Just like the ancient Greek maxim “know thyself”, new cognitive neuroscience suggest that cultivating self-awareness is key to wisdom. Stephen M Fleming outlines new experiments that image the brain as we make decisions and considers how we can know what to believe.

As a student on a summer break from my psychology degree, I spent a few weeks traveling alone around China. Much of the trip was spent on long, rambling train journeys where pleasantries with my fellow passengers were exchanged via hand signals and a few halting words of Mandarin. There was plenty of time to think while watching the landscape roll by. The book in my backpack was conducive to this – Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, all about free will. Dennett’s thesis was that we can retain a sense of being free while still acknowledging the determinism inherent in the brain and mind (a view known as compatibilism in philosophy). To me it made a lot of sense (and still does) to define freedom as the capacity to make decisions – to be able to consciously weigh up what to believe or what course of action to take.

But I remember one thing nagging away at me about this picture. It didn’t seem to explain spontaneous changes of mind – those that seem to emerge out of nowhere, dramatically altering our beliefs about reality. If freedom is having conscious command over what we do and say, then surely such shifts that bubble up unbidden into consciousness should not be considered as part of who “we” are. And yet newfound worldviews, formed in such watershed moments, become central to personality and identity.