Sublime

or, better, a collection of perceptions—a tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared toward keeping your body alive.

Let’s consider three core components of prediction error minimization in the brain: generative models, perceptual hierarchies, and the “precision weighting” of sensory signals.

Normally, we cling to an intuitive sense of being “me,” but we can come to see that the sense of me is nothing more than a set of stories in the mind. Together they conjure up a kind of genie—“Me.” That is to say, the sense of me is not as stable or solid as we take it to be, and depends on an implicit narrative repeatedly generated by our thinking

Nevertheless, most people identify with their narrating self. When they say ‘I’, they mean the story in their head, not the stream of experiences they undergo.

despite believing myself to be an integrated self, I talk to myself as if I am composed of several ‘people’.

The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. Indeed, what I hope to offer in this book is just such a Gestalt – one that is based on an understanding of the import of the structure of our brains.

Among the most important stories we know are stories about ourselves, and these “life narratives” are McAdams’s third level of personality. McAdams’s greatest contribution to psychology has been his insistence that psychologists connect their quantitative data (about the two lower levels, which we assess with questionnaires and reaction-time measur

Hume banished the conception of substance from psychology, as Berkeley had banished it from physics. There is, he says, no impression of self, and therefore no idea of self (Book I, Part IV, Sec. VI). “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light o

The elusive and commonly overlooked central factor is that there is a belief in being a ‘person’.