We all feel, instinctively, that The Self exists. However, The Self is no more than a story we tell ourselves and, in our current time of accelerating technological advancement, we should abandon the one true self, and accept that in the absence of a strongly singular “I”, there must be a weakly multiple “we”, writes Joanna Nadin.

The argument goes like this: each of us has to a greater or lesser extent that feeling of ‘me-ness’: of both existence as a separate being, and of the specific nature of that being – our ‘character’. And that me-ness is remarkably enduring, despite our ever-changing circumstances, tastes and relationships. But here’s the thing: that me-ness is not something the brain possesses, it is something the brain does; a ‘symphony’, as Bruce Hood describes it, played by the orchestra of processes in the brain.

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Self is not a monologue, constructed by our mind in isolation, but the product of an ongoing conversation; it is dialogic, born of our interactions with significant (and less significant) others.