The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

by Thomas Metzinger

intersubjectivity is not only about the body and emotions. Thinking plays a role as well. Reason-based forms of empathy appear to involve yet other parts of the brain—specifically, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Still, the discovery of mirror neurons helps us to understand that empathy is a natural phenomenon, acquired step by step in the course of our biological evolution. First, we developed the self-model, because we had to integrate our sensory perceptions with our bodily behavior. Then this self-model became conscious, and the phenomenal self-model was born into the Ego Tunnel, allowing us to achieve global control of our bodies in a much more selective and flexible manner. This was the step from being an embodied natural system that has and uses an internal image of itself as a whole to a system that, in addition, consciously experiences this fact.9 The next evolutionary step was what Vittorio Gallese, Rizzolatti’s colleague at Parma and one of the leading researchers in the field, has called embodied simulation,.10 In order to understand the feelings and goals of other human beings, we use our own body-model in the brain to simulate them.