Losing the self: what meditation, psychedelics and brain scans reveal about ego

The Short Version

A meditator, a writer on psychedelics, a neuroscientist who scans people at prayer and a musician who meditates daily all describe the same thing at the heart of spiritual experience: the usual sense of being a separate self behind your eyes loosens, and what's left feels like connection, clarity and often awe. Sam Harris argues that this separate self was never really there, and that meditation, psychedelics and moments of flow all briefly reveal it [1]. Michael Pollan describes his ego dissolving on psilocybin and notes that meditation and awe shrink it too [2], while Dr. Andrew Newberg's brain scans show a region that maps where your body ends quieting down when people feel oneness, whatever their faith [3]. Brain scans also point to a shared biology: Harris says meditation and psychedelics both quiet the brain's self-talk network [1], and Newberg sees the same pattern of changes across traditions [3]. That shared machinery is why practices that look so different can produce such similar feelings, though the sources also warn that the experiences fade, can inflate the ego instead of dissolving it, and aren't the same thing as lasting insight [1][2].

Table of contents

What They Said

Sam Harris: the self is an illusion you can see through

Neuroscientist and meditation teacher Sam Harris is careful about which self he means [1]. People are real, and each of us has psychological continuity with our past. What he calls an illusion is the feeling that there is a subject inside experience, in addition to experience itself: a locus of awareness and intention sitting behind the face, riding in the body like a passenger [1]. He notes most people are what his friend Paul Bloom calls "common sense dualists," who feel the mind might somehow be separate from the body [1].

His account of where that feeling comes from is striking: "the self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking" [1]. A thought arises uninspected and seems to become you; even a thought of self-hatred can silently define your mood [1]. He traces it to development: infants are the center of endless attention and learn to see themselves as objects in others' eyes, and toddlers talk to themselves out loud and keep going when the parent leaves the room. We never stop, he says, because evolution never built an off switch for self-talk [1].

Crucially, Harris says we lose the self all the time without noticing [1]. He compares it to saccades: about three times a second our eyes jump and the brain suppresses vision so the world doesn't lurch, so we go briefly blind constantly without knowing it [1]. In the same way, the sense of self disappears whenever attention is absorbed in its object, as in flow during sport, sex or creative work, when there is no distance between you and the experience [1]. We love those moments, but thinking pulls us back: watching a beautiful sunset, we start narrating how amazing it is and wondering about local real estate prices [1].

He describes two stages in meditation. First, you learn to notice thought as thought, which lets anger or anxiety dissolve instead of feeding itself [1]. Second, you recognize there is no one doing the noticing, only an open condition in which everything appears [1]. At first you feel like you're on a riverbank watching experience flow by, "But the truth is, you are the river" [1]. As a matter of experience, he says, "consciousness is not in your body"; what you call your body appears in consciousness [1]. In advanced practice, in a Tibetan Buddhist image he shares, "thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house," with nothing to steal [1].

His best story is the missing tourist [1]. On a tour bus in northern Europe, a woman changed her clothes at a rest stop; back on the bus nobody recognized her, someone reported a tourist missing, and because of a language barrier she joined the search party looking for herself until around 3 a.m., when she realized she was the person everyone was looking for [1]. The problem didn't get solved; it evaporated. Meditation, Harris says, works the same way: the seeker is the thing being sought [1]. He also uses the image of a fist trying to become an open hand; the fist doesn't make the journey as a fist, it comes apart [1].

Because of this, Harris insists the insight isn't far away. Like the optic blind spot, which is always in your visual field but goes unnoticed until you set up the right experiment, selflessness is so close it's hard to see [1]. That contradicts the expectation, fed by psychedelics and mystical literature, that freedom lies at the top of some mountain [1]. He admits he spent about a year on silent retreats, meditating 12 to 18 hours a day in stints of a week to three months, before he understood the point, and argues better information can shorten the search [1].

Harris on psychedelics: the doorway, not the destination

Harris credits MDMA as his own gateway [1]. As a skeptical, cerebral 18-year-old, he would have bounced off meditation, but psychedelics proved there was an inner landscape worth exploring and that states like unconditional love are possible [1]. When he once guided Richard Dawkins through a meditation, Dawkins found nothing of interest, whereas with a large enough dose of a psychedelic, Harris says, it is virtually impossible for nothing to happen [1]. He recalls an LSD trip in his 20s when he and friends meant to hike to the redwoods and instead spent six hours captivated by an ordinary oak tree [1].

But he draws a sharp line. Drug experiences wear off, and chasing them sets up a logic of seeking peak experiences that are each impermanent [1]. He distinguishes the Buddhist idea of emptiness, having no center, from the oneness or merging psychedelics can bring, which can be a bigger "somethingness" rather than true selflessness [1]. Emptiness, by contrast, makes the insight as available during a podcast as while communing with a tree [1]. When he took a high dose of mushrooms alone and blindfolded after 25 years away, he found his mindfulness training crucial, because letting go of the self could make the difference between heaven and hell in an overwhelming experience [1]. He cautions that people prone to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder should avoid psychedelics [1].

Michael Pollan: consciousness without a self

Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, comes at the same pattern from psychedelics and consciousness science [2]. "It turns out you can have consciousness without a self. And that's, you know, I mean, meditators know this. Psychedelics give you and it can give you an experience of consciousness without a self" [2]. He finds a hint of it in ordinary life: "I think we have it every morning when we wake up. There's that 500 milliseconds, you know, when you're reconstituting, like, who am I, where am I?" [2]. Buddhists, he adds, have known this for a long time, "but it's a strange idea" [2].

On high-dose psilocybin, Pollan felt himself explode into a cloud of blue Post-it notes that settled into a pool of blue paint, and he watched it with total equanimity [2]. In a later experience of the same kind, he felt he became a Bach cello suite rather than listening to it [2]. "A very common phenomenon on high-dose psychedelics is a sense of losing a sense of self," he says [2].

He's clear that this isn't the only route. "Meditators get there too. It's more work, but you can get there through meditation and transcend your sense of ego. Experiences of awe, which you can get for many different ways, diminish your sense of ego in a way that I think is very pro-social" [2]. He cites his Berkeley colleague Dacher Keltner, who asked people to draw stick-figure self-portraits before and after an awe experience such as river rafting; afterward they drew themselves "at like a third of the size because their sense of self had been diminished in a very positive way. It felt very, very good" [2].

Pollan is equally clear about the downside. The dream of psychedelics has long been "that they would diminish the ego and contribute to sort of pro-social feeling, a sense of connection," but "it doesn't always work. We have cases of ego dissolution and we have cases of ego inflation" [2]. The self is also double-edged: we need it to get things done, like writing a book over six years, but it's a trap that makes us selfish [2]. "We have such complicated paradoxical feelings about the ego and the self" [2]. That tension is why he doubts simple ideas of "collective consciousness" [2].

His lasting change is perspective, not erasure. Huberman sums up that the dissolution is vivid inside the journey but "doesn't fundamentally change your relationship to self at every moment in your waking life," and Pollan agrees: "I just have a slightly different understanding in my ego. It's not like it's gone away. It's there when I need it" [2]. He now recognizes when his ego is "up to his old tricks" [2].

Pollan also widens the frame on where the self comes from. He's persuaded by research from Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms suggesting consciousness begins not "with thought in the cortex, but with feeling in the brain stem" [2], and he notes how bodily states shape the self: "I think we all become more self-centric when we're in pain" [2]. He takes seriously filter theories, associated with Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley, in which the brain acts as a "reducing valve" admitting only the "measly trickle" of consciousness we need to survive [2].

Dr. Andrew Newberg: what the scans show

Neuroscientist and physician Andrew Newberg has spent about 30 years scanning the brains of people as they meditate, pray and speak in tongues, a field he calls neurotheology [3]. For some studies he injects a radioactive tracer through an IV while the person is in the middle of the practice, even moving and singing, then scans them 15 to 20 minutes later for a snapshot of what the brain was doing at that moment [3].

The region most tied to losing the self is the parietal lobe, "an area of our brain that takes a lot of our sensory information and helps us to kind of create a spatial representation of ourselves" [3]. It keeps you on the sidewalk and out of the trees [3]. In deep meditation or prayer, its activity decreases, and the boundary between self and world seems to dissolve into a sense of oneness with God, the universe or other people [3]. Across traditions the pattern is shared, but the content differs: a Christian may feel connected to Jesus, a Muslim to Allah, a Buddhist to universal consciousness [3].

From a survey of a couple of thousand people describing their spiritual experiences, his team found five elements almost everyone reports [3]:

• Unity or oneness, linked to the parietal lobe [3].
• Intensity, described in superlatives: the greatest love, the most beautiful light [3].
• Clarity, a sense of suddenly understanding the world, with significant shifts in the thalamus, a hub that relays sensory information [3]. After an intense retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, people's brains were more sensitive to dopamine and serotonin: "So these practices are making us more sensitive to serotonin" [3].
• Surrender. Whether reached through years of practice or spontaneously, "at some point, our purposefulness kind of gets taken over. The experience kind of pulls us along and we let go" [3]. The frontal lobes, active while people concentrate on a prayer or meditation, quiet down at that point [3].
• Transformation, a sense that "I am now a different person" [3]. About 90 to 95% of people said the experience changed them for the better, affecting relationships, work, beliefs and even their fear of death [3].

The limbic system, the emotional center, also becomes very active in intense moments of joy or awe, marking them as special and writing them into memory, which is why such experiences reshape beliefs rather than just feeling real [3].

Newberg's most inclusive point is that the machinery is universal. "We all have a pretty similar kind of brain," and "we don't have a separate brain that becomes spirit" [3]. So small experiences, a sunrise, a hike, a Mozart concerto, holding a grandchild, sit on the same continuum as mystical ones and carry a bit of unity and intensity [3]. He describes a continuum of connection running from a good conversation where two brains resonate, to friendships, partners and family, up to mystical experiences where everything becomes one [3]. The most common definition of spiritual, he says, is "connecting with something greater than the self," which can be God but also nature, creativity, music or humanity [3].

He is also humble about what scans can show. A scan can't tell him what someone is experiencing, which is why he asks people to describe it in their own words [3]. And "I can't do a brain scan. I say, okay, well, there is the enlightened pattern" [3]. People who have these experiences often say they perceived a more fundamental reality; he is careful not to say whether they are right [3].

Tal Wilkenfeld: fear, flow and the self in music

Bassist and songwriter Tal Wilkenfeld adds a performer's version of the same pattern [4]. Music was her first way into flow and meditation, and after years of crashing after shows she wanted to feel that flow all the time [4]. She now meditates daily and asks her band to meditate together for at least 20 minutes before going on stage; on the few nights they ran out of time, she noticed a major difference in the performance [4].

Her enemy on stage is the self-protective ego: "as soon as you bring fear to a bandstand, you're limiting yourself," walling yourself off from the other musicians [4]. She prefers trust to confidence, because confidence carries a belief that you are some fixed thing, and she has found very confident players can be like a brick wall, just as fear is [4]. She describes loneliness as coming from feeling separate from the world and others, and says she feels it less each year through meditation and studying scriptures [4]. Losing a piece of yourself you gave to someone is different from opening yourself, which she calls "a loving experience"; if you see yourself as the same self as everyone else, she says, there's nothing to lose [4]. In the Vedanta tradition she studies, love is consciousness itself: "love is everything" [4]. She recalls meeting Leonard Cohen's Zen teacher, Roshi, who gripped her hand and asked where she was; she answered that she was in the handshake [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

The shared pattern. All four describe spiritual or peak experience as a loosening of the ordinary self and a resulting sense of connection. Harris sees it in meditation, psychedelics and flow [1]; Pollan in psilocybin, meditation, awe and the first moments after waking [2]; Newberg in prayer, meditation and everyday moments like hiking, all showing a quieter parietal lobe and a feeling of oneness [3]; Wilkenfeld in musical flow and meditation that dissolve fear and separateness [4]. All agree the route doesn't have to be exotic: Harris says the insight is always close at hand [1], Pollan points to awe and waking up [2], and Newberg says small experiences are on the same continuum as mystical ones [3].

They agree the experience is transformative but not magic. Newberg's survey found most people felt changed for the better [3]; Pollan feels a lasting shift in perspective [2]; Harris says recognizing selflessness brings deeper benefits than stress relief [1]. But Pollan says the ego is "there when I need it" [2], and Harris says psychedelic peaks fade [1].

Where they differ:

• Oneness versus emptiness. Newberg's central finding is a feeling of unity, the self merging into something greater [3], and Pollan describes merging with a Bach suite [2]. Harris cautions that oneness can be a bigger "somethingness," different from the emptiness of recognizing there is no center at all [1]. For Harris, the goal is not a special merged state but seeing what was always true in ordinary experience [1].
• Is the self an illusion or a useful tool? Harris calls the felt self an illusion [1]. Pollan treats the ego as both necessary and a trap, and says it doesn't go away [2]. Wilkenfeld treats ego-driven fear as the problem on stage but still values trust in herself [4]. Newberg doesn't judge whether the experience of unity reveals reality, only that it is real to people [3].
• Does the experience reveal reality? Harris says selflessness is simply what you find when you look closely [1]. Newberg reports that people feel they perceived reality more fundamentally but won't say if they are right [3]. Pollan is open to filter theories in which the brain restricts a wider consciousness, while calling himself a practical materialist [2].
• Psychedelics. Harris and Pollan both see value, but Harris calls them a doorway with fading effects [1], while Pollan stresses that they can inflate the ego as well as dissolve it and that some people should stay away entirely [2].
• Which brain story? Harris points to the default mode network [1]; Newberg to the parietal lobe, frontal lobes, thalamus and limbic system [3]; Pollan to the brainstem as where feeling, and perhaps consciousness, begins [2]. These are complementary rather than competing, but none of them claims a complete explanation, and Newberg notes that when an area "lights up" nobody knows how many of its neurons are involved [3].

Why It Works

The sources offer several mechanisms that explain why different practices converge:

• A quieter self-talk network. Harris describes the default mode network, midline brain regions active between tasks and during self-referential thinking; in one of his experiments, challenging people's political or religious beliefs increased activity there [1]. Meditation and psychedelics both seem to suppress these regions, associated with self-talk and mind-wandering, and Huberman adds that his colleague David Spiegel found hypnosis does too [1].
• A quieter body map. Newberg's parietal lobe builds your spatial sense of where you end and the world begins; when it quiets during deep practice, that boundary fades and oneness appears [3].
• Letting go of control. The frontal lobes are active when you concentrate on a practice, then quiet at the moment of surrender [3], consistent with Harris's point that the self disappears when attention is fully absorbed [1].
• Emotional tagging and chemistry. The limbic system marks these experiences as important and stores them, and retreat participants became more sensitive to dopamine and serotonin, which Robbins and Newberg connect to the afterglow people feel after a retreat, service or concert [3].
• Awe shrinks the self. Keltner's stick-figure experiment shows a measurable drop in self-size after awe [2].
• Absorption. Flow in sport, sex, creative work or music removes the distance between you and the experience [1][4].

Because the machinery is shared, Newberg argues, a monk, an atheist on a mountain and a churchgoer can report the same five elements in different words [3].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

The pattern applies broadly: to meditation, prayer, awe in nature, music, flow and psychedelic experiences [1][2][3][4]. Newberg reports the data are pretty clear that engaging your spiritual side helps manage stress, anxiety and depression and may support immune function, and a study of older adults who began meditating showed brain changes: "whether you're 85 or five, you can change your brain" [3].

It has limits. Peak experiences are temporary, and chasing them can become its own trap [1]. Ego dissolution sometimes turns into ego inflation [2]. There's no brain signature of enlightenment [3], and there's no guarantee a walk in the woods will produce one; Newberg urges patience [3]. And "There is never a one-size-fits-all": each person needs a different key [3].

Psychedelics carry real risks. Harris says people prone to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder should avoid them [1], and Pollan points to what we are learning about psychosis and addiction and says some people should stay away entirely [2]. They also remain illegal in many places. Anyone considering them for mental health should talk to a qualified medical professional.

Losing the sense of self is also not always pleasant. Harris says mindfulness training helped him in an overwhelming psychedelic experience where letting go made the difference between heaven and hell [1], and Wilkenfeld notes that sitting with yourself brings every demon out before anything profound happens on the other side [4].

What To Do With It

1. Try Harris's 30-second test. Pay attention to your breath or a sound for 30 seconds without getting lost in thought, and notice how quickly thinking takes over; seeing that is the first step [1].
2. Practice noticing thoughts as thoughts. When angry or anxious, catch the thinking that feeds it; Harris says the emotion has a short half-life once you stop feeding it [1].
3. Look for the looker. In meditation, briefly look for the self that is doing the noticing, as Harris suggests, and practice with your eyes open too, since so much of the sense of self is anchored visually [1].
4. Seek out awe on purpose. Nature, music and big views can shrink the self in a way Pollan calls very pro-social [2][3].
5. Treat small moments as the real thing. A hike, a sunrise or holding a child sits on the same continuum as mystical experience; how you engage matters more than what you do [3].
6. Define what you're looking for. Newberg suggests writing down your goal, whether less anxiety or connection to something greater, and trying practices that fit, changing course if they don't [3].
7. Build new rituals if you feel stuck. Since neurons that fire together wire together, a new practice can break old patterns [3].
8. Make space before demanding work. Wilkenfeld's band meditates for 20 minutes before shows to connect and drop fear [4].
9. Don't chase peaks. Treat intense experiences, including psychedelic ones, as a doorway, not a destination, and remember the ego returns when you need it [1][2].
10. Be cautious with psychedelics. Avoid them with a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder, and seek professional guidance [1][2].

Sources

1. Dr Sam Harris Using Meditation To Focus View Consciousness Expand Your Mind · Huberman Lab
2. Michael Pollan on Consciousness, Plant Intelligence, Psychedelics, and Caffeine · Huberman Lab
3. The Science of Spiritual Experiences: How to Rewire Your Brain for More Happiness & Purpose · The Mel Robbins Podcast
4. Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen · Lex Fridman Podcast