Narrative self and minimal self
Researchers and philosophers describe two ways the self shows up. The narrative self is the story across time: who we say we are, what has happened to us, what we plan to do. The minimal self is the bare sense of being the one having this experience right now. Most of the time the two run together, and a few lines of research suggest attention can lean toward one or the other.
On the train, Marcus replays his meeting: he was cut off again, he is always the one who stays quiet, this is how his whole career goes. Then the train brakes hard. For a second there is only the lurch, the noise and a hand tightening on the rail, and the meeting is gone.
It doesn't mean feeling unreal or cut off from oneself. The minimal self is the ordinary sense of being here, present and one's own. Feeling detached from oneself or the world, as if watching from outside, is a different experience, described under depersonalization and derealization on the dissociation page. It can be distressing, and a person who lives with it often may want to talk to a clinician.
How it shows
At work
Spending a meeting inside a story about where a career is going, with little notice of the room. Or working on something with full attention, with almost no thought about oneself.
In close relationships
Telling an account of a relationship that includes its history, its pattern and a guess about its future. Or being with someone while attending to the moment, with the account set aside for a while.
In ourselves
Noticing that thinking about who I am feels different from noticing that I am here. Noticing the story return and the sense of being here still behind it.
How it differs from similar ideas
Narrative identity
Narrative identity is the life story a person builds, studied by Dan McAdams and coded for features such as redemption and contamination and tied to wellbeing. It is one way to study the narrative self. This page is the wider pair: the story, and the sense of being the experiencer that the story is told by. The narrative identity page covers what the story contains and what it predicts.
Self-concept clarity
Self-concept clarity is how clear, steady and consistent a person's beliefs about themselves are. It is a property of the story side. The minimal self has no beliefs in it to be clear or unclear.
Decentering
Decentering is the skill of seeing thoughts as passing events, and it is described on its own page. It may be one way attention moves from the story to the present moment, while the minimal self is what is felt there.
Dissociation
Dissociation involves a disruption in the usual integration of awareness, memory, identity and perception. The minimal self is the ordinary sense of being present and one's own, so loss of that sense is a different thing.
What it doesn’t mean
It doesn't mean there are two people inside. Both terms describe how one person's attention and sense of self can be organized. The research treats them as two modes that are usually blended.
It doesn't mean the story is false. The narrative self is how people keep a past, make plans and tell others who they are. Calling it a story describes its form, and says nothing about whether it is accurate.
It isn't a settled scientific fact. Some philosophers hold that the self is built out of the stories told about it. In 2007 the philosopher Dan Zahavi argued against that view, for a more basic sense of self that stories cannot capture. The imaging evidence for two modes rests on small studies.
An example: Marcus, the meeting and the train
Marcus has just left a meeting where a colleague talked over him. He is on the train home, forty minutes from his stop.
- Minute two He builds the case. This happened last month too. He never pushes back. At his last job it was the same. He pictures how he will look to his manager at the next review.
- Minute nine The story has grown. It now covers his twenties, his father's remarks about him, and the version of himself he planned to be by forty. Nothing in the carriage has registered in a while.
- Minute eleven The brakes squeal. His hand grips the rail. He hears the squeal, feels the pull in his shoulder and notices his heart going. For a few seconds there is nothing about the meeting or his career.
- Minute thirteen The story returns, a little smaller. He thinks: I was tense, that was all. Then he is back to wondering what he should have said.
In the story, the first two moments are the self as a narrative: a past, a pattern and a future version. The third is the sense of being here, aware of sound and body, with no account of who he is. Neither one replaces the other. The story comes back within seconds and the sense of being here was there the whole time, behind it.
The example shows the split the research is about. In the first two moments the self is a story with a plot. In the third there is still an experiencer, but it has no biography. The 2000 review below calls the first the narrative self and the second the minimal self.
A different story would point elsewhere. If Marcus had felt the train lurch as unreal, as if it were happening to someone else or behind glass, that would be a different experience, closer to what the dissociation page describes. The minimal self feels present and one's own. And a story with a different tone, in which he remembers the meeting as a hard day and moves on, would still be a narrative self, just a kinder one.
What the research shows
The research on this pair is thinner than the idea suggests. One philosophy review sets out the two selves, and a few brain-imaging reviews and studies look at what happens when people think about themselves. The studies below cover the philosophical split, one scan study of self-judgments, a review of scans, and one scan study that compared the story mode with a present-moment mode.
The split between a self across time and a self in the present is clearly stated in philosophy. Brain scans link self-related thinking to regions in the middle of the cortex, and one small study found different activity when trained and untrained people attended to the present instead of to a story about themselves. The evidence is early and it comes from small samples.
A philosophy review described two selves: one with no extension in time and one that continues across it
In 2000, Shaun Gallagher published a review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. He described the minimal self as a self devoid of temporal extension, and the narrative self as one that involves personal identity and continuity across time.
For the minimal self he separated the sense of having caused an action from the sense that the action is one's own, and linked the split to schizophrenia, where the sense of agency may be disrupted. He discussed the narrative self alongside Michael Gazzaniga's idea of a left-hemisphere “interpreter” and episodic memory, the memory of particular past events. He concluded that philosophy and cognitive science could inform each other.
Doesn’t show A review with no new data, so it is a case for a way of dividing the self rather than a test of it. Philosophers continue to argue about whether the minimal self exists apart from a story, and this review does not settle that.
Judging whether a word described oneself picked out a separate region in the middle of the front of the brain
In 2002, William Kelley and colleagues scanned 21 people (12 men and 9 women, ages 18 to 30, average age 20) with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a scan that tracks blood flow as a stand-in for brain activity. Each person judged trait adjectives in three ways: does this word describe you, does it describe a well-known public figure, or is it printed in capital letters.
Judging relevance, whether to the self or the other person, compared with judging capital letters, was accompanied by activity in the left inferior frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate. A separate part of the medial prefrontal cortex, a region toward the middle of the front of the brain, was selectively engaged during the self-judgments. The authors concluded that self-referential processing could be told apart from other kinds of word processing in the brain.
Doesn’t show Twenty-one mostly young adults, judging words in a scanner. The authors note that how familiar the other person is may matter, and that the medial prefrontal result was a drop from baseline in both conditions, so the self-versus-other difference compares two decreases. They describe the medial prefrontal finding as a possibility that awaits further research.
A review of imaging studies found that self-related tasks tended to activate the middle of the cortex
In 2006, Georg Northoff and colleagues reviewed neuroimaging studies that compared self-related stimuli with non-self stimuli. All of the studies they reviewed showed activation in the medial regions of the cortex, the brain's outer layer, during self-related stimuli. They call these cortical midline structures, and the activation appeared across verbal, spatial, emotional and facial tasks.
They also reported that these regions sort into lower, upper and back groups with different roles. They proposed that self-referential processing in these midline structures is the core of a sense of self.
Doesn’t show Read in abstract form only. It is a review of other people's scans, and the proposal that these regions are the core of the self is the authors' interpretation. Activity in a region during a self task does not by itself show that the region holds the self.
In people who had taken an eight-week mindfulness course, a self-story focus and a present-moment focus differed more in brain activity
In 2007, Norman Farb and colleagues used fMRI to compare two ways of attending to the same trait words. In the narrative focus, people thought about what each word meant about them and let their thoughts run. In the experiential focus, they watched their moment-to-moment thoughts, feelings and body sensations without picking one. Each word was shown for 4 seconds, and no responses were collected in the scanner.
There were 16 people who had not yet taken a mindfulness-based stress reduction course, enrolled and waiting to start, and 20 who had completed the eight-week course. They were different people, tested once each.
In the untrained group, the present-moment focus produced focused reductions in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex that the story focus had engaged. In the trained group the reductions were larger and more widespread, and a right-sided network that included the insula, a region that tracks internal body states, became more engaged. A link between the right insula and the medial prefrontal cortex was strong in the untrained group and uncoupled in the trained group. The authors read this as two forms of self-awareness that are habitually integrated and can be dissociated through attentional training.
Doesn’t show Sixteen and 20 people is small, and the groups were two sets of people, each tested once, so no one was measured before and after the course. The authors name that as a limitation: the design cannot show that the course caused the greater separation. The study reports activity that differed between tasks, which does not show what any person felt or that one mode is better.
Try it: story and sense
Think of something that happened this week that you still have thoughts about. Write three short notes.
- The story I tell about it, in a sentence, including what it says about me
- What I can notice right now in this room: one sound, one feeling in the body, one thought passing
- What changed between writing the first note and the second
The first note is the narrative self at work: a past, a meaning and a version of me. The second is closer to the sense of being here. If the third note says the two felt different, the page's idea may fit. If they felt the same, that is also informative, since the research suggests the two are habitually blended.
What is the narrative self?
The self understood as a story across time, covering who a person says they are, what has happened and what they plan. Shaun Gallagher's 2000 review described it as involving personal identity and continuity across time. It is closely related to narrative identity, the life story studied by Dan McAdams, which has its own page here.
What is the minimal self?
The bare sense of being the subject of an experience right now, with no extension in time. Gallagher called it a self devoid of temporal extension in 2000. His examples included the sense that an action is one's own and the sense of having caused it.
What is the difference between the narrative self and the minimal self?
The narrative self stretches across time and holds a history and a future. The minimal self is the sense of being here in this moment. William James's 1890 split between the Me, the person who is known, and the I, the thought doing the knowing, is an older relative of the same idea. In practice they are usually blended.
What did the Farb study find about the narrative and experiential self?
In 2007, Norman Farb and colleagues scanned people while they either reflected on trait words as being about themselves or watched their moment-to-moment experience. The present-moment focus reduced activity in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex, more strongly in 20 people who had finished an eight-week mindfulness course than in 16 who were about to start one. It was a small study that compared different people.
Is the narrative self related to the default mode network?
They are linked in the research, though the link is still being worked out. The default mode network is a set of brain regions that is active when attention is not on a task, and it overlaps with the midline regions that scans find during self-related thinking. The default mode network page covers it.
Does the minimal self really exist?
That is still argued. Gallagher's 2000 review makes the case for it, and Farb's 2007 study found brain activity that differed between a story focus and a present-moment focus. Other philosophers dispute that a self exists apart from any story, and the imaging evidence comes from small studies.
Where the idea comes from
The oldest form of the idea is in William James's The Principles of Psychology (1890), chapter 10. James wrote that a person's sense of self has two elements: an empirical person who is known, which he called the Me, and a passing thought that does the knowing, which he called the I. His Me is everything a person is tempted to call mine. The I is the thinking that is happening now.
In 2000, the philosopher Shaun Gallagher reviewed recent philosophical work on the self for cognitive scientists in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. He described two concepts: the minimal self, a self without time stretched through it, and the narrative self, which involves personal identity and continuity across time. His examples for the minimal self included the sense of owning one's own action and the sense of having caused it, which can come apart in schizophrenia.
Researchers have since used the split to ask what the brain does when people think about themselves across time and when they attend to the present. The 2007 imaging study below is the best-known example. Later work on mindfulness and on the brain's default mode network cites it, and each has its own page here.
The question it adds
When a thought about myself feels like a fact, this idea asks which self is speaking.
Is this a story about who I am, or am I just aware of what is here right now?
William James, 1890 (the “I” and the “Me”). Shaun Gallagher, 2000 (the minimal self and the narrative self). Norman Farb and colleagues, 2007 (brain-imaging study).
Questions to carry
- When I think about what a recent event says about me, what story am I telling, and who is the one telling it?
- If I set the story down for a minute and attend to what is here, what is left of the sense of being me?
Related
story i tell about myself, who am i, sense of self, sense of i, the i and the me, lost in my story, story of me, experiencing self, remembering self, observer self, pure awareness, being versus story, self as story
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