How you see yourself

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From Ted and NPR. I'm Anush Zamarodi.

Do you remember Picture Day at school? You'd step into an empty classroom, maybe a pastel backdrop set up with blazing bright lights. Okay, next up. And the photographer who is in the middle of taking dozens, if not hundreds, of kids' photos. All right, shoulders back. Posing you like a doll. Your chin. Turn your body. Adjust your shoulder. Now sit up straight. Okay, now look at the side. Look at the camera. Before you know, A moment which feels so incredibly Awkward.

is captured for all time. And then you go back to class, never wanting to have your photo taken ever. To many people, getting their photos taken is a very traumatizing experience. This is David Sir. When you bring up a camera to someone, like a lot of people just Like they just their body just reacts immediately without David is the guy on the other side of the camera. He is a portrait photographer. And I think a lot of people as young children who didn't want to be photographed and were

That. I don't think many people realize that we hold that sort of grudge, whatever it is. I think a lot of people hold that in their bodies and it shows up in front of the camera.

And when we internalize that, it's we it it shapes how we act. It it shapes how we show up in the world. David sees this all the time with clients. Confident, interesting people with incredible careers and hobbies don't know how to feel natural in front of the camera. And so David has made it his mission to reject a culture of awkward scripted poses. Are you tired being stuck doing the same pose? Over and over. Well my own. More professionals. More themselves.

He has millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram where he dishes out practical and thoughtful advice. How to pose in direct sunlight at the beach. Yeah, are we the two friends here? When you see a stranger photographing something To how to take pictures in public without being that obnoxious person taking up the whole sidewalk. Speaking of attention. Bring unnecessary So how do we take this want of looking good in photo?

Uh and then meet ourselves where we're at with how we perceive ourselves. And now it's about moving our bodies and How do we find comfort in our body when we're so used to tearing it down and saying, ugh, it looks terrible, it's not perfect. that how do we reconcile the image that we have of ourselves? with the one that we show to the world. That's what today's episode is about. Self. From why we want to think of ourselves as good as

people to definitions of beauty that have been exported from the plastic surgery capital of the world. How can we make peace with who we are on the outside and inside?

For David Sa, a good portrait marries those two things. Inside and out. But this kind of thinking was not obvious to David when he first went to college. At that time, I was doing a lot of college grad photos. David had wanted to study dance, but that didn't work out. So instead he majored in design at UC David.

Taking photos was a great way to make some extra money. Well I was like, okay, like I have a nice camera and I can take decent photos and everyone's everyone's offering to do it for X amount of price, so let me just Get myself some. money to go to dinner a few a few times a week. In in the beginning it was very cookie cutter.

David says he Googled grad school photo poses for inspiration. Right. Like there's a a sense of style to it. Maybe it's a girl graduating, she's got her hands on her hips and then she's got her arm up in the air, maybe it's like throwing the like cap or something like that. If anything, it was a a big roadblock for me. I didn't want to think about poses. The only reason I was posing people was because I knew I had to. They weren't professional models.

And I I'm glad I came across my mentor Sue Bryce at that time too because Sue was the one who really taught me that we can't be put into boxes and we're when I think a lot of us feel comfortable when we are in a box and we look like other people and it's But you know, we as photographers can be in control and we can we can control of how photos come out for everyone and how people experience being in front of the camera.

And so when he realized he was responsible not just for taking composed pictures, but for making his clients feel comfortable, David threw out his list of poses. And and then people started realizing, oh yeah, like David doesn't just do cooking He started having fun with his clients, moving with them, dancing. Kind of inventing new poses on the spot.

Felt natural and now he has his own ethos. Posing is It's a practice of being present in your body and communicating who you are through body language. Today, when David starts working with a client, he asks them a few questions. How do you want to see yourself? How do you want to feel in these photos? How do you define your photos? Let's look at fabrics. Let's look at structures and silhouettes. And let's also deconstruct what some of these.

Clothing, um, the association that's tied to these clothing. I could really just redefine this and I could wear and don this suit. I could um wear this beautiful dress. And and through this exercise at the end they're realizing I am so much more than how I perceive myself. Is it great? It's uh Okay, they've got an outfit that they feel good in. There's hair, makeup, and then like what actually happens in the section. How do you get them to loosen up to feel comfortable?

So a process I take everyone through it's is first just like a yoga Getting really present in the moment. Getting really present in the moment and there's many different ways to do that, right? breathing, just breathing and slowing down. Through the nose. Feeling the toes that you have that's contacting your shoe then to the ground.

Um if they're sitting then I really help them feel like what are you sitting on? And that just brings them back to the present moment and in their body intentional with our movements. And I'm guiding her her movements at that point, right? We've done our hair and makeup, she wants to uh explore in the way she wants to explore and now I'm just

She trying to channel as much of the definition that she's given me. Have you follow me? David gets his clients to mirror him, his movements, his facial expressions. There we go. He wants them to feel relaxed and at play.

And I'm just moving my arm over here and I say wave me. That's awesome. And then the other side wave me. Let's wave one more time over here. You're dancing with them. It's a dance. And not only am I physically mirroring them I'm also emotionally mirroring them because I'm doing every step of the way with that. sometimes you might need some help

You just look like you're having such a good time. Can you tell the story about where you decided to get into a dress because your client was wearing a dress? Um and and y sort of an epiphany that you had. Yeah. I love making things easier for people and and helping them sort of unlock something new. And it's really important to be, as especially as a guy, for me to feel that. If I'm gonna be creating a safe space for

a lot of my female clients. I wanna I wanna make sure I'm not operating a place again from judgment and it's being curious, being playful and saying, yeah, I'm gonna put on this dress and have fun. You wanna you wanna be as in the skin of the person you're talking to as possible, it seems like. Exactly. My social media following too, uh uh the bigger bigger demographic is is woman there as well. So I get a lot of questions of like David, how do you pose?

uh for your pregnancy photos. How do you pose in a mini skirt? And I remember putting on my first miniskirt and I was like, oh my gosh, I feel so exposed. Yeah. Um and I realized, yeah, I definitely cannot suggest that pose I was about to do.

in my just baggy jeans. Right, right, right. So there's there's like a practical, like technical sense to it of like, yeah, I need to really understand just like you said, like if you're in a tight dress, you just can't m physically move your body in a certain way.

And there are feelings to it that we just would never know unless we we try to be physically in their shoes. But David, do you think sometimes people have unrealistic expectations? They're gonna think, you know, if I just Can prove to myself that I can look amazing in a photo, or I can show the world how hot I can be. gonna fix something. That's gonna gonna solve something for me.

Well of course. Well that's why that's why the the reflection in the beginning is so important to say this isn't for anybody else but you. And you know, I I can't control all of that. There we do have our egos, right? And we also do I I wanna make sure I I tell my clients, listen, this Many clients would say this is very therapeutic, but by by no means am I a therapist. I'm not here to help you through just like different.

um mental health issues, right? If that's the thing. So yeah, so it's acknowledging that as well. Are you a proponent or believer of the saying, fake it till you make it? Pss No, I've I've come to Distance myself from that sick. Especially in the world of posing. I think it's a way to reflect how I think society defines posing. Like fake it, right? Like suck Because you don't want to see that.

Uh, thinking that the one definition of hot was like Chris Evans with his six-pack abs coming out the ocean. Once we hit a dolphin. the the older we get, I feel like we start to um create even more of a stubborn belief. I think we are versus like oh yeah, let's let's try this. Let's A session with me is almost like breaking down your Lego castle that you super glue together and re-snapping your finger and saying, you know what? It's actually a sand castle now. Let's rebuild.

Awesome. You wanna see a picture? That's David Sa, the king of poses. at Ted.com and find his Instagram. On the show today. I'm Minoush Zamaro. We are. Like I'm still in shock.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamarodi. On the show today, our self-image and why so many of us so desperately want to think of ourselves as good people. You're walking down the street and You accidentally bump against someone on the sidewalk, you didn't mean to. Realized they were gonna tilt that way and they're they call you a name and makes you feel horrible. This is NYU Business School Professor and Psychologist Dolly. Choke.

And I'm like, Wait, am I a jerk? I was looking at my phone. I really should have been looking up. I guess I'm kind of a jerk. That exact situation has happened to me and it was upsetting. And Dolly says there's a good reason why. Many of us have what psychologists call a central moral identity. We care about whether we're seen as a good person and whether we feel like good people. And and the idea in that moment is that you weren't intending to do harm to someone, but you inadvertently did.

Now your self-view is being threatened because there's something you've done that doesn't match how you see yourself showing up in the world. How do different people define good? W what are some of the different definitions that you've heard? Sure. Well, some people define being good as holding a door open. Other people might define being a good person as being someone who treats

everyone the same, no differences based off of gender, perhaps. Other people might define good person as someone who does no harm to others, just manages themselves and doesn't cause any problems.

Someone else might define being a good person as someone who goes above and beyond, who is making things better, not just doing no harm. Aaron Powell So when we wake up every morning, we each have the sort of self-image of who we are in the world and generally we're trying to stick to a moral code that we've set for ourselves. Well, uh the way I would think about it is people do vary in how central their moral identity is to them. Mm-hmm. And so

Do people wake up as you said thinking how am I gonna be a good person? I think some people do, but I think most of us think about how are we gonna get the kids off to school and yes how am I gonna get to work on time and is there traffic and what's the weather. Uh-huh. That said, our moral identity is often guiding how we react.

To what we call self-threat, to anything that makes us feel like we are not a good person. We may not all have the same definition, but within whatever our definition is, that moral identity is important to many of us.

Dolly Chug continues from the TED stage. Now, if somebody challenges it, like they question us for a joke we tell, or maybe they say our workforce is homogeneous or a slippery business expense. I mean sometimes we out all the ways in which we help people from marginalized groups, where we donate to charity, the hours we volunteer to nonprofits. We work to protect that good person identity. It's important to many of us.

But what if I told you that our attachment to being good people is getting in the way of us being better people? What if I told you that our definition of good person is so narrow it's scientifically impossible to meet? So that is a big statement that it is impossible to meet our own definition of what a good person is. And you have done studies on this. Walk us through your research. What have you found when it comes

To trying to be the good person that we think we are. Yeah. So we looked at things like why do we sometimes not even notice? A decision we ha are about to make has ethical implications? Or why are we so able to overlook? an ethical failure in ourselves that we would jump all over if it was in our roommate. Or if I do something sketchy earlier in the day Do I kind of compensate later in the day and do something particularly pro social?

But other times I do something sketchy earlier than day and I get sketchier as the day goes on. So in other words like W why do these spirals sometimes go downward and sometimes go upward? So there is lots of literature by a number of extraordinary scholars. that have shown all of those effects. And we were able to map out a theory that elegantly made sense of all of it. So the theory that you're talking about is what you call bounded ethicality. Explain.

So bounded ethicality refers to the idea that Sometimes we behave ethically and sometimes we don't. Sometimes that's intentional and sometimes it's not. And this model of bounded ethicality challenges ways of thinking where you're either a good person or you're not, either you're a racist or you're not, either you're unethical or you're not. That binary idea, it's quite seductive, but it's misleading and it's scientifically and psychologically inaccurate.

Okay, so we may think we're a good person, but you're saying there is no such thing. It is a sliding scale. And throughout the day we are making decisions, taking actions that affect that self view, that push it up and down that scale. Yeah. Sometimes that self-view is validated by others. You hold the door open. Oh, you're so kind, someone might say, as you go into the office. Um so now I'm like, ah, okay. Uh-huh. I don't feel threatened.

Right. I feel bolstered. King of the world. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not looking like I need to protect. that self view. Mm-hmm. So now I'm in the office and, you know, I I don't know that they really need this extra keyboard here. And I could really use one at home. It's just sitting here, nobody's taking it and the keyboard ends up in my bag heading home. And and okay, let's go back to that scenario that we talked about earlier that I bumped into someone on the sidewalk. I didn't mean to.

But the person calls me a name and I'm thinking, oof, maybe I am rude. Maybe I'm a bad person. Yes, you're not feeling like a good person and in this case you're also being told by others that you're not a good person. And so now I'm going to spiral more towards something that will bring me back up to that positive self view. You know, oh when I get in I oh, the security guard looked like they'd had a tough night. I'm gonna go grab'em a cup of coffee when I get my own. To sort of make up for it.

Yeah, and our brain is a gold medal gymnast when it comes to the gymnastics necessary to make our thoughts, our perceptions. beliefs what we want them to be. We don't realize how much our self view as person is affecting our behavior. In fact, we're working so hard to protect that good person identity that we're not actually giving ourselves space to learn from our mistakes and actually be better people.

So what I've been thinking about is what if we were to just forget about being good people? Just let it go and instead set a higher standard of being a goodish person. A goodish person absolutely still makes mistakes. As a goodish person, in fact, I become better at noticing my own mistakes. I don't wait for people to point them out. I practice finding them. And as a result, Sure, sometimes it can be embarrassing. It can be uncomfortable. We put ourselves in a vulnerable place.

But through all that vulnerability, just like in everything else we've tried to ever get better at, we see progress, we see growth, we allow ourselves to get better. Being a goodish person is not a very good thing. Someone who has a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. In other words

They view issues of morality as skills, as knowledge, as things that are a work in progress and that I can get better at. Just like I can get better at pickleball, I can get better at being an ethical person with practice.

On the other hand, good is fixed in time. It's static. It forces me in a corner because there's nowhere to go. I actually I've been watching there's all these um Saturday night night live documentaries. And um Bowen Yang, the first Asian actor on the show, said like there was a moment where somebody wrote something.

that made him feel super uncomfortable and he just went and talked to them and they said, Noted, it will not happen again. Thank you for telling me. I love that. I mean one of my closest friends from grad school He was introducing someone, uh another researcher at a seminar. And in his attempt to be funny and personal, he he had put time into putting a lovely introduction together. But he also said something that inadvertently

highlighted a stereotype around her gender and racial identity. And he didn't realize he had done that. But when I heard it I immediately was oh my gosh, that is not how I would want her to be introduced in that setting. So I did what any self respecting virtue signalling person would do is I went back to my lab and I just ranted and finally, um, my office mate at the time said, You know, why don't you tell him?

And I was like, I literally laughed in her face. I was, what? Like, no, I'm not going to go tell him what I just said. I don't even know him. She says, No, no, I do know him and I think he'd wanna know. I was like, Okay, I will go walk by his office in case he happens to be there and Sure enough, I walked by his office, I kind of poke my head in and I was like, Well, um it was just something about that seminar earlier today. I don't know, it just made me uncomfortable.

This is the moment where I expected him to be like, Well, thanks for coming by. I gotta get back to work and instead he said, Hey, hey, just wait a minute. Let me go grab another chair so you can sit down And he ran down the hall, got a chair and brought it into his tiny little cubicle office thing. And he said, Please sit down. I really wanna understand this. Can you tell me more about what what you heard me say? Mm-hmm. He's now one of my closest friends. So that's a

Great example of what we've called being an ethical learner. They're goodish. They're trying to get better. Um if someone was confronted in that moment, a fixed mindset or a good person response often starts with that's not what I meant, or I'm sorry you heard it that way, or what I really meant was Every statement I just made was some form of trying to protect oneself. In a growth mindset, the response would be something like Wow, I didn't know that. Please tell me more.

There are some who might say, well, this has been taken too far. Yeah. that there's a d a generation of people who act as the morality police that you can't have a meeting without there being a ton of people wanting to show off how good they are and how thoughtful they are about their fellow colleagues when really, based on what you just taught us.

A lot of it is about their own self image. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's some truth to that, right? I mean what they're picking up on is sometimes this virtue signaling is less about Being better, and it's more about feeling better. And it's less about looking at ourselves, and it's more about critiquing others. And I would also say that what that individual is shortchanging themselves on in that moment is one of the greatest joys of being a human being, which is learning.

Learning is thrilling. It's uncomfortable. It's exciting. It's painful. It's pride inducing. It's it is one of the things that is most gratifying. you know, the next time you encounter that situation when you feel a little more in the know, that feels really good. That was NYU business school professor and psychologist Dolly Chug. Her most recent book is called A More Just Future. You can see her full talk at TED.com.

On the show today, how we see ourselves and why we so often want to change the way we look. Women have been pressured to keep up with evolving beauty standards for millennia. But we're going to focus on the past decade and where the latest ideas of what women should look like are coming from. South Korea.

Have y'all heard about that Korean skincare routine that everyone's been doing since it's so much better than everything in the US. I've been using Korean skincare for years. So the notion of having a skincare routine that is multi-step Really rooted in Korean culture, skincare culture. This is journalist Elise Hugh. The idea of having glass skin or dewy skin. It really cleanses my skin and makes it feel so good. Having such a beautiful canvas that you don't need to wear much makeup.

can kind of do the no makeup makeup look. My pores are like basic Invisible, no acne. It's amazing. That ideal is also from Korean culture. So there's a lot that we're sort of used to and normalized to as just skincare these days. that is tied to stuff that Korea's been doing for decades. Through TikTok and other social media, Korean beauty trends have gone global. They've also created a massive industry. Yeah, South Korea is exporting more cosmetics than they export smartphones.

Sending out sheet masks, foot peels. They're also huge on all the wands and the injectables that are getting used in med spas across the world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people also travel to South Korea for cosmetic procedures. I'm flying fifteen and a half hours to um Seoul, South Korea. for my surgery in Ghana? It costs me less to fly to Seoul, stay in a hotel and get all of my beauty treatments done than it does for just the treatments in the US.

And now South Korea has the world's highest concentration of cosmetic surgeons. So there's all sorts of cosmetic surgeries like getting your jaw broken to be reshaped. You know, like a reduction of the cheekbones. and jawline to make it a filtrum reduction or also known as a lip lift. I had double eyelid surgery in Korea about three months ago. Or nose jobs or breast augmentation.

So I had under-eye fat repositioning, which is when they take the under-eye fat pad and it is repositioned so you don't look so tired. Elise first experienced the world of K Beauty in twenty fifteen when she moved to Seoul to report for NPR. After many years of living there, she ended up writing a book called Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K Beauty Capitol, in which she makes one central point.

that the future has kind of already arrived in Seoul and what Korea presents is kind of a canary in the coal mine for where we're gonna be in terms of appearance and how much appearances matter.

Soul is all about optimizing your face and your body. Here's Elise Hugh on the TED stage. If you want your skull reshaped, any part of your body lifted or enhanced, have at it. It's the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. No other place comes close. Having a slimmer jawline is so desirable that a soul plastic surgery clinic once displayed the human bones of jaws it had shaved down in a glass vase in its lobby. This has since been removed. But this kind of body augmentation work.

Isn't just accepted, it is expected. Because insult looks matter so much for your professional and personal advancement. Headshots are required on resumes. Hiring bosses made character judgments based on your face. You were often bullied if you were bald or big. Trying to look better is framed as a route to economic security and a matter of personal responsibility. But Korea just shows us a more concentrated and extreme example of the pretty privilege that exists.

Everywhere. Look at fat phobia in the United States, helping drive off the charts, off-label use of Ozempic, not for diabetes, but for weight loss. It makes sense when we are so rewarded for thinness and stigmatized for fat. And all I'm saying is we should reckon with this because the more narrow our idea of beauty is, the wider the pool of ugly becomes.

In a minute, more with Elise Hugh on how ideas of beauty are becoming subhuman thanks to AI, and how all this has affected the way she parents her three daughters. On the show today, our self-image. I'm Minoosh Zamarodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamarodi. Today on the show, our self-image. And we were just talking to Elise Hugh, the author of Flawless.

Which tracks the history of South Korea's domination of the global beauty industry. So Elise, you focus on South Korea. But I mean many uh cultures are obsessed with looks. I am half Iranian and I'm just thinking of all the Persian women I've known who have gotten nose jobs. What is so different? South Korea, is there a new level of pressure or societal expectation there? We have to remember that South Korea is an extremely homogeneous society.

of the people in Korea are Korean. They're ethnically Korean, which is so different than the US and what I came to understand after my time living there was that a Korean woman who gets cosmetic surgery in order to fit in She's not looking good or acceptable just for herself. She it this is a way of showing respect to others in her community or in her family. Cause so many young girls who are getting plastic surgery, that double eyelid surgery that is so common.

They're getting it at the behest of their mothers or their grandmothers. Family members are insisting that they do this in order to fit in. And as the rest of the world becomes as visual and as appearance focused as Korea was ten years ago. That having good looks is framed as a matter of personal responsibility. Kind of like, oh, if you can fix this about yourself, then why wouldn't you do it?

You were there exactly ten years ago and now here we are, a decade later. And are you seeing echoes of that in your own life here in the United States? You have three daughters, you live in Los Angeles. What are you seeing that strikes you as echoing your time in Korea? So I'm really glad that I spent so much time thinking about this because it is helpful.

in parenting. Now I have a tween, I have a twelve year old, I have a nine year old, and nine year olds are getting really into skincare these days. You have the Sephora tweens. And then my youngest who was born there is now seven. And so I see it every day, you know, I see that I have my oldest has said to me sometimes like, Oh, you know, my face looks bad. I don't want to go to school today. You know, and we all had that too, or versions of that, I think, in middle school and high school.

And so what Korea showed me was just how much damage that appearance bias can do. And so I wonder, did you ever ask a Korean woman like Well what do you think? Do you want to do this or is that kind of move? A lot of Korean women that I interviewed, and I interviewed hundreds from the ages of seven to I think seventy-three, and a lot of them said they wanted to

Look different, right? They actually had a desire to not wear skirts to school every day or not start wearing makeup as young as they started to wear makeup. But it was so frowned upon by their individual families, by their parents, you know, who we're all taught to respect and have reverence for, that they really felt as though there wasn't a choice.

Right? Like um so many of our decisions, whether it's to get Botox or whether to dye our hair, it's like situated as a choice. But is it a matter of personal choice when everybody else in the group is choosing to get fillers in their face? And my point is that all of us become collateral damage when we internalize ideas that like thinness is health, fat people can't be happy, or that you're less lovable.

Yeah, and I guess one aspect we haven't talked about is just how vast this beauty culture has become because uh of social media and and the digital world that is very much shaping how people think that they should look in real life. Well one thing that we didn't talk about too is kind of AI, right? And how much our filters these days are AI generated. And what I think that we need to really watch out for and remember is that

The internet tends towards sameness and a certain kind of smoothness or flatness. And I worry that. Our differences get flattened out and then it's only more and more ma marginalizing for people who can't fit in. Digital culture is now reshaping our actual faces and bodies. We learn it so young. An estimated 80% of 13-year-old girls in America have already used filters or some kind of editing to alter their appearance online.

And these days, the filters are hyper-realistic because they tend to be AI generated. They come with a suite of characteristics teaching us how to look, things like arched eyebrows. or higher cheekbones or plump lips. What then happens is we see the gap between the way we look in the mirror and the way we look in these filters. And the digital world begins to dictate real world beauty standards. Because if we are chasing digital beauty, well then

The limit does not exist. AI's idea of attractiveness is only increasingly inhuman and cyborgian. I worry that our bodies become projects to be worked on forever. And if we don't slow down this body augmentation arms race that I saw and sold, then the enhancements that were available there only get farther and farther out of reach and not just for women.

I don't want my daughters coming up in a world in which their looks are the most important things about them. It is incredibly marginalizing to everybody who can't fit in and exhausting for everyone who can because you are constantly having to make or pay for interventions. In order to keep up. So we're where do you stand now? Uh you wrote the book, you were hopeful that we would question these things. People question them, and yet the train rolls on.

So, a way to care for one another is to remember that we are all so different. Our bodies show up in such different ways. And we are not less lovable because we are different from one another. In fact, it like makes us really collectively strong.

And what beauty can do to us is make us think, oh, there's only one way to look and it's this particular way. And we really have to fight back against that. And so I do a lot of my interviews without makeup on. I want to make sure that That's out there because I don't want to be like glam squatted. All the time. Right. I want people to know that like there's all kinds of ways to look and to appear and like that I still have worth and value and like what I say has worth and value.

that's not linked to my appearance. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Like the more we sit with not dyeing the hair, not getting the Botox, the more comfortable it becomes. So we need to lean into our humanity. The things about us that aren't smooth, you know, and aren't necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Because if we go in this direction of just like smoothness and sameness. Really quite a boring future.

That was journalist Elise Hugh. She's the host of the TED Talks Daily Podcast. Her book is called Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital. By the way, since we first spoke in 2025, South Korea has become the world's second largest exporter of cosmetic products. You can see her full talk at TED.com.

We want to wrap up the show with a neuroscientific perspective on our self-image. We might say to someone, you really know who you are, or I always know where I stand with you. It's a compliment. But there are certain mental health conditions that can truly change someone's sense of self. And be very disorienting for them and their loved ones, as science writer Anil Ananthaswamy explained on the TED Stage in 2022.

About a decade ago, I met someone who had experienced a few episodes of schizophrenia. They had felt that their sense of self, of what it feels like to be them, changing somewhat. The boundaries of their body began to feel a bit nebulous. Even their psychological self. felt a bit porous at times. They were experiencing what could be called an altered sense of self. Over the years I met many such brave and insightful people who shared what it's like to live with their altered.

And by altered, I mean different, not deficient, while acknowledging that coping with altered selves. At times. So speaking with them and with theologians, philosophers, Neuroscientists. I came to understand that this self that each one of us takes oneself to be. It's not as real as Take, for instance, the question, who am I? The most likely answer you'll get or give to such a question will be in the form of a story.

We tell others and indeed ourselves stories about who we are. We take our stories to be sacrosanct. We are our stories. But a condition that most of us, sadly, will be familiar with Alzheimer's disease. tells us something quite different.

In order for our stories to form, to grow, something that just happens to us has to first enter short-term memory and then get incorporated into what's called long-term episodic memory. But what if the experience doesn't even enter short-term memory? In the beginning, Alzheimer's impairs the formation of short-term memory. It impairs the growth of the narrative. It's as if our stories begin stalling upon the onset of the disease.

Eventually Alzheimer's eats away at older long-term memories. So if you were to meet someone with mid-stage Alzheimer's, they will likely be able to tell you stories about who they are. But if you know the real stories You'll be able to tell that they sometimes scramble up their narrative, that they sometimes mix up the sequence of episodes from It's as if they are recalling their own stories in ways that are not.

It's important at this stage to realize that there is still a person experiencing that scrambledness. Sadly Alzheimer's goes on to destroy one's narrative and so much more. And yet Alzheimer's tells us that these stories that we take ourselves to be, what philosophers call the narrative self. These are spun by the brain and body. They are constructions. And when the construction goes wrong, we perceive our own stories in ways that are From the narrative self, let's talk about our body.

Let's take a very basic aspect of our bodily self. This feeling we all have. that we are owners of our body and body parts. If I were to ask you, does your hand belong to you? Of course it does. What a foolish question. But not everyone would agree. Early on in my research. A neuropsychologist alerted me to a condition called xenomelia or foreign limb syndrome.

You may have heard of something called phantom limb syndrome, in which people who have had an amputation feel the presence of that limb sometimes. Xenomelia is somewhat of an opposite condition, where people feel like some part of their body, usually the extremities of their hands or legs, don't belong to them.

So this neuropsychologist talked of phantom limb syndrome as animation without incarnation. So the limb is gone, it's not incarnate anymore, but it's animated in your mind. And he talked of xenomelia as incarnation without animation. So the limb is present, healthy even, incarnate, and yet in your own mind it feels like it doesn't belong to you. People with xenomelia will sometimes take extreme measures to get rid of, to amputate their foreign seeming body parts.

From the perspective of the self, though, Xenomelia is telling us something very profound. It's telling us that something as basic as the sense of ownership of our own body parts is a construction. Let's take another aspect of our bodily self. It's called the sense of agency. So when I do something like pick up a cup, I have this implicit feeling that I am the agent of that action, that I have willed that action into existence. That feeling is the sense of agency.

But someone with schizophrenia may not have that feeling, always. Someone with schizophrenia might do something and not feel like they are the agent of that action. Let me take one more example to drive home this point. Let's talk of what it feels to be a body here and now. Not the feeling of being a story, but the feeling of being a body in the present moment. Psychologists estimate that about 5% of the general population will at some point in their lives.

Have an out of body experience. Let's assume all of us right now are having an in body experience. But if you think like I do that out-of-body experiences are the outcome of brain processes that are misfiring. Then it stands to reason that the experience of being in body, of being embodied, is itself a construction, and that too can come apart.

So what are these experiences of altered selves telling us? They are telling us that just about everything we take to be real about ourselves, real in the sense that we think we are always experiencing undeniable truths about our bodies. Well, that's just not the case. So when theologians and philosophers tell us that the self is an illusion, this is partly what they mean.

So knowing all this, recognising the constructed nature of it all, maybe we can hold on less tightly to our stories. Maybe we can learn to let go. But that's easier said than done because the thing that is doing the letting go is also the thing that has to be let go of. Maybe we can just marvel at the efforts of people over millennia, from the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree to the modern philosopher and neuroscientist who have asked themselves the question, who am I?

But most of all, I think we owe a debt to those amongst us who bravely bear witness to our altered selves, whether we do so voluntarily, like monks and nuns do when they meditate, or whether it's brought upon us by biology and circumstance. There is something remarkably robust about the processes that give rise to the totality of our sense of self. But there's something frighteningly fragile about them. And any one of us at any time in our lives may have to confront such cracks.

And that knowledge, I believe, should make us empathetic towards those of us dealing with altered selves. But I also believe that altered self should not as the outcome of deficits or as the outcome of a lack of attributes considered normal. They are different ways of being And it's the willingness of some of us to confront the self constructed nature that is helping make sense of the self. For all of us. Thank you.

That was science writer Anil Ananthaswamy. His book is called The Man Who Wasn't There Tales from the Edge of the Cell. You can find his full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to the show today. This episode was produced by Katie Montaleone, Harsha Nahada, James Delahousie, and Fiona Guerin. It was edited by Sanas Meshkinpur, Rachel Faulkner White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Kai McNamy and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Nogucci.

Our audio engineers were Jimmy Keeley, Tiffany Vera Castro, Patrick Murray, and Neil Rauch. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablui. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hilash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballarazzo. I'm Manoosh Zamarodi and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Ted Hell.

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