Close your eyes and think back to your earliest memory. Perhaps you recall sitting on a kitchen floor, playing with wooden blocks. Maybe you remember the smell of your grandmother’s house or the sound of rain against a window. Whatever that memory contains, you probably assume something important about it. You believe the child in that memory was you. Not just a younger version of you, but essentially, fundamentally you.

Most people carry this assumption through life without questioning it. We look at old photographs and see ourselves. We cringe at embarrassing moments from decades past because we feel connected to the person who lived them. Our legal systems, our relationships, and our entire social fabric rest on the idea that each person maintains a continuous identity from birth until death.

But what if this assumption is wrong?

What if the person you were at five years old shares almost nothing with the person reading these words right now? What if your sense of a stable, unchanging self is not a fact but a story your brain tells to make sense of existence?

For thousands of years, Buddhist monks have taught exactly this. And now, brain researchers working in modern laboratories have begun to arrive at the same unsettling conclusion through entirely different methods.

Ancient Monks and Modern Scientists Reached Similar Answers

Evan Thompson has spent his career at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. As a professor at the University of British Columbia, he studies how the mind works and what consciousness really means. His research has led him to an unexpected place where ancient Eastern philosophy and cutting-edge neuroscience meet.

Buddhist teachings about the self date back more than two thousand years. Monks developed sophisticated meditation practices and philosophical frameworks long before anyone understood neurons or synapses. Yet their conclusions about human identity align remarkably well with what brain scanners now reveal.

Thompson puts it plainly when discussing his findings with Quartz. “Buddhists argue that nothing is constant, everything changes through time, you have a constantly changing stream of consciousness,” he says. “And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”

Consider what this means. Two completely separate traditions, separated by millennia and operating with vastly different tools, reached the same answer about one of humanity’s deepest questions. Monks sitting in silent meditation and scientists peering at functional MRI scans both concluded that the solid, stable self we take for granted simply does not exist in the way we imagine.

Scientific researchers have recently started referencing Buddhist philosophy in their academic papers. What began as a fringe interest has moved toward mainstream acceptance. Ideas that monks first articulated in ancient India now appear in peer-reviewed journals published by major universities.

Your Brain Never Stops Changing

A paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences examined where exactly the “self” lives in the brain. Researchers expected to find a specific region or network responsible for self-processing. Instead, they discovered something far more interesting.

Self-processing does not sit in one location. It spreads across many different neural processes that constantly shift and change. None of these processes appears to be specifically dedicated to creating a sense of self. Rather, our feeling of being a unified person emerges from the interaction of countless brain activities that have other primary functions.

Picture a river. From a distance, it looks like a single thing with clear boundaries. But step closer and you see that no single drop of water defines the river. Water flows in, flows out, evaporates, falls as rain upstream, and rejoins the current. At no point can you point to a specific collection of water molecules and say “that is the river.” Yet the river clearly exists as a pattern, a process, a way that water moves through a particular landscape.

Your self works similarly. Neurons fire and rest. Connections strengthen and weaken. Memories form, distort, and fade. Emotions rise and fall. Through all of this constant activity, your brain generates a sense of continuous identity. But that sense is a construction, not a discovery. Your brain builds your self moment by moment, and the building materials change constantly.

Neuroplasticity describes the brain’s ability to rewire itself throughout life. Scientists once believed that adult brains remained relatively fixed after childhood development. We now know this is false. Human brains can form new connections, strengthen existing pathways, and even reassign functions from damaged areas to healthy ones.

Buddhist monks understood something like this long before the term neuroplasticity existed. They believed that mental training could change the mind in profound ways. Meditation was not merely relaxation or stress relief but a method for fundamentally restructuring how consciousness operates.

Meditation Can Rewire How You Think

Modern research on meditation has produced striking results. Long-term meditators show measurable differences in brain structure and function compared to non-meditators. Gray matter density increases in regions associated with learning, memory, and emotional regulation. Activity in areas linked to stress and anxiety decreases.

But these changes do not happen overnight. Just as physical exercise gradually builds muscle, mental exercise gradually reshapes the brain. Monks who have meditated for decades show the most dramatic differences. Their brains have literally changed shape through sustained practice.

Consider the implications. If meditation can alter brain structure, then the self that emerges from that brain must also change. A person who meditates seriously for twenty years does not simply feel different from their former self. At a neurological level, they have become different. New neural pathways have formed. Old patterns have weakened or disappeared entirely.

Buddhist teachers have always claimed that people can free themselves from destructive mental habits through dedicated practice. Science now supports this claim with hard evidence. Bad habits are not permanent features of identity. They are patterns that can be unlearned, replaced by healthier patterns through consistent effort.

What Happens to Awareness When You Sleep?

Sleep presents a puzzle for both Buddhism and neuroscience. When you enter deep, dreamless sleep, where does your consciousness go? Does it simply switch off like a light, leaving nothing but biological maintenance running in darkness?

Thompson has explored this question from multiple angles. “The standard neuroscience view is that deep sleep is a blackout state where consciousness disappears,” he explains. “In Indian philosophy we see some theorists argue that there’s a subtle awareness that continues to be present in dreamless sleep, there’s just a lack of ability to consolidate that in a moment-to-moment way in memory.”

A 2013 study examined the sleep patterns of experienced meditators. Researchers found that meditation affects electrophysical brain patterns during sleep in unexpected ways. Some level of information processing appears to continue even in states where cognitive functions normally shut down almost entirely.

We cannot yet say definitively what this means. Perhaps consciousness persists in some attenuated form throughout sleep. Perhaps the brain maintains a kind of background awareness that we cannot remember upon waking. Or perhaps something else entirely is happening that current scientific methods cannot fully capture.

What remains clear is that consciousness proves far more mysterious than simple models suggest. Neither neuroscience nor Buddhism has solved every puzzle surrounding awareness, sleep, and the nature of experience. Both traditions continue to grapple with questions that may never have complete answers.

Where Science and Buddhism Part Ways

Neuroscience backs up the Buddhist belief that “the self” isn’t constant, but ever-changing
byu/plato_thyself inMeditation

Despite their remarkable agreement on many points, neuroscience and Buddhism diverge on one crucial question. Buddhists traditionally believe that some form of consciousness can exist independently of a physical body. Neuroscientists, including Thompson, reject this view.

From a scientific standpoint, consciousness appears to emerge from brain activity. Damage to specific brain regions and specific aspects of consciousness disappears. Alter brain chemistry and subjective experience changes. Every observable fact points to consciousness as something brains do rather than something that exists independently.

Yet Thompson resists a common conclusion that some neuroscientists draw from these facts. Many researchers argue that because the self is constructed by the brain, it must be an illusion. We should recognize our sense of being somebody as a kind of trick, a useful fiction that evolution developed to help us survive.

Thompson disagrees with this assessment. “In neuroscience, you’ll often come across people who say the self is an illusion created by the brain,” he notes. “My view is that the brain and the body work together in the context of our physical environment to create a sense of self. And it’s misguided to say that just because it’s a construction, it’s an illusion.”

A construction is not necessarily an illusion. Cities are constructed, but they exist. Marriages are constructed, but they are real. Perhaps the self belongs in this category as well. It may not exist as a permanent, unchanging essence hidden somewhere inside us. But the pattern, the process, the ongoing construction of identity through time has its own reality.

Why a Fluid Self Sets You Free

If everything discussed so far sounds abstract, consider the practical consequences. Believing in a fixed self creates fixed limitations. “I am an anxious person” becomes a life sentence. “I have always been bad at relationships” becomes a prophecy that fulfills itself. Every rigid belief about who you are constrains who you might become.

Accepting that the self flows and changes opens different possibilities. If you are not fundamentally the same person you were ten years ago, then you need not remain the person you are today. Bad habits belong to past versions of yourself and can be left behind. Mental patterns that cause suffering can be unlearned through practice.

Buddhist monks developed their meditation techniques precisely because they believed in this kind of freedom. Mental suffering arises from clinging to fixed ideas about self and reality. Release that clinging and suffering loosens its grip. Train the mind through disciplined practice, and it becomes capable of states that once seemed impossible.

Neuroscience now validates this approach. Brains change. People change. What seemed like permanent features of personality turn out to be malleable patterns that respond to effort and training.

What a Changing Self Means for Being Human

When we accept that identity flows rather than stays fixed, something shifts in how we see our place in existence. Life on Earth becomes less about protecting a permanent “me” and more about participating in an ongoing process of becoming. Every living thing, from single-celled organisms to human beings, exists in constant motion. Our brains rebuild themselves. Our cells replace themselves. Even our personalities respond to experience and choice.

Accepting a fluid self also speaks to what humans can achieve when they refuse to accept mental limits as permanent. Buddhist monks spent centuries developing meditation practices because they believed the mind could be trained. Science now confirms they were right. Human beings possess an ability to reshape their own neural pathways, to break free from patterns they once thought were fixed parts of who they were.

Perhaps the larger lesson here is that ancient wisdom and scientific inquiry need not compete. Different cultures and different eras can arrive at similar truths through entirely separate methods. What monks discovered through contemplation, researchers confirmed through brain imaging. Our sense of self may be a construction, but that construction belongs to us. We can rebuild it. We can let go of old versions of ourselves that no longer serve us. And in doing so, we can become more fully alive.

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