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The Story the Brain Tells: Narrative Identity, Neural Self-Modeling, and the Pathologies of Autobiographical Coherence
Naga Jyothi Boddu
Journal of Interdisclipinary Inquiry (2025) 1 (1).
Issue Section: Research
Keywords: Narrative identity, Default mode network, Predictive coding, Autobiographical memory, Personal identity, Narrative therapy, Philosophy of mind
Abstract
Human beings are narrative animals. The sense of being a continuous self persisting through time is not given directly by experience but constructed through the ongoing activity of autobiographical storytelling, a process with identifiable neural substrates, characteristic distortion patterns, and profound implications for psychological wellbeing and moral agency. This paper advances a neurophilosophical framework called Neural Narrative Integration (NNI) that treats narrative self-construction as a computational process implemented in the default mode network, subject to the same constraints as other inference processes in predictive coding architectures, and vulnerable to four characteristic failure modes: narrative fragmentation, narrative rigidity, narrative confabulation, and narrative colonization. Drawing on philosophy of personal identity, cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology, and the theory of mind, we argue that the narrative self is neither a mere fiction to be debunked nor a transparent window onto a pre-existing substantial self, but a functionally essential and epistemically constrained construction whose health or pathology has determinate consequences for the agent who inhabits it. We conclude with implications for narrative-based psychotherapy, the ethics of identity-affecting interventions, and the design of AI systems that interact with human self-conception.
Authors:
Naga Jyothi Boddu
Published 2026-05-15
How to Cite:
Naga Jyothi Boddu. (2026). The Story the Brain Tells: Narrative Identity, Neural Self-Modeling, and the Pathologies of Autobiographical Coherence. The Journal of Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 1(1). The Journal of Interdisciplinary Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21582124
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© Copyright 2026 JII.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain copyright and agree to license their articles with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) International License.
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