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