Your Brain Agrees With Buddhist Monks About Who You Really Are

Picture yourself at five years old. Maybe you recall a birthday party, a favorite toy, or the smell of your childhood home. Now consider who you were then versus who you are now. Most people assume something essential has remained constant through all those years, a core “you” that has persisted from infancy through adolescence and into adulthood.

What if that assumption is wrong?

A quiet revolution has been brewing at the intersection of two unlikely allies. On one side stand Buddhist monks who have spent millennia in contemplation, examining consciousness through meditation and philosophical inquiry. On the other side sit neuroscientists armed with brain scanners, EEG machines, and peer-reviewed journals. Neither group set out to prove the other right. Yet when researchers at the University of British Columbia and elsewhere began examining their findings, they discovered something remarkable.

Two traditions separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years had arrived at an identical conclusion about human identity. And that conclusion challenges everything most people believe about themselves.

What Monks Knew Before Brain Scans Existed

Long before Western scientists developed tools to measure neural activity, Buddhist practitioners in ancient India developed a concept called “anatta” or “not-self.” According to Buddhist teaching, no permanent, unchanging self exists within any person. Instead, what we call “self” represents a continuous flow of mental states, perceptions, and sensations that shift from moment to moment.

Buddhist philosophy holds that clinging to a fixed sense of identity causes suffering. When people believe they possess an unchanging core self, they become attached to certain traits, memories, and self-concepts. They resist change. They fight against the natural flow of existence. Liberation, according to Buddhist thought, comes from recognizing and accepting impermanence.

For centuries, Western thinkers dismissed such ideas as mysticism. How could serious scholars accept claims made by robed monks sitting in mountain monasteries? Science demanded evidence, measurement, and replication. Contemplative insight, no matter how profound, could not compete with laboratory data. Or so the thinking went.

Brain Research Maps a Self Without Borders

Evan Thompson, a philosophy of mind professor at the University of British Columbia, has spent years studying where cognitive science and Buddhist philosophy meet. His research has produced findings that would have seemed impossible to earlier generations of scientists.

“Buddhists argue that nothing is constant, everything changes through time, you have a constantly changing stream of consciousness,” Thompson tells Quartz. “And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”

Consider what brain imaging studies have revealed. When researchers first began mapping neural activity, many expected to find a “self center” somewhere in the brain. Perhaps the prefrontal cortex or some other region would light up consistently whenever subjects thought about themselves, made decisions, or reflected on their identities.

Instead, scientists found something far more interesting. A paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences reported that self-processing in the brain does not reside in any particular region or network. Rather, it spreads across a broad range of fluctuating neural processes. No single area serves as headquarters for personal identity. No neural command center houses the essential “you.”

Your sense of self, according to these findings, emerges from countless interactions between different brain regions, bodily sensations, and environmental factors. It arises fresh in each moment, shaped by whatever you happen to be experiencing, thinking, or feeling at that instant. From one second to the next, the neural patterns creating your sense of identity shift and change.

Buddhist monks reached this understanding through introspective practice. Neuroscientists reached it through brain scans and data analysis. Neither tradition knew the other would confirm its findings. Yet here both stand, pointing at the same truth.

Your Brain Can Change, and Monks Proved It First

If no fixed self exists, what does that mean for personal growth? Buddhist traditions have long taught that the mind can be trained through meditation. Monks spend decades cultivating qualities like compassion, focus, and equanimity. Such practice assumes the mind remains plastic and responsive to training throughout life.

Modern neuroscience now uses a term for this phenomenon. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. Scientists once believed the adult brain remained relatively fixed after childhood development concluded. Research over the past few decades has overturned that assumption.

Studies of meditation practitioners have proven particularly striking. Researchers examining long-term meditators have found measurable changes in brain structure and function. Areas associated with attention, emotional regulation, and self-awareness show increased gray matter density in experienced practitioners. Meditation training can alter how different brain regions communicate with each other.

What monks achieved through contemplative discipline, scientists can now measure with imaging technology. People who meditate can strengthen specific mental capacities through sustained practice, just as athletes can develop particular muscle groups through targeted exercise.

For anyone who has ever felt trapped by bad habits, negative thought patterns, or self-limiting beliefs, these findings carry profound implications. If no fixed self exists, if the brain remains plastic throughout life, then change becomes possible at any age. People need not remain prisoners of their past selves. Growth and transformation remain available options.

Are You Aware When You Sleep?

Perhaps nowhere do Buddhist claims seem more outlandish to scientific ears than in discussions of consciousness during deep sleep. Standard neuroscience treats dreamless sleep as a blackout state. Consciousness simply vanishes, according to conventional thinking, only to reappear upon waking.

Indian philosophical traditions tell a different story. Some theorists argue that subtle awareness persists even in dreamless sleep. A thread of consciousness continues, they claim, though it cannot be consolidated into memory from moment to moment. Sleepers remain dimly aware without retaining any record of that awareness.

Such claims might seem impossible to test. How can researchers study awareness that leaves no memory trace? Yet scientists have found creative ways to investigate.

A 2013 study examined meditators’ brain patterns during sleep. Researchers discovered that meditation affects electro-physical activity even when practitioners are unconscious. Most striking, the findings suggested that meditators might retain the capacity to “process information and maintain some level of awareness, even during a state when usually these cognitive functions are greatly impaired.”

Such research remains preliminary. No one claims to have proven Buddhist theories about sleep consciousness. But the fact that measurable differences exist between meditators and non-meditators during sleep suggests contemplative traditions may have noticed something real. Ancient practitioners lacked the tools to measure neural activity, yet their careful attention to subjective experience detected phenomena that modern instruments can now partially confirm.

Where Science and Spirituality Part Ways

For all their agreement, Buddhism and neuroscience do not see eye to eye on everything. A fundamental divide separates the two traditions when it comes to consciousness itself.

Buddhist philosophy allows for some form of awareness that does not depend on a physical body. Different schools within Buddhism articulate this belief in various ways, but most accept that consciousness can exist independently of brain and body. Reincarnation, after all, requires something to carry forward from one life to the next.

Neuroscientists, including Thompson, reject this view. From a scientific standpoint, consciousness appears to require a functioning brain. No evidence supports the existence of awareness without neural activity to generate it. Whatever continues after death, if anything continues at all, lies beyond the reach of current scientific investigation.

Neither Buddhism nor neuroscience has solved the hard problem of consciousness. How subjective experience arises from physical processes remains mysterious. Scientists can correlate brain states with mental states. They cannot yet explain why any brain state should feel like anything at all from the inside. On this question, both traditions continue to search for answers.

Real But Not Fixed

Some neuroscientists take their findings about the self in a direction Thompson considers mistaken. Because no neural “self center” exists, some researchers conclude that the self itself is an illusion. If brain scans cannot locate it, the reasoning goes, it must not be real.

Thompson disagrees with this conclusion. “In neuroscience, you’ll often come across people who say the self is an illusion created by the brain,” he explains. “My view is that the brain and the body work together in the context of our physical environment to create a sense of self. And it’s misguided to say that just because it’s a construction, it’s an illusion.”

A construction is not the same as an illusion. Money, for example, is a social construction. Its value exists only because people agree to treat certain pieces of paper and metal as valuable. Yet no one would claim money is, therefore, an illusion. You cannot pay rent with illusions.

Similarly, the self emerges from interactions between brain, body, and environment. It exists as a process rather than a thing, a verb rather than a noun. But this does not make it unreal. You exist. Your sense of identity exists. What science and Buddhism together reveal is that this identity remains far more fluid than most people assume.

And in that fluidity lies freedom. If no fixed self imprisons you, then you need not remain trapped by old patterns, past mistakes, or limiting self-concepts. Change becomes possible because change is your nature. Growth remains available because permanence was always an illusion, even if selfhood was not.

Buddhist monks have taught this message for millennia. Modern neuroscience now adds its voice to theirs. Two very different traditions, speaking across vast distances of time and culture, have arrived at the same liberating truth.

You are not who you think you are. And that just might be the best news you have heard all day.