Who Are You Without Your Sense of Self?

There is something strange about being a person that we almost never notice.

From the moment you wake up, thousands of things enter and leave consciousness. Sounds appear. Thoughts interrupt one another. Emotions change. Your attention moves between your body, your surroundings, memories of yesterday and predictions about tomorrow. The physical material of your body changes throughout your life, your beliefs evolve, relationships transform you, and the person you remember being ten years ago may feel almost foreign.

Yet through all of this change, there remains an extraordinarily persistent feeling that all of these experiences are happening to the same person.

Me.

You do not normally need to reconstruct your identity every morning. You simply wake up and find yourself already there. Your hand immediately feels like your hand. A memory feels like something that happened to you. When you decide to stand up, you experience yourself as the person initiating the movement. When you look at another person, there seems to be an obvious distinction between the consciousness looking outward and the person being observed.

This feeling is so fundamental that we rarely recognise it as an experience at all.

Until it changes.

People undergoing certain altered states of consciousness sometimes describe a profound weakening of the ordinary distinction between themselves and the world around them. The autobiographical story of who they are may become temporarily less important. The body can feel less clearly bounded. The familiar centre from which experience appears to be happening can become difficult to locate. In more intense cases, people report that the sense of being a separate “I” disappears almost entirely, while experience itself continues.

This phenomenon has become known in psychedelic research as ego dissolution.

The term sounds dramatic, and sometimes the experience is. Yet ego dissolution is scientifically interesting for a reason that goes far beyond psychedelics. If consciousness can continue while the ordinary experience of selfhood changes radically, then studying these states gives researchers an unusual opportunity to investigate something normally hidden in plain sight: how the brain produces the feeling of being a self.

What exactly is the “self”?

Before asking what happens when the self dissolves, we encounter a surprisingly difficult problem: defining what the self actually is.

There is no single brain structure where scientists can point and say, there you are.

Instead, what we casually call the self appears to involve several overlapping processes. There is an embodied or minimal self: the immediate feeling that this body is mine, that I occupy a particular location and that I am the one perceiving and acting. There is also a more narrative self, constructed from memories, personality, relationships, values, social roles and the stories we tell about who we have been and who we expect to become.

These aspects usually fit together so seamlessly that they feel like one thing.

Your body belongs to you. Your memories happened to you. Your name refers to you. Your thoughts seem to originate within you. Your plans concern your future.

But neuroscience suggests that this apparent unity depends on multiple interacting systems rather than a single internal observer sitting somewhere inside the brain.

This is an important distinction because popular discussions of ego dissolution sometimes imagine an “ego” as though it were a specific neurological object that psychedelics temporarily switch off. The scientific picture is much more complex. Contemporary research links self-related processing to distributed brain networks involved in autobiographical memory, bodily awareness, salience, internal thought, perspective and the integration of information.

The self may therefore be less like an object inside the brain and more like an ongoing process of organisation.

And processes can change.

The brain is constantly constructing “me”

One influential way of understanding perception is through predictive processing.

Rather than passively receiving a complete representation of reality through the senses, the brain is thought to continuously generate models of what is happening and update them using incoming sensory information. Perception, in this view, emerges from an ongoing negotiation between what the brain expects and what sensory signals suggest.

This framework has also been applied to the self.

Your brain receives enormous amounts of information from inside and outside the body: heartbeat, breathing, muscular tension, vision, touch, balance, memory, emotion, social information and the consequences of your own actions. Somehow these streams of information are integrated into a remarkably stable model centred around you.

Philosophers and neuroscientists have therefore proposed that the self we experience may function partly as a model that organises information. Rather than needing a separate little observer somewhere inside the brain, the nervous system continuously integrates perception, memory and bodily information around the useful assumption that there is a relatively stable entity to whom these experiences belong.

That model is incredibly useful.

Without some continuity of self, planning becomes difficult. Relationships require remembering who we are in relation to others. Protecting the body requires distinguishing it from the environment. Responsibility requires linking past actions with a present individual. Future goals depend on imagining that the person making a sacrifice today will somehow be connected to the person benefiting tomorrow.

The self is therefore not something we should casually dismiss as an illusion.

Even theories that describe selfhood as constructed recognise that the construction performs important functions.

But constructed does not mean unreal.

A rainbow is constructed through the interaction of light, water and perception, yet we still see it. Money depends on collectively constructed meaning, yet it can change a life. The interesting question is not whether the self is “fake,” but how the experience of self is produced, maintained and sometimes altered.

Psychedelics have given researchers an unusual way of investigating exactly that.

What happens during ego dissolution?

Classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD primarily exert their characteristic effects through serotonin 2A (5-HT2A) receptors. Their action can substantially alter communication within and between large-scale brain networks, producing changes in perception, cognition, emotion and self-experience. Reviews of psychedelic neurobiology suggest that these effects may disrupt some of the hierarchical processes through which the brain ordinarily maintains stable interpretations of the self and world (Stoliker et al., 2022).

Subjectively, this can produce experiences ranging from a mild reduction in self-focused thinking to a profound disappearance of ordinary self-world boundaries.

A person may still see the room around them, hear music and experience emotion, yet no longer feel that everything is organised around the familiar psychological centre of “me.” Some describe becoming indistinguishable from their surroundings. Others experience an intense sense of unity with nature, other people or existence itself.

Researchers developed the Ego-Dissolution Inventory partly to measure these experiences systematically rather than relying only on anecdotal descriptions.

But even the term “ego dissolution” may conceal enormous variation.

A 2024 investigation into experiences involving self-loss and boundary dissolution identified 16 distinguishable factors and found important differences between experiences arising through psychedelics, meditation and psychopathology. Interestingly, experiences of unity appeared to involve changes in identity rather than simply the disappearance of identity (Canby et al., 2024).

This suggests that “losing the ego” may not be one singular state.

For one person, self-referential thought may become quieter. For another, bodily boundaries may change. Someone else may retain a clear sense of self while feeling unusually connected to everything around them. At the extreme, the distinction between observer and observed may temporarily become difficult to identify at all.

The language of dissolution captures something important, but the reality appears to be more multidimensional.

The Default Mode Network - and a popular oversimplification

No discussion of psychedelics and ego dissolution seems complete without the default mode network, or DMN.

The DMN is a network of interacting brain regions associated with processes including autobiographical memory, internally directed cognition and aspects of self-referential thinking. Psychedelic neuroimaging studies have repeatedly found changes in its activity and connectivity.

A systematic review examining psilocybin, LSD and ayahuasca found consistent evidence of acute disruption of connectivity within the DMN alongside increased communication between brain networks that are normally more segregated (Gattuso et al., 2023).

This finding has produced a seductive story in popular psychedelic culture:

The DMN is the ego. Psychedelics switch it off. Therefore, the ego disappears.

The reality is considerably more interesting.

The DMN is not simply “the ego network,” nor does selfhood live inside one brain system. Research has implicated several networks and structures in changes to self-experience. A placebo-controlled psilocybin study, for example, associated ego dissolution with decreased connectivity between medial temporal and higher cortical regions, disruption of the salience network and changes in interhemispheric communication (Lebedev et al., 2015).

Other studies have associated psychedelic ego dissolution with changes in global brain connectivity and communication between normally differentiated networks.

What appears to happen is therefore not the simple deactivation of a neurological ego button. Psychedelics seem to alter the organisation of brain activity more broadly, including systems that contribute to maintaining our ordinary models of ourselves and the world.

A brain that becomes temporarily less constrained

Another influential theory proposes that psychedelic states involve changes in the balance between established predictions and incoming information.

In ordinary consciousness, previous experience strongly influences perception. This is generally useful. The world would be overwhelming if every moment had to be interpreted completely from scratch.

But our predictions do more than help us recognise objects. They also organise beliefs about ourselves.

I am this kind of person.

This is what other people think about me.

This is what I am capable of.

This is what my past means.

This is what will happen if I take that risk.

Over time, some of these predictions can become extremely rigid.

The REBUS model - “Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics” - proposes that psychedelics may temporarily reduce the influence or precision of certain high-level prior beliefs, allowing information to move through the brain in less constrained ways. Predictive-processing accounts have subsequently been used to explain how this loosening might contribute to ego dissolution and altered consciousness.

Within this framework, ego dissolution becomes especially interesting.

If the self is partly maintained through a highly stable model - this body is me, these memories define me, these beliefs belong to me, this is where I end - then temporarily reducing the dominance of that model could change how experience is organised.

The world has not necessarily changed.

The model through which the world is being experienced has.

Why can losing yourself feel like becoming connected to everything?

One of the most consistent themes in reports of profound psychedelic experiences is that ego dissolution and connectedness frequently appear together.

People do not simply report becoming “nothing.” They may describe feeling deeply connected to nature, humanity, another person or existence as a whole. The weakening of one boundary seems, in some cases, to be accompanied by the expansion of another relationship.

This makes intuitive sense.

Ordinary experience continuously distinguishes self from environment. This sensation belongs to my body. That tree exists outside me. Those are another person's emotions. This is my perspective.

If some of the processes maintaining those distinctions become less dominant, experience may no longer be organised around such a rigid separation between observer and observed.

A systematic review examining ego dissolution and connectedness across 15 studies involving 2,182 participants found that both were associated with a greater likelihood of improvement following psychedelic experiences, although association does not demonstrate that either experience directly caused those outcomes.

This distinction is particularly important as psychedelic experiences become increasingly discussed as therapeutic tools.

A powerful feeling of unity can be meaningful without automatically being therapeutic. An experience can feel profound and still require careful integration. And an experience that temporarily dissolves familiar psychological structures can also be frightening.

Ego dissolution is not always blissful

Popular accounts often present ego dissolution as though it were the ultimate psychedelic achievement: surrender completely, lose yourself and emerge transformed.

That romanticisation misses an important part of the phenomenon.

The loss of familiar self-boundaries can feel liberating, but it can also feel terrifying. The same weakening of control that one person experiences as unity may be interpreted by another as disappearance, death or psychological disintegration.

Context matters enormously.

The intensity of the experience, psychological state, expectations, environment, dose, interpersonal support and interpretation can all influence what an altered state becomes.

This is one reason it is dangerous to treat ego dissolution as something people should deliberately maximise. More is not necessarily better, and the strongest alteration of selfhood is not automatically the most beneficial experience.

Research itself increasingly reflects this complexity. Contemporary work on self-loss distinguishes experiences associated with positive unity from forms of self-disturbance that can occur in distressing or pathological states.

The disappearance of ordinary selfhood is therefore not inherently enlightening.

What matters is the form it takes, the context in which it occurs and what happens afterward.

Psychedelics are not the only route

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of ego dissolution is that psychedelics are not required for changes in self-experience.

Contemplative traditions have explored the instability of selfhood for centuries, often through sustained attention and meditation rather than pharmacology. Certain meditation practices deliberately examine the processes through which thoughts, sensations and identity are experienced as “mine,” sometimes producing states described as selflessness or non-dual awareness.

There are intriguing parallels between meditation and psychedelic states, but they should not be collapsed into the same phenomenon. A major review comparing meditation and psychedelic experiences emphasised both convergences and important phenomenological differences between them (Millière et al., 2018).

This matters because it suggests there may be multiple ways in which ordinary self-processing can change.

A psychedelic can produce an abrupt and pharmacologically driven transformation of perception and selfhood. Meditation may gradually change how a person relates to thoughts and self-referential processes through training. Awe can temporarily make personal concerns feel smaller. Deep absorption in music or movement can reduce explicit self-awareness without eliminating basic bodily selfhood.

We use phrases such as “losing yourself” for many of these experiences, but they may involve very different psychological and neural mechanisms.

Perhaps the more interesting commonality is that our ordinary experience of self is capable of changing at all.

If the self disappears, who is experiencing it?

This leads directly into one of the strangest philosophical problems raised by ego dissolution.

People return from these experiences and say:

I disappeared.

But who noticed?

If there was literally no self whatsoever, how was there an experience that could later be remembered?

Part of the difficulty comes from treating “self” and “consciousness” as interchangeable.

They may not be.

Consciousness can contain colour, sensation, emotion, sound and awareness while some forms of explicit self-representation become radically altered. What disappears during ego dissolution may therefore not be consciousness itself but particular ways in which consciousness is organised around a subject.

This is why researchers distinguish different dimensions of selfhood. The narrative story of “Ieva, with my history, personality, plans and problems” is different from the minimal sense of being located in a body. Both are different again from the simple fact that experience is occurring.

Ego dissolution may alter these layers to different degrees.

And suddenly an apparently mystical question becomes scientifically precise:

Which components of selfhood are actually necessary for conscious experience?

We do not yet have a complete answer.

What comes back when “you” come back?

Perhaps the most important part of ego dissolution is not the moment in which the self disappears.

It is what happens when it returns.

Eventually, the ordinary architecture of identity reassembles. Your name matters again. Your memories reconnect. Your body feels clearly bounded. The distinction between yourself and the chair, the trees, the other person or the universe becomes obvious once more.

But sometimes the returning self is viewed differently.

A belief that previously felt absolute may now feel like a belief rather than reality. A personal problem that occupied the entire field of attention may seem smaller. A relationship may feel more important. The natural world may feel less external. Or perhaps nothing lasting changes at all.

This is one reason researchers are interested in whether experiences involving ego dissolution, connectedness and mystical-type qualities predict longer-term outcomes following psychedelic interventions. Some studies report associations between these experiences and subsequent improvements, but the mechanisms remain uncertain and should not be reduced to the idea that “losing the ego heals you.”

An intense experience is not the same thing as transformation.

Whatever happens afterward - interpretation, behaviour, relationships, integration and environment - matters too.

Maybe the question is not whether the self is real

Discussions about ego dissolution often end up asking whether the self is an illusion.

Perhaps that question is too binary.

The self clearly has consequences. Your history matters. Your relationships matter. Your body matters. Your commitments and values matter. A functioning sense of identity allows us to navigate the social and physical world.

At the same time, neuroscience gives us good reason to question the intuition that somewhere inside us exists a single, permanent, indivisible observer that remains unchanged beneath every experience.

What we call “me” may instead emerge continuously from memory, bodily information, prediction, attention, emotion and interaction with the world.

That does not make the self meaningless.

It makes it dynamic.

And perhaps this is why experiences of ego dissolution can feel so profound. They do not necessarily reveal some final metaphysical truth about reality. Science cannot tell us that a feeling of becoming one with the universe proves that everything is literally one consciousness.

What these experiences can reveal, much more modestly and perhaps more importantly, is that the boundary we experience as completely obvious in ordinary life is capable of changing.

The sense of I is remarkably convincing.

It may also be remarkably flexible.

So, who are you without your sense of self?

There is no simple scientific answer.

Remove your name and there is still experience. Quiet the autobiographical story and sensations continue. Reduce self-referential thinking and consciousness does not necessarily disappear. Even when the ordinary boundary between self and world becomes profoundly altered, something can remain that later allows a person to say: I experienced that.

Perhaps this is why ego dissolution sits at such a fascinating intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, contemplative practice and psychedelic research. It forces us to examine the one assumption we bring into almost every other question about consciousness: that there is a stable someone at the centre of it.

For most of our lives, that someone feels unquestionable.

Then, under unusual conditions, the structure can loosen.

The boundary can move.

And consciousness continues.

At HOLISMUS, we are interested in what these experiences can teach us without rushing to turn them into proof of something larger. Psychedelics, meditation and other altered states may give us unusual windows into how selfhood is constructed, but they do not yet tell us what consciousness ultimately is or whether experiences of unity reveal anything about the fundamental nature of reality.

They leave us somewhere more interesting: with evidence, experience and an unanswered question.

If the person you experience yourself to be can temporarily disappear while experience remains, what exactly have you been calling “me”?

References & Further Reading

Stoliker, D., Egan, G. F., Friston, K. J., & Razi, A. (2022). Neural Mechanisms and Psychology of Psychedelic Ego Dissolution. Pharmacological Reviews, 74(4), 876–917.

Lebedev, A. V., et al. (2015). Finding the self by losing the self: Neural correlates of ego-dissolution under psilocybin. Human Brain Mapping, 36(8), 3137–3153.

Gattuso, J. J., et al. (2023). Default Mode Network Modulation by Psychedelics: A Systematic Review. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 26(3), 155–188.

Letheby, C., & Gerrans, P. (2017). Self unbound: ego dissolution in psychedelic experience. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2017(1), nix016.

Canby, N. K., Lindahl, J., Britton, W. B., & Córdova, J. V. (2024). Clarifying and measuring the characteristics of experiences that involve a loss of self or a dissolution of its boundaries. Consciousness and Cognition, 119, 103655.

Millière, R., Carhart-Harris, R. L., Roseman, L., Trautwein, F.-M., & Berkovich-Ohana, A. (2018). Psychedelics, Meditation, and Self-Consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1475.

A note from HOLISMUS

Ego dissolution is an active area of consciousness and psychedelic research. Experiences of unity, self-loss or altered self-world boundaries should not be treated as scientific evidence for metaphysical claims such as universal consciousness or the literal merging of minds. HOLISMUS approaches these experiences as phenomena worth exploring in their own right: through what research can measure, what people report experiencing, and the questions that remain unresolved.

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