. Yet both traditions arrived at strikingly similar conclusions.
Buddhist practitioners reached their understanding through meditation. By watching their own minds with intense focus over thousands of hours, monks noticed that thoughts and feelings arise and pass away without any permanent observer controlling them. Every attempt to find a solid self came up empty. What remained was just a flow of experiences with no fixed experiencer at the center.
Neuroscientists reached their understanding through experiments. Brain imaging, lesion studies, and careful observation of patients with neurological conditions revealed that selfhood isn’t a single thing but a collection of processes. Damage different brain areas and different aspects of identity fall away. There’s no master control room where “you” sit watching the show.
Some researchers have started building bridges between these two approaches. Thompson’s work represents one example, but he’s not alone. A growing number of scientists now reference Buddhist philosophy in their papers and draw on meditation traditions in their research designs.
You Can Train Your Brain to Change
Buddhist monks have known for thousands of years what science is just now learning. Your mind can be changed by training it.
Neuroscientists call the brain’s ability to reshape itself neuroplasticity. Every skill you learn, every habit you form, every thought pattern you practice carves new pathways in your neural tissue. Your brain at age forty differs from your brain at age twenty, and those changes don’t stop as long as you live.
Meditation takes advantage of neuroplasticity in specific ways. Regular practice appears to strengthen attention networks, reduce activity in stress-related brain regions, and change how the mind processes emotions. Monks who have meditated for decades show brain patterns that differ markedly from those of beginners.
What does all of this mean for ordinary people? If the self isn’t fixed, you’re not trapped by your current habits, fears, or limitations. Bad patterns can be unlearned. New abilities can be developed. Who you are today doesn’t determine who you’ll be tomorrow.
That idea sounds simple, but it carries profound weight. Many people feel stuck in their personalities, convinced they can’t change. Knowing that the brain remains plastic throughout life offers a kind of permission slip. Growth isn’t just possible. It’s built into how minds work.
What Happens to Awareness When You Sleep?
Neuroscience and Buddhism agree on many points about consciousness. But their overlap extends into territory that might surprise you. “The standard neuroscience view is that deep sleep is a blackout state where consciousness disappears,” Thompson notes. “In Indian philosophy we see some theorists argue that there’s a subtle awareness that continues to be present in dreamless sleep, there’s just a lack of ability to consolidate that in a moment-to-moment way in memory.”
For most people, deep sleep feels like nothing. You close your eyes, time passes, and you wake up with no memory of what happened in between. That experience of absence seems to support the blackout view. If awareness existed during deep sleep, wouldn’t we remember it?
Studies of experienced meditators complicate that assumption. Research published in 2013 found that meditation practice affects electrophysical brain patterns during sleep. Meditators showed signs that suggested some capacity to process information and maintain awareness even in states where cognitive functions are usually impaired.
None of these findings proves that Buddhist claims about consciousness are correct. But they do suggest that ancient contemplative traditions noticed something real about the mind. Meditation practices developed over centuries of trial and error may have identified capacities that laboratory science is only beginning to detect.
Where Buddhism and Brain Science Part Ways
Agreement between traditions doesn’t mean total overlap. Buddhism and neuroscience diverge on at least one major question.
Many Buddhist schools teach that some form of consciousness can exist without a physical body. Different traditions describe this possibility in different ways, but the basic idea appears across much of Buddhist thought. Awareness might not require a brain.
Neuroscientists, including Thompson, reject that claim. Everything science knows about consciousness points to its dependence on neural activity. Damage to the brain and changes. Anesthetize the brain, and consciousness disappears. No evidence suggests that awareness can float free of physical structures.
On this point, the two traditions remain at odds. Perhaps future research will clarify the relationship between consciousness and the brain. For now, the question of whether the mind can exist without matter stays open.
Construction Doesn’t Mean Illusion
Some neuroscientists take their findings about the self in a direction that Thompson resists. If the brain constructs the self, they argue, then the self must be an illusion. A fiction. A mistake we make about our own nature.
Thompson offers a different view. “In neuroscience, you’ll often come across people who say the self is an illusion created by the brain. My view is that the brain and the body work together in the context of our physical environment to create a sense of self. And it’s misguided to say that just because it’s a construction, it’s an illusion.”
Consider an analogy. A house is constructed from wood, concrete, and glass. Nobody would call a house an illusion just because workers built it from raw materials. Constructed things can be real and useful even if they don’t exist as fundamental features of the universe.
Your sense of self works similarly. Yes, your brain builds it from neural activity, bodily sensations, memories, and social interactions. That construction process doesn’t make you self fake. It makes you see a natural product of how minds operate in bodies that exist in a physical world.
Freedom in Letting Go of a Fixed Identity
What happens when someone accepts that their self changes constantly? Buddhism teaches that liberation follows.
Many of our mental struggles come from clinging to fixed ideas about who we are. I’m an anxious person. I’m bad at math. I’m someone who always fails at relationships. Labels like these feel permanent, and that permanence makes them heavy.
Knowing that the self flows and changes loosens the grip of those labels. Yesterday’s failures don’t determine tomorrow’s possibilities. Current limitations don’t set permanent boundaries. Every moment offers a chance to start fresh.
Ancient monks discovered these truths through contemplation. Modern scientists are confirming them through brain scans and controlled experiments. Both traditions point toward the same liberating insight.
You are not who you were. You are not who you will be. And in that constant becoming lies a freedom that fixed identities can never offer.
