Susan Greenfield

The self in our stream of consciousness changes continuously as it moves forward in time, even as we retain a sense that the self remains the same while our existence continues.’

he movement of the baby as he or she shifts around inside the womb and the speed and size to which he or she grows – all affect how the fingerprint patterns and ridges form and ensure that the truly unique physical fe

A still more recent technology has developed an unlikely focus: the ears. It turns out that, surprisingly, ears are unique: as long ago as 1906

And as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, there was increasing emphasis on what someone felt and thought as opposed to what they actually did – a shifting away from objective narrative, from mere action, to showcase instead the diversity of subjective attitudes and to celebrate individuality as giving meaning to life.

self’ as a phenomenon of the human mind, realised as he saw it primarily as a feature arising from interaction with others: in particular he pointed to the ability to imagine oneself from the standpoint of another person, and suggested that the self consisted both of the subject ‘I’ and the object ‘me’. T

‘Self-referring dispositions’ are the abstract concepts developed over life courses which determine the kinds of responses someone will make, including the kinds of thoughts they’ll have.

Following on from this idea, in 1979 Morris Rosenberg defined the self as the totality of an individual person’s thoughts and feelings toward him- or herse

Piaget proposed that playing at pretence was a reflection of this transition from exclusively self-directed to a mixture of self- and other-directed play.

This well-documented feature once more suggests that the literal, sensory world will take precedence over the inner one of personal thought.

Thirdly, the greater impact of the sensory world could be due to the fact that for a schizophrenic, the senses can be heightened, with colours appearing brighter and more glowing, for exampl