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Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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Self-recognition, theory-of-mind, and self-awareness: What side are you
on?
Alain Morina
a
Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada
First published on: 03 November 2010

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17

Self-recognition, theory-of-mind, and self-awareness:
What side are you on?
Alain Morin

Downloaded By: [Morin, Alain] At: 01:03 4 November 2010

Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada

A fashionable view in comparative psychology states that primates possess selfawareness because they exhibit mirror self-recognition (MSR), which in turn makes
it possible to infer mental states in others (‘‘theory-of-mind’’; ToM). In cognitive
neuroscience, an increasingly popular position holds that the right hemisphere
represents the centre of self-awareness because MSR and ToM tasks presumably
increase activity in that hemisphere. These two claims are critically assessed here as
follows: (1) MSR should not be equated with full-blown self-awareness, as it most
probably only requires kinaesthetic self-knowledge and does not involve access to
one’s mental events; (2) ToM and self-awareness are fairly independent and should
also not be taken as equivalent notions; (3) MSR and ToM tasks engage medial and
left brain areas; (4) other self-awareness tasks besides MSR and ToM tasks (e.g.,
self-description, autobiography) mostly recruit medial and left brain areas; (5) and
recent neuropsychological evidence implies that inner speech (produced by the left
hemisphere) plays a significant role in self-referential activity. The main conclusions
reached based on this analysis are that (a) organisms that display MSR most
probably do not possess introspective self-awareness, and (b) self-related processes
most likely engage a distributed network of brain regions situated in both
hemispheres.

Keywords: Self-awareness; Self-recognition; Theory-of-mind; Right hemisphere;
Inner speech.

In 1998, Gordon G. Gallup Jr. published an article whose title was ‘‘Can
animals empathize?’’ His answer to this question was a confident ‘‘yes’’:
‘‘Animals that pass the mirror test are self-aware and thus can infer the states
of mind of another individual’’ (first paragraph of the article). One of Julian
Paul Keenan’s papers (Feinberg & Keenan, 2005) is entitled ‘‘Where in the
Address correspondence to: Alain Morin, Department of Psychology, Mount Royal University,
4825 Mount Royal Gate S.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T3E 6K6. E-mail: amorin@mtroyal.ca
This paper is based on a talk presented at the conference The Minds of Animals held in Toronto
(Ontario) on 12
13 August 2008. I would like to thank Petra Kamstra and Cass Foursha-Stevenson
for their helpful editorial comments on previous versions of this manuscript.
# 2010 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
http://www.psypress.com/laterality
DOI: 10.1080/13576501003702648

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brain is the self ?’’ According to the authors, ‘‘(. . .) the right hemisphere
plays a special role in the creation of the self’’ (p. 15).
These two articles and their conclusions are representative of an
increasingly popular view in comparative psychology and cognitive neuroscience.1 This position states that primates possess self-awareness because
they exhibit mirror self-recognition (MSR), which in turn makes it possible
to infer mental states in others (i.e., to develop a ‘‘theory-of-mind’’ or ToM);
this view also holds that the right hemisphere represents the neurological
seat of self-awareness because MSR and ToM tasks presumably increase
activity in that hemisphere.
The goal of this paper is to question this dual assumption on several
conceptual, behavioural, psychological, and neurological grounds (see
Morin, 2002, 2003, 2007). The conclusions that will be submitted based
on this analysis will cast doubts on the above target assumptions. It will be
suggested that MSR need not be equated with ‘‘genuine’’ (i.e., private, as
opposed to kinaesthetic) self-awareness; that ToM and self-awareness are
relatively independent and thus should also not be taken as equivalent
concepts; that MSR and ToM tasks recruit medial and left brain areas, not
areas exclusively located in the right hemisphere; that other self-awareness
tasks besides MSR and ToM tasks (e.g., self-description, autobiography)
mostly involve medial and left brain sites; and that inner speech seems to
play an important role in self-awareness.

MIRROR SELF-FACE RECOGNITION (MSR)
MSR and self-awareness
Most organisms that are confronted with a reflecting surface react as if they
were seeing another conspecific creature: they engage in a variety of social
responses such as bobbing, vocalising, and threatening. Only human
primates, chimpanzees, orangutans, and some bonobos, elephants, dolphins,
and most recently Australian magpies have been shown to exhibit
spontaneous mirror-guided self-exploration*e.g., self-directed behaviours
such as examining body parts only visible in the mirror (for reviews, see
1
This view is based on Gallup’s and Keenan’s extensive research on self-recognition and selfawareness; in Gallup’s case it spans over more than 40 years. Providing the reader with an
exhaustive list of their published work is unrealistic. The reader can find below a list of their most
important articles and book chapters.
Gordon G. Gallup Jr. and his team: Gallup, 1968, 1970, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1997;
Gallup et al., 2002; Platek et al., 2003, 2004b; Stuss et al., 2001; Suarez & Gallup, 1981.
Julian Paul Keenan and his team: Barnacz et al., 2004; Guise et al., 2007; Keenan et al., 1999,
2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2005; Keenan & Gorman, 2007; Platek et al., 2004a; Rosa et al., 2008;
Seger et al., 2004; Uddin et al., 2007.

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3

Bard, Todd, Bernier, Love, & Leavens, 2006; Gallup, Anderson, & Shillito,
2002; see also Plotnik, de Waal, & Reiss, 2006; Prior, Schwartz, &
Gunturkun, 2008; Reiss & Marino, 2001). The aforementioned animals
also pass the more formal ‘‘mark test’’ and will touch a red dot that has been
inconspicuously applied to their brow or forehead (or throat feathers in
magpies’ case). Emitting self-directed responses in front of a mirror and
passing the mark test indicate MSR; in humans this developmental
landmark is achieved between 18 and 24 months of age (Amsterdam,
1972). MSR has also been studied in individuals diagnosed with autism
(Dawson & McKissick, 1984), Down syndrome (Cunningham & Glenn,
2004), Alzheimer’s disease (Biringer & Anderson, 1992), and schizophrenia
(Lee, Kwon, Shin, Lee, & Park, 2007), where deficits have been observed in
these last three disorders. Video recordings of the self have been used to test
time-delayed self-recognition (e.g., Povinelli, Laudau, & Perilloux, 1996).
People are also competent at identifying their body, including limbs (e.g.,
hands) and shadows produced by the body (Cameron & Gallup, 1988), their
odour (Platek, Thompson, & Gallup, 2004b), and their name (Kaplan, AzizZadeh, Uddin, & Iacoboni, 2008).
While some have tried to discredit the validity of the mirror test on diverse
methodological and conceptual grounds (e.g., Epstein, Lanza, & Skinner,
1981; Heyes, 1998), there is no real controversy surrounding the evidence:
displaying self-guided responses in front of a mirror and/or passing the mark
test do indicate that an organism is capable of self-recognition. A debate
emerges when one attempts to interpret what self-recognition actually
signifies (De Veer & van den Bos, 1999; Schilhab, 2004). The most extreme
view, articulated by Gallup (e.g., 1982), can be summarised as follows.
Emitting self-directed behaviours in front of a mirror indicates that the
organism can take itself as the object of its own attention; the ability to selffocus constitutes a well-established component of self-awareness (Duval &
Wicklund, 1972; Mead, 1934). In addition, re-cognising oneself in front of a
mirror presupposes pre-existing ‘‘self-cognition’’ (i.e., self-knowledge, a selfconcept) and thus self-awareness.
That MSR implies some form of self-awareness is beyond doubt; but what
type or level of self-awareness is involved? Self-awareness represents a state in
which one actively identifies, processes, and stores information about the self
(Morin, 2006). It comprises various self-domains (e.g., emotions, autobiographical retrieval, sense of agency, personality traits) and corollaries (e.g.,
self-esteem, self-regulation, death awareness, self-conscious emotions).
Importantly, self-awareness includes a knowledge of one’s own mental states
(private self-aspects) such as thoughts, goals, sensations, attitudes; and
visible characteristics (public self-aspects) like physical appearance, mannerisms, and behaviours (Fenigstein, 1986; Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975).

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Self-awareness also entails knowing that one stays the same person across
time and that one is separate from the environment (Kircher & David, 2003).
It is unlikely that MSR taps into all these rich aspects of self-awareness;
indeed probably the only prerequisite for MSR is a knowledge of one’s body
(e.g., Mitchell, 1993, 2002a, 2002b; Povinelli, 1995)*a strictly public selfaspect. More specifically, all an organism requires to self-recognise is a
mental representation of its own physical self; the organism matches the
kinaesthetic representation of the body with the image seen in the mirror and
infers that ‘‘it’s me’’. This interpretation implies that an awareness of private
self-dimensions is not needed for MSR to take place: what is needed,
however, is an awareness of the body. Keenan, Gallup, and Falk (2003), who
insist that organisms that self-recognise are self-aware, define self-awareness
as ‘‘the ability to reflect on one’s own mental state (. . .)’’ (p. 5; italics added);
in addition, as will be seen below, Gallup suggests that organisms that pass
the mark test are self-aware and can engage in ToM because they have access
to their own mental states. The present line of reasoning is clearly at odds
with this view.
In one study, 96% of Down syndrome patients demonstrated MSR while
only 57% showed awareness of their disability (Cunningham & Glenn,
2004)*a clear indication that self-recognition does not involve knowledge of
fundamental self-aspects. Ramachandran (2007) observed psychiatric patients insisting that their reflection in the mirror was ‘‘someone else’’ (thus
exhibiting some identity distortion), yet they passed the mark test. Sugiura
and his colleagues (2006) report cases of demented patients combing or
shaving in front of a mirror (the informal equivalent of the mark test), yet
failing to recognise their own mirror images. Most autistic individuals are
capable of MSR (Dawson & McKissick, 1984; Mitchell, 1997b) but are
characterised by alexithymia*serious difficulties in reflecting on their inner
experience and identifying their subjective feelings (Silani et al., 2008). So
MSR can be exhibited in the presence of important self-awareness deficits,
and MSR can be impaired despite intact self-knowledge: Klein, Gabriel,
Gandi, and Robertson (2008) describe the case of a prosopagnosic patient
incapable of self-face recognition who nonetheless showed perfect trait selfknowledge. If MSR were synonymous with self-awareness, one would not
come across such peculiar observations.

Self-face recognition and the brain
Let us now focus on the claim that self-awareness is located in the right
hemisphere because self-face recognition mostly activates areas within this
hemisphere. This argument is fallacious for at least two reasons. The first
one has already been explored above: MSR and self-awareness cannot be

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5

equated; consequently, even if studies were able to demonstrate that the
former is located in the right hemisphere, it would not imply that the latter
be produced by the same hemisphere. The second reason is that current
evidence indicates that self-face recognition recruits a bilateral network of
brain areas (Platek, Wathne, Tierney, & Thomson, 2008).
Four types of neurocognitive studies have been conducted to investigate
the neural correlates of self-face recognition: behavioural, lesion, split-brain,
and functional imaging. While behavioural and lesion data tend to support
a right hemisphere dominance view of self-face processing, split-brain and
functional imaging data do not.
In a typical behavioural study (e.g., Keenan et al., 1999), healthy
participants are asked to determine if a visual stimulus represents their own
face or that of either a familiar other or an unknown person by pressing
buttons with the right or left hand. Such studies find a left-hand/righthemisphere advantage (faster reaction times) when participants respond to
self-faces, but not to other faces. Lesion studies report cases of patients with
right hemisphere damage who fail to recognise themselves in the mirror (e.g.,
Keenan, Rubio, Racioppi, Johnson, & Barnacz, 2005). Note that only a
handful of patients show such a condition (Rosa, Lassonde, Pinard, Keenan, &
Belin, 2008).
Preilowski (1977) presented various photographs of faces, including their
own face, to the left and right hemispheres of two split-brain patients while
recording galvanic skin response, an indicator of arousal. In both patients
the skin response was significantly greater when self-faces were projected to
the right hemisphere than when they were presented to the left. All other
published split-brain reports fail to replicate this clear-cut lateralised result.
In Sperry, Zaidel, and Zaidel’s experiment (1979), both hemispheres of two
split-brain patients were capable of explicit self-recognition. The patients
successfully selected a picture of themselves (among an array of pictures of
family members and acquaintances) with their right hand when the
information was presented in the left hemisphere, and vice versa. Using
slightly different procedures, Uddin, Rayman, and Zaidel (2005) obtained
comparable results, and Turk et al. (2002) instead observed a left hemisphere
bias for self-recognition.
It is worth noting here that the split-brain data actually present a major
challenge not only to the idea of a right hemispheric superiority for self-face
recognition, but also to the general notion of the existence of a specialised
neural network for self-awareness in the right hemisphere. As Sperry et al.
(1979) point out, it is relatively easy to objectify the conscious status of the
left hemisphere by addressing verbal questions to it, in which case the left
hemisphere will offer answers that visibly indicate that it has a complete
sense of self*e.g., the name it shares with the right hemisphere, its present
feelings, future goals, fears, hopes, etc. How can the right hemisphere be

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MORIN

dominant for self-reflecting activities if the left hemisphere is also fully selfaware (Morin, 2007)?
With functional-imaging studies of self-face recognition, healthy participants are invited to make identity judgements about their own face, the face
of an acquaintance, and the face of a stranger while brain activity is being
recorded with positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) (e.g., Platek, Keenan, Gallup, & Mohamed,
2004a). While initial reports tended to favour the right hemispheric model,
a recent meta-analysis of nine functional-neuroimaging studies of self-face
recognition (Platek et al., 2008) identifies a larger distributed, bilateral,
network that comprises the left fusiform gyrus, bilateral middle and inferior
frontal gyri, and right precuneus. This is obviously inconsistent with claims
such as ‘‘neural substrates of the right hemisphere may selectively participate
in processes linked to self-awareness’’ (Keenan, Nelson, O’Connor, &
Pascual-Leone, 2001b, p. 305).

THEORY OF MIND (ToM)
ToM and self-awareness
An important aspect of the view being assessed here is the claim that because
humans and primates possess self-awareness, they can make inferences about
others’ mental states (i.e., they can engage in ToM). ToM consists in
attributing mental states such as goals, intentions, beliefs, desires, thoughts,
and feelings to other social agents (Gallagher & Frith, 2003). The benefits of
ToM are the ability to predict others’ behaviour and, on that basis, to help,
avoid, or deceive others as the situation dictates. Many variations of the
‘‘Sally-Ann’’ false-belief task are usually used to measure ToM abilities in
children (see Birch & Bloom, 2004, Fig. 1a). Primitive forms of ToM emerge
at around 18 months of age; an implicit understanding of mental states exists
at 2 years of age (Frith & Frith, 2003). A full development of ToM occurs at
around 6 years of age; this development seems to be related to language
acquisition (e.g., Garfield, Peterson, & Perry, 2001; Milligan, Astington, &
Dack, 2007) and triadic interactions (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004). ToM
deficits are well documented in autism (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 2001) and
schizophrenia (e.g., Brune, 2005); these deficits are increasingly being
associated with brain dysfunction, most likely located in the more anterior
region of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (Amodio & Frith, 2006).
Both Gallup’s and Keenan’s groups suggest that self-awareness, as
measured by MSR, paves the way to the understanding of others’ minds:
‘‘. . . if I can think about my thoughts, I should be able to think about
your thoughts as well’’ (Keenan et al., 2003, p. 78). This intuitively attractive
idea, the ‘‘Simulation’’ (or ‘‘Projection) view, explicitly assumes that (private)

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7

self-awareness comes first and is rapidly followed by a natural propensity to
impute internal states to others through a form of mental simulation.
Although possibly linked, self-awareness and ToM are nonetheless
relatively independent and should not be equated. One first difficulty
(see Mitchell, 1997a) is the immense time gap that exists between the
emergence of MSR (between 18 and 24 months in human children) and the
effective establishment of ToM skills (at around 6): if introspection (which
according to Gallup should already be present when MRS occurs) naturally
leads to ToM, how could self-aware individuals navigate in their social world
for 4 years or more without spontaneously thinking about others’ mental
states? A second point is that, by definition, ToM implies a focus of
attention on others, not on the self, whereas self-awareness exclusively entails
self-focus (Morin, 2002). In addition, in humans, self-awareness is made up
of two tendencies (Trapnell & Campbell, 1999): self-reflection, which
constitutes an authentic curiosity about the self, and self-rumination, which
represents anxious attention paid to the self. Only self-reflection leads to
ToM (i.e., empathy); self-rumination actually inhibits TOM because the
person is too self-absorbed to think about others’ mental states (Joireman,
2004; Joireman, Parrott, & Hammaersla, 2002). And finally, brain areas
correlated with self-awareness and ToM abilities differ (Dimaggio, Lysaker,
Carcione, Nicolo, & Semerari, 2008). Overall, brain-imaging studies suggest
that self-awareness tasks activate the ventral portion of the medial prefrontal
cortex (mPFC), whereas ToM tasks engage a more dorsal subregion of the
mPFC. Thus again, self-awareness and ToM are not interchangeable
concepts.

ToM and the brain
Some lesion and brain-imaging studies of ToM tasks show a significant
involvement of the right prefrontal cortex (e.g., Stuss, Gallup, & Alexander,
2001; Vogeley et al., 2001). An implied assumption made on that basis is
that, since ToM skills seem to depend on right hemispheric activity, selfawareness abilities too ought to be located in the same hemisphere (e.g.,
Guise et al., 2007, p. 133). This argument is erroneous of course, because
ToM and self-awareness most probably should not be equated; as a result,
even if studies were able to establish that the former is located in the right
hemisphere, it would not mean that the latter be produced by the same
hemisphere. Additionally, although some studies do suggest a right hemisphere bias during mentalising tasks, a recent review of 40 fMRI studies of
ToM (Carrington & Bailey, 2009) clearly reveals activation of medial and left
brain areas. In a typical experiment (e.g., Calarge, Andreasen & O’Leary,
2003), healthy participants are asked to produce a fictive story about the

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mental state of a stranger whom they imagine meeting on a park bench.
Brain activity during the ToM task is then compared to that of a control task
consisting in reading a story requiring no mental state attribution. In their
review Carrington and Bailey (2009) observed most activations occurring
bilaterally in the medial prefrontal /orbitofrontal cortex, superior temporal
sulcus, tempo-parietal gyrus, and anterior- and para-cingulate cortices. This
is in sharp contradiction to statements such as ‘‘there is good evidence that
tasks requiring Theory of Mind engage the right hemisphere’’ (Keenan et al.,
2005, p. 701).

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SELF-AWARENESS
Disorders of the self and the brain
One argument made in favour of the right hemisphere model of selfawareness is that injury to that hemisphere consistently leads to disturbances
of the self (e.g., Feinberg & Keenan, 2005; Keenan et al., 2005). Some
patients may be incapable of recognising themselves in a mirror (the mirror
sign syndrome), may experience dissociation, which includes derealisation
(feeling outside of one’s body), may suffer from asomatognosia (a failure to
recognise specific body parts, e.g., one’s left arm), or anosognosia
(unawareness of hemiplegia, e.g., paralysis of one side of the body, most
typically the left side). All these conditions follow right hemisphere damage.
It is striking that all seem to involve a distortion or absence of a body
representation*precisely the type of kinaesthetic information postulated to
be required for MSR. It is tempting, then, to suggest that the mirror sign
syndrome, asomatognosia, dissociation, and anosognosia have nothing to do
with access to one’s mental events (private self-awareness), and instead are
related to one’s mental conception of one’s body*or lack thereof (Morin,
2003).
More subtle forms of anosognosia are observed in response to traumatic
brain injuries (TBI), where patients exhibit a lack of awareness into their
own condition. Does anosognosia of that type result from damage
specifically located in the right hemisphere? In a 20-year review of the
literature, Prigatano (2005) concludes that ‘‘(. . .) persistent problems of
impaired awareness after TBI may require bilateral diffuse cerebral
dysfunction’’ (p. 24, italics added). Sherer, Hart, Whyte, Nick, and Yablon
(2005) scanned the brain of 91 patients with anosognosia caused by TBI and
observed that the severity of the injury, but not its location in the right
hemisphere, was predictive of degree of self-awareness deficits. Cocchini,
Cameron, Beschin, and Fotopoulou (2009) note that left hemisphere
damaged patients are often excluded from studies investigating anosognosia
because of their language deficits, leading to an overestimation of the

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9

frequency of unawareness of impairment in the right hemisphere. Cocchini
et al. (2009) used a non-verbal tool to assess their patients and found that
40% of those with left hemisphere injury exhibited anosognosia.

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Other forms of self-referential activity and the brain
What kind of brain activation is observed when participants engage in more
‘‘introspective’’ forms of self-awareness? Does the postulated right hemisphere dominance also apply to autobiographical retrieval, assessment of
one’s current emotional experience, or description of one’s personality traits?
In their 2005 meta-analysis, Gillihan and Farah compiled activation maxima
obtained across various imaging experiments using self-related tasks and
neuropsychological case studies assessing self-awareness. In a standard
‘‘personality trait’’ experiment (e.g., Kelley et al., 2002), volunteers must
decide if adjectives describe themselves (self condition) or a well-known
person (other condition), or if adjectives are printed in capitals or lowercase
letters (control condition). Eight out of the ten studies in Gillihan and
Farah’s review (2005) report activation of areas in the left and right
hemispheres; only two experiments found uniquely right hemispheric activity
during self-judgements of personality traits. In a typical brain-imaging study
of autobiographical memory (e.g., Fink et al., 1996), participants are
scanned while they listen to a narrative describing a memory of their own
(self condition) and a narrative describing another person’s memory (control
condition). Gillihan and Farah reviewed three such studies: one reports
uniquely left hemispheric activity, another one a strictly right hemisphere
bias, and the third study indicates activation of areas in both hemispheres. In
contrast another meta-analysis of the functional neuroanatomy of autobiographical memory (Svoboda, McKinnon, & Levine, 2006) ‘‘. . . found a
left-lateralised network, including select regions in the frontal, temporal and
posterior cortices, as well as the cerebellum and a number of subcortical
structures’’ (p. 15; italics added).
Northoff et al. (2006) reviewed 27 imaging studies of the self and
observed that neural activity in the cortical midline structures is typical
during self-related tasks across all domains, including personality traits
judgements, autobiographical retrieval, and emotions assessment. In a
representative brain-imaging study of emotions (e.g., Goldberg, Harel, &
Malach, 2006), participants view various images and are asked to reflect on
the emotional response that these stimuli produce; the control task may
consist in categorising the pictures into groups (e.g., animal/no-animal).
Phan, Wager, Taylor, and Liberzon (2004) reviewed 55 functional-neuroimaging experiments of emotions: they found reliable activation in the medial

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prefrontal cortex, as well as in the amygdala (more so on the left side),
anterior cingulate cortex, and insula.
The REST (Random Episodic Silent Thinking) condition is now seen as
an introspective state in which participants actively think about their
current, past, or future goals, emotions, needs, behaviour, physiological
sensations, etc. (Gusnard, Akbudak, Shulman, & Raichle, 2001): it recruits
most brain regions that have also been shown to be active during selfawareness tasks. Wickera, Ruby, Royet, and Fonlupt (2003) reviewed five
studies where brain areas activated during the resting state were compared to
those recruited during active tasks. Two maxima were revealed bilaterally
along the superior frontal sulcus. Schilbach, Eickhoff, Rotarska-Jagiela,
Fink, and Vogeley (2008) looked at brain regions that are reliably deactivated
during experimental tasks: these areas should precisely be those that are
recruited at rest but inhibited during cognitively effortful tasks. The team
performed a deactivation analysis across 12 fMRI studies and found
differentially decreased neural activity in the left angular gyrus, bilateral
medial frontal cortex, and the precuneus bilaterally.
Thus far, it can be concluded that various self-referential tasks such as
thinking about one’s personality traits, past, and emotions engage a wide
network of sites located in both hemispheres of the brain. This observation
obviously clashes with claims such as ‘‘We therefore find that the data
support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere is dominant for higherorder consciousness’’ (Keenan et al., 2005, p. 702).

Self-awareness and inner speech
Evidence increasingly suggests that language, and more precisely inner
speech, plays a fundamental role in self-awareness (Dimaggio, Vanheule,
Lysaker, Carcione, & Nicolo, 2009; Morin, 1993, 2004, 2005; Morin &
Everett, 1990). Since language is produced by Broca’s area, located in the left
hemisphere, this strongly implies that self-awareness is not uniquely located
in the right hemisphere.
A correlation exists between the emergence of both language and selffocused thought. Archaeologists have identified a period called the MiddleUpper Palaeolithic transition (around 40,000 years ago) during which a
cultural Big Bang occurred, characterised by the emergence of the first
burials and body adornments, boat making, more sophisticated tools, and
more refined cultural practices. They correlate these changes with the
development of self-awareness*interestingly, experts also date the appearance of human language at about this same period (Leary, 2004). Helen
Keller, who spent a significant portion of her life blind and deaf, reports a
lack of sense of self before she was taught a language (Salzen, 1998).

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Inner speech represents the act of using language to talk to oneself
internally (Langdon, Jones, Connaughton, & Fernyhough, 2009). Although
we engage in self-talk for a variety of reasons, by definition when we talk to
ourselves about ourselves we become the object of our own attention and are
in a state of self-awareness. Not surprisingly then, a significant positive
correlation has repeatedly been observed between diverse validated scales
measuring the frequency of private self-focus and use of inner speech (e.g.,
Morin, Everett, Turcotte, & Tardif, 1993; Schneider, Pospeschill, & Ranger,
2005; Siegrist, 1995). In brain-injured patients who eventually recover from
their trauma, conscious experience often returns in parallel with inner
speech (Ojemann, 1986); conversely, healthy individuals report inner speech
inhibition when they shift from wakefulness to sleep (Rusalova, 2005).
Based on the observation that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG)
sustains inner speech use (e.g., McGuire et al., 1996), Morin and Michaud
(2007) reasoned that an activation of the LIFG should be found in a
reasonable number of self-awareness studies. Furthermore, they hypothesised that inner speech use should be greater in conceptual-abstract selfdomains (e.g., emotions, traits) than in perceptual-concrete self-domains
(e.g., agency, self-recognition). To test these predictions, 59 studies measuring brain activity during self-referential tasks were reviewed; 56% of all
studies identified LIFG activity across self-awareness tasks, and LIFG
activation was more frequently observed during conceptual tasks (68%) than
during perceptual tasks (20%).
Inner speech loss following brain injury impedes self-awareness (Morin,
2009). Taylor (2006) details her experience of suffering from a left
hemispheric stroke produced by a congenital arteriovenous malformation
that caused a loss of inner speech. Her phenomenological description
convincingly suggests that this impairment created a general self-awareness
deficit as well as more specific dysfunctions related to her sense of
individuality, retrieval of autobiographical memories, and self-conscious
emotions.

CONCLUSION
The first view critically examined here was that human and non-human
primates possess self-awareness because they exhibit self-face recognition,
which in turn makes it possible to engage in ToM. It was suggested that both
MSR and ToM should not be equated with ‘‘genuine’’, introspective selfawareness. In essence, MSR most likely underlies a kinaesthetic, as opposed
to mental, form of self-knowledge, and by definition ToM implies focusing
one’s attention on others*not on the self. As a consequence, organisms that

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MORIN

exhibit MSR and/or ToM most probably do not possess mature selfawareness.
The second position assessed was that the right hemisphere constitutes
the neurological seat of self-awareness, because MSR and ToM tasks
typically increase activity in that hemisphere. In short, current empirical
evidence rather indicates that participants engaging in self-face recognition,
ToM, and complex types of conceptual introspection recruit a bilateral
network of brain areas. In addition, inner speech, which seems to participate
significantly in self-awareness, is generated by the left hemisphere. The
conclusion is patent: self-related processes engage a distributed set of brain
regions situated in both hemispheres. Current efforts aimed at identifying
brain areas recruited during self-referential thinking in older persons
(Gutchess, Kensinger, & Schacter, 2007), across cultures (Zhu, Zhang,
Fan, & Shihui, 2007), and during mental time travel (D’Argembeau et al.
2008) further confirm this observation.
Manuscript received 17 October 2009
Revised manuscript received 10 January 2010
First published online day/month/year

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