Who are you? Are you just a brain? A brain and a body? All the things you have done and the friends you have made? Many of us assume that who we really are is something deep inside us, an inner sanctuary that contains our true selves. In Who You Are, Michael Spivey argues that the opposite is true: that you are more than a brain, more than a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are. Rather than peeling layers away to reveal the inner you, Spivey traces who you are outward. You may already feel in your heart that something outside your body is actually part of you—a child, a place, a favorite book. Spivey confirms this intuition with scientific findings.

With each chapter, Spivey incrementally expands a common definition of the self. After (gently) helping you to discard your assumptions about who you are, he draws on research in cognitive science and neuroscience to explain the back-and-forth among all the regions of the brain and the interaction between the brain and body. He then makes the case for understanding objects and locations in your environment as additional parts of who we are. Going even further, he shows that, just as interaction links brain, body, and environment, ever-expanding systems of interaction link humans to other humans, to nonhuman animals, and to nonliving matter. This may seem an interaction or two too far. But you don't have to take his word for it—just consider the evidence he presents.

About the Author

Michael J. Spivey is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Merced. He earned his B.A. in Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. After 12 years as a psychology professor at Cornell University, Spivey moved to UC Merced to help build their Cognitive and Information Sciences Ph.D. Program. He has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters on the embodiment of cognition, and interactions between language, vision, memory, syntax, semantics, and motor movement. His research uses eye-tracking, computer-mouse tracking, and dynamical systems theory to explore how brain, body, and environment work together to make a mind what it is. He is author of The Continuity of Mind and Who You Are. In 2010, Spivey received the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society.

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