"It is impossible to ask where in the brain a particular memory is located," Rose says. "Memory is a dynamic property of the brain as a whole rather than of any one specific region. Memory resides simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the brain."

Whenever we recall a given object or experience," Damasio says, "we do not get an exact reproduction but an interpretation, a newly reconstructed version of the original."

"The self is not a little person inside the brain," says Damasio. "It is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade."