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Your 'Self' is an Illusion : Neuroscientist Explains

Top Neuroscientist: Consciousness Doesn’t Exist (and what’s actually going on) In this conversation, we explore the illusion of self, the myth of a continuous “you,” and how the brain may just be playing a very convincing trick to keep us moving forward. From quantum fields in the microtubules of your neurons to split-brain experiments and memory glitches, Dr. Hill walks us through the science behind why awareness may just be a collection of impulses, not a soul, not a self. This episode challenges everything you think you know about identity, free will, and the very idea of “being.” Buckle up. It’s a wild ride through neuroscience, philosophy, and quantum theory. 🎙 Full episode now on YouTube @cameronedwardbenton #ConsciousnessDoesntExist #NeuroscienceExplained #AndrewHillPhD #BrainTricks #SelfIllusion #QuantumConsciousness #SplitBrainStudies #CameronEdwardBenton #Neurophilosophy #cameronedwardbenton #gettingtoknowyou 🎙️ Don’t miss out! If you enjoyed this episode of Getting to Know You, hit the Subscribe button and turn on notifications 🔔 to stay updated on our latest deep-dive conversations. 💬 Join the conversation! Drop your thoughts, questions, or favorite insights in the comments below—we’d love to hear from you. ✨ Discover more: Explore untold stories, unique perspectives, and thought-provoking interviews. Check out our playlist for more inspiring episodes. Stay Connected with Us! We’d love to hear from you and share more amazing content. Follow us on our socials for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and much more: 🌟 Instagram: Getting to Know You Podcast 💬 Facebook: Cameron Edward Benton 📖 Threads: @camedwardbenton 🎥 TikTok: @camedwardbenton 👉 Don’t miss out—click the links and follow us now to join our community! Your support means the world to us! Let’s get to know each other better. Stay curious! Keywords: Cameron Edward Benton, Getting to Know You podcast, neurofeedback benefits, consciousness doesn’t exist, Andrew Hill podcast, neuroscience and identity, illusion of self, what is consciousness, brain creates self, neuroscience and free will, memory and identity, self as illusion, quantum consciousness theory, orchestrated objective reduction, Penrose microtubule theory, mind blowing neuroscience, split brain consciousness, brain trick self, consciousness debate, brain illusion explained, quantum brain physics, does the self exist, neuroscience and spirituality, is consciousness real, philosophy of mind, dual hemisphere awareness, left brain right brain, free will illusion, cognitive neuroscience podcast, Dr. Andrew Hill interview, consciousness microtubules, identity and memory, perception of self, neural decision making, brain as storyteller, subconscious learning, ego and awareness

Episode Summary

I spend my days mapping brains and training them. The more I look at how awareness actually works, the more skeptical I get that the thing you call your self is a single, continuous entity. This conversation originally aired on Cameron Edward Benton's "Getting to Know You" podcast, and you can watch the original conversation. Here is how I think about it.

Is consciousness one thing or two?

I separate two things that get jammed together under one word.

Little-c consciousness is the moment-to-moment sensation of being aware, present, awake. That exists. You can feel it right now.

Capital-C consciousness is the bigger claim: the continuous self, the identity that owns your tenth birthday party and your retirement plan, a soul that persists. I am increasingly skeptical that this second thing is real in the way people assume.

The reason is mechanical. The overarching sense of self is easy to abolish. Brief interruptions in information processing erode your ability to be present or to feel like yourself. Memory is required to hold a self together across time, and memory is fragile. When the substrate that maintains continuity gets disrupted, the self that was supposedly underneath it goes with it. That tells you the self was riding on top of those processes, not sitting beneath them.

Does the brain decide before "you" do?

In many situations, the brain has already made the call before the mind reports being aware of it. The sensory observation, the attention judgment, the decision, all of it can be set in motion roughly half a second before conscious awareness shows up to take credit.

This is well-replicated in the readiness-potential literature, and it matters for how you think about free will. You operate in a largely automatic mode. The drive-reduction machinery, the evolutionary pushes, those are doing the steering. The narrative "I chose this" gets wrapped around the action afterward.

The self, on this view, is a continuity illusion. You are a ship of Theseus, swapping out planks the whole way through and arriving as a genuinely different ship years later. The trick your brain pulls is convincing you the ship never changed. That illusion of continuity is what most people mean when they say "self."

Where does the feeling of being aware come from?

Little-c awareness, the raw sensation of being conscious right now, is harder to pin down. We are starting to get a handle on it at the intersection of neuroscience and quantum physics. I want to flag the evidence level here clearly: this is a speculative theory, not established fact.

Inside your neurons are structures called microtubules. They run the length of the cell like little highways that move material up and down. The geometry of a microtubule appears to be sized and shaped to permit water molecules to move through it by quantum tunneling, which is non-classical movement through space. For years the standard objection was that the brain is too hot and wet for quantum effects to survive. More recent work has chipped away at that assumption.

The physicist Roger Penrose, working with the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, proposed a theory called orchestrated objective reduction. The idea is that the sensation of being conscious might be the neuron's registration of a quantum field collapsing into a single present-moment event at the level of those microtubules. Awareness, on this account, is quantum possibility resolving into one unique outcome.

I treat this as extrapolation at the frontier, not settled science. What I will say with more confidence is that awareness exists, and that tying it to a birthday a decade ago and a plan for next year is a separate construction the brain bolts on. That bolted-on layer is the part I think is closer to a joke the body plays to keep itself moving in one direction.

Do you really have two brains?

I did my PhD in a laterality lab studying left and right hemisphere function. My advisor, Dr. Eran Zaidel, had assisted in the split-brain work that Roger Sperry and Joseph Bogen did with epilepsy patients whose corpus callosum had been severed.

Here is what that line of research shows. You can identify and demonstrate completely separate attention and awareness systems in each hemisphere. Each side has its own attention, its own response selection, its own decision-making, its own awareness. The full loop from attention to behavior is duplicated.

That duplication shows up in intact brains as well as split-brain patients. The method exploits how vision is wired. Fixate on the center of a screen and flash something briefly to one side. Information on the left of fixation routes to the right hemisphere, and the right side routes to the left hemisphere. If you then force the person to respond with the hand driven by that same hemisphere, you can keep the information confined to one side and test how a single hemisphere handles attention and other cognitive resources on its own. You can also force information to cross between hemispheres and watch the handoff.

The practical takeaway is that the "complete you" doing the experiencing is at minimum two semi-independent processing systems running in parallel, integrated well enough that you never notice the seam. The unified self is a successful integration, not a fundamental unit.

How does the brain learn during neurofeedback?

This is where the philosophy meets the clinic, and where I can show you data rather than speculation.

I ran a 40-subject, fully blind, placebo-controlled study. Four groups: left-hemisphere training with low beta, left-hemisphere training with high beta, right-hemisphere training with low beta, and a sham condition. When the feedback beep was genuinely contingent on a real brainwave event, you could watch the brain react with a burst of activity tied to that event. When the beep was sham, that burst did not appear.

The brain figures out whether the signal is connected to it. That is the mechanism of neurofeedback. There is nothing magical happening. It is associative learning, and the brain is doing the heavy lifting. We are simply capturing a learning event in the EEG and feeding it back fast enough for the brain to use.

The brain detects this contingency below the level of conscious thought. A baby flopping on the floor does a push-up, suddenly sees twelve feet of room, and the system registers "those neurons produced more world, do that again." Associative learning runs the same machinery I described earlier, deciding and updating before awareness arrives to narrate it.

Why neurofeedback works without your conscious cooperation

Most neurofeedback for ADHD and other targets is Skinnerian conditioning. Skinner shaped pigeons to peck in specific patterns by rewarding successive approximations, first when the bird neared the bar, then when it tapped it, then twice, then three times. You applaud one end of an existing behavioral range and the system drifts toward it.

Neurofeedback shapes the behavior of brainwave amplitude, speed, or connectivity the same way. It is involuntary behavior, but it is still behavior, and your brain still notices when that behavior is contingent on the outside world. If the brain does something and the world reacts, the brain registers the relationship even when the mind is bored and skeptical.

This is exactly what I see clinically. People sit down, watch Pac-Man start and stop, and think it is ridiculous. Around the third session they say, "Wait, I think I feel something, or maybe I'm imagining it." The effect fades. Next session it comes back a little stronger and more clearly. Then a sleep change shows up. The progressive build is the associative learning consolidating. The conscious mind's opinion of the process is close to irrelevant to whether it works.

For more on how this conditioning translates into self-regulation, see SMR neurofeedback and the overview at is neurofeedback legitimate. If you want the imaging side, the QEEG brain mapping guide covers what these recordings show.

What this means for how you think about yourself

Pull the threads together and a working picture emerges. Awareness is real and may bottom out in quantum events your neurons register moment to moment. Decisions and learning often happen before conscious awareness reports them. Attention and decision-making are duplicated across two hemispheres that can operate independently. And your brain learns and changes constantly through associative shaping, with or without your conscious sign-off.

The continuous, unified self that owns all of this is the integration layer, the story the system tells to keep one body moving coherently through time. That story rests on a substrate that is far more changeable than it implies. If you want to work with that changeability directly, a QEEG brain map is where I would start, and the right training protocol follows from what the map shows.

Full Transcript
The more I learn about consciousness, the less I'm sure it exists. The little C, being conscious, being aware exists moment to moment. But the the capital C consciousness, the self, the identity, the soul. I think that might be a joke. That might be a trick to keep the meat machine moving in one direction. What makes you feel that way? Because we have so many ways that consciousness is easily abolished, that the overarching sense of self is easily abolished. You know, we have moments of being aware, but memory is necessary for self. And you can have, you know, breaks in information processing that rapidly erode your ability to be present or be yourself. I also think that in very many cases, we're discovering the brain will have already like made the decision, made the sensory observation, made the attention judgment like half a second before the mind becomes aware of it and decides. So I think we're in this sort of like automatic mode and the evolutionary pushes are really what are there the drive reduction stuff really what are there and it's nicer to have an identity wrapped around that. So the illusion of continuity is created and that's what consciousness is or the self is. It's the continuity illusion. So really what we are ship of thesis we're replacing planks all the time and becoming very different ships later on. But the trick, the grand illusion is that continuity of cell. And I think that's I'm I'm really quite skeptical these days that that there's that there's a uh an overarching self or an underlying self or soul. Now, I do think we're just starting to figure out where conscious being conscious that that that sensation of being aware and present and sapient. We're starting potentially to get a handle on that at the intersection of neuroscience and quantum physics where there's these structures inside of neurons called microtubules that run the length of the neuron and they're kind of like little highways that move information up and down. And it turns out the the shape of the microtubule is is is sufficient to allow water molecules to move through quantum tunneling effects. like it's perfectly sized and shaped to allow non low non-traditional movement through space. And so for years that was observed and then dismissed that the brain cannot have quantum effects. It's hot and wet, you know, like it can't happen. Well, more and more research is pointing out this and then a a great physicist Roger Penrose came up with a theory I decade ago now that the consciousness might be the neurons awareness of that like quantum field collapsing into the present moment. That seems to be what consciousness is. O uh orchestrated objective reduction. That consciousness might be the quantum possibilities collapsing into a unique event in the level of the microtubules. So, you know, that exists. Awareness exists. But I think the fact that we're tying it to our birthday party 10 years ago and our future plans is kind of a joke. It's kind of the trick of having a body. Yeah. No, that's so interesting. We're always limited by our language in a lot of ways, but even when we see something like our awareness or there's an awareness of that, it's like what is what is it that's being aware? Because I for me when I think of consciousness I almost think of less of the the narrative the long arcing narrative of like do I have a conscious because I think you know even if you went down a spiritual path or other paths you kind of go back into like oh well there's not really any separation between anything anyway so like that level of consciousness construct is an illusion on some level right but I think of like consciousness almost as that awareness is how I often think of consciousness so like that always makes me go into like okay well what because I remember even hearing that like you know basically how the cells are interpreting their environment not not just the environment itself but how they interpret the environment determines how the gene expresses itself right so there's all these little things but then I still go back to well then what is it that is like aware what is the thing that is it gets weirder um I got my PhD studying in a laterality lab left right hemisphere division lab where you can look at individual hemispheric function as it separates as it separates in the hemispheres and my advice advisor, a guy named Dr. Iran Zidell himself was a grad student who assisted in a lot of the work that Roger Sperry and Joe Bogen did on split brain subjects with epilepsy. And back in that research as well as the research I did with Dr. Zidell, you can identify and demonstrate completely separate attention and awareness systems in each hemisphere. Wow. Come online late, the very last minute to become a complete idea. But we have separable attention, response, decision- making, awareness in each hemisphere. Even in intact brains, we do. Yeah. So, literally what I'm hearing you say is on that level, we have like literally two brains that are functional. We may have multiple brains. We may have, you know, memory systems stored throughout the body. We have specialized tissues that do certain things. But yeah, the complete loop of attention and behavior is duplicated in both hemispheres. And even in a person with with connected hemispheres, you can separate those things. If you flash something on the screen, if you're looking at the middle of the screen and you flash something on one side, it comes to one visual field and goes back to one hemisphere. So each eye has two visual fields, left and right. And so the left side of each eye goes to the right visual field in each eye goes back to the right hemisphere. So it converges. Each eye converges to the hemisphere. And if you then make somebody respond with the hand that's being driven by that hemisphere, you can keep the information in one hemisphere only in a behavioral test. So you can test through attention testing how information is flowing in one hemisphere or force it to cross hemispheres and look at how the individual hemispheres work in attention and other uh cognitive resources. I did a 40 subject fully blind placeboc controlled uh looking at left left hemisphere training with low beta and high beta, right hemisphere training with low beta or sham in four groups of people. And you can see the brain reacting when there's a beep to an actual brain wave event. But if it's a beep that's not contingent to their brain, there's no burst of brain waves in response to it. The brain figures out that it's neuro feedback. That's the trick is the brain's doing all the heavy lifting here. This is not magical. It's just associative learning. The brain is doing the learning event. We just captured it in the uh in the EG. What's so fascinating to me about that is what you just said, which is that the brain is able to realize that it's learning, right? because I could show it like different beefs and stuff, but it's actually figuring out that it is having a relationship that is impacting on this thing, which would me also I don't know suggest that like there's a big difference in the the brain's ability to actually understand the things that it even can make an impact on. I want to say, right, like we can tell when something Well, it's below cognition. Yeah. I mean, if you're a baby flopping around on the on the the ground and suddenly you do a baby push-up, you're like, "Whoa, I can see 12 feet. Oh my gosh, all this stuff." The brain goes, "Ooh, remember those neurons." Next time you want to get more stuff, do the thing. Right. The mind's not really involved with that at that level. When you're a baby, it's like, I just did something. Okay, I'm going to do it again. Yeah. And that's how associative learning works. You find stuff that's already existing and then you reward part of it. You shape you applaud one end of the behavioral domain and the brain goes, "Oh, okay." And you start shaping it. You you progressively applaud. So most neuro feedback is skinner skarian conditioning. It's like Skinner's pigeons where now pigeons already packed, but Skinner got them to peck in certain patterns by first rewarding them when they got near the food bar and then rewarding they tapped the food bar and then they pressed it twice and then three times. You shape you approximately shape the behavior. Neuro feedback is shaping the behavior of brain wave amplitude or speed or connectivity. Yeah. So it's involuntary behavior, but it's still happening. And your brain notices if the behavior is contingent to the outside world. If it does something and the world then reacts, the brain notices. Even if the mind's like, "This is stupid. Why am I sitting here?" Which happens all the time. And people like, "Really? This Pac-Man stopping and starting this is turning my brain." Really? See what you think. And like three sessions in, you're like, "Whoa, wait a minute. Oh, okay. I think I'm feeling something now. I'm imagining it." And it wears off. And the next time they're like, "Oh, no, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'm Oh, okay." And then you get a sleep change. So it is the sort of thing that as you get into neuro feedback or any other kind of brain intervention, you start to notice this progressive build and it leaves you in a very different face.
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