Research Digest

Panksepp, J., & Northoff, G. (2009). The trans-species core SELF: the emergence of active cultural and neuro-ecological agents through self-related processing within subcortical-cortical midline networks.  Consciousness and Cognition,  18 (1):  193-215.

Northoff, G., & Panksepp, J. (2008). The trans-species concept of self and the subcortical-cortical midline system.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences,  12 (7):  259-264.

The self occupies privileged, but inverse, positions in both the social and the neural sciences. In the social sciences, the self is the “basic unit” out of which social institutions and phenomena are constructed. Everything in society is built on top of the self, which is clear when we break religious, social, governmental, and cultural institutions into their component parts. Subunits and committees (dioceses, parliaments, courts, television networks) are comprised of individual positions (judges, majors, priests, talk-show hosts) that are in turn filled by individuals (Barack Obama, Simon Cowell). And then we stop. This is as far down as social science goes: the individual self. Moreover, the self, in a sense, is the easiest unit in the hierarchy of society to hang on to—whereas “The United States of America” seems an amorphous object, Barack Obama seems rather easier to get a handle on.

In the central nervous system, things are reversed. The self sits not concretely at the bottom but, rather, metaphysically at the top. And where the social sciences toss the self around as though it were the easiest part of their models (“white middle-class middle-American suburban voters prefer Hilary Clinton; but can she win the cities?”), neuroscientists—who in their personal lives talk about their selves freely—hardly dare mention the word in their published work, for fear of being thought either overweening or overreaching. Where DNA and serotonin and the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala are basic building blocks of models of brain function, as neuroscience climbs the