Matthew Long on Substack

When you wake each morning, you not only become freshly aware of your thoughts, you also resituate yourself in your body. We don’t experience the world purely in our minds, but as ‘embodied agents’, says Roy Salomon, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Your sense of self is as connected to your limbs and guts as to the

“Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years.”

If you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions, and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from thi

If part of the reason we don’t look more regularly into ourselves is our shame and fear at the unusual nature of what we may find there, then a crucial collective resource in the path to self-knowledge is a redrawn sense of what is normal. Our picture of acceptability is – very often – way out of line with what is actually true and widespread. Many

‘I am wise not because I know, but because I know I don’t know.’ The eventual result of a quest for self-knowledge might be presumed to be a confident understanding of the corridors of the mind. But a truly successful outcome might involve something rather different. The more closely we introspect, the more we start to appreciate the range of trick