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HOW DOES MY BRAIN CREATE MY SENSE OF SELF?

BBC Science Focus

|

November 2025

Your ability to experience a stable, coherent sense of self is truly a miracle.

- FRANK ROSS, SOUTHAMPTON

Each of us experience profound changes across the course of our lifetime, growing from infants into adults, learning new things, forgetting others, forging fresh relationships and losing old ones – all interspersed with prolonged interludes of dreams and blankness each and every night. And yet, throughout it all, we still have a sense of being the same person. Ultimately, this comes down to an ongoing construction process operating in the brain, which is probably more malleable and fragile than you might think.

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