I happened across this article, The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity. Um, I don’t know, its not very good, but there were a couple interesting points in it which might be useful for me to come back and harvest in later article writing. There was some stuff about how the natural state of the human mind is in many autonomous centers working together to create the illusion of unity. He mentions Julian Jaynes and some other researchers working with patients whose corpus callosums have been severed. The corpus callosum is the bridge between the two halves of your brain, which is largely responsible for certain types of communication between them.

Also, the author sort of dances around this idea that what the “self” actually is is some kind of gravitational field for stories. Although, looking back, it seems they barely talk about that, and just meander around in a lot of philosophical stuff that never really said to much (to me anyway).

Oh, one more interesting point in the article is they talk about how talking to yourself serves to activate these other autonomous parts of your brain, including them in whatever decision-making or problem-solving process you may be involved in. They also talk about how interior monologue is basically a more efficient, stream-lined version of talking to yourself, in order to engage these other centers in the mind. Good times. Good times.