The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self

The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent h

Decades of neurological research has shown that the mind and body are intimately intertwined: we learn through our whole sensory apparatus, a sculptor can project her mind into her fingertips, we feel our emotions coursing through our whole physical being, mental stress can cause diabetes, the beat of our hearts and the sweat on our palms are part

Put another way, we grow to be “materialists”—that is, habitually consumed by thoughts of things in the external environment. Our identity becomes wrapped up in our bodies.