[skip navigation]
Visit the Bookstore
Several news outlets recently reported on work by a researcher at the California Institute of Technology to discover the center of "self-awareness" within the brain. Researcher John Allman claims to have found neurons believed to integrate the various functions of the brain into what human beings experience as self-awareness are also present in great apes.
While intriguing the evidence for a self-awareness portion of the brain is sketchy at best. What the researcher did was compare brain scans of normal, healthy adults with those of brain scans of mentally ill and Alzheimer's patients. What Allman observed were differences in the density of neurons in the frontal lobe of the brain near the corpus callosum (which connects the two halves of the brain). In the Alzheimer's patients, the disappearance of these "self-awareness" cells seemed to correlate with a loss of identity.
Allman also looked at brain scans of various animal species and found that while chimps and gorillas had similar structures, though smaller than in human beings, they were completely absent in the non-primate species he studied.
Reference:
"Science Uncovers Apes' Hidden Soul" from The Times (UK) , November 23, 1999