It’s a feeling familiar to most. We all have an inner voice that provides a running commentary of our day and helps to make sense of our lives. We weave stories to deal with a messy break-up or a family feud; casting ourselves centre stage in our daydreaming dramas.

To have a sense of yourself is a profoundly human trait, one which helped us to evolve and form functioning societies. Self-awareness, together with the development of complex language, allowed us to construct mental images and project ourselves into the future. This allowed Homo sapiens to prepare in advance for future events and to make better decisions, giving us the edge over Neanderthals. But research is showing that losing our sense of self can have a positive impact on our mental health.

The loss of self is referred to by neuroscientists as ego dissolution and is thought to occupy a spectrum, from the banality of losing yourself in a book to the extremes of ego death during a psychedelic experience.

A state of flow

A watered-down form of ego dissolution occurs when we become so engaged in a task that we momentarily forget ourselves. Before you realise, hours have gone by and you’ve forgotten to eat lunch. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this feeling ‘flow’ due to the effortlessness involved; you are so absorbed in the activity that the work pours out of you.

Through his interviews with composers, poets, businessmen, monks and others, Csikszentmihalyi found that people feel happiest when they are completely absorbed in an activity, or ‘in the zone’. Flow, he explains, occurs when you are doing something enjoyable that occupies the sweet spot between being challenging while matching your skillset. When flow is reached, it brings a feeling of serenity that extends beyond the boundaries of the ego. In an interview, a composer explains:

‘You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching it in a state of awe and wonderment. And [the music] just flows out of itself.’

Csikszentmihalyi explains this state of disembodiment in terms of the brain’s limited processing power. We can only absorb so much information at once, which is why most of us are so terrible at multitasking. When somebody is so absorbed in an activity that it demands all of their attention, the brain is no longer able to process information on the self — things like whether you are hungry, your itches and aches, what you’re going to do at the weekend — the things that remind us that we inhabit a physical body.

Psychedelics inhibit the brain’s ‘me network’

Over the past few decades, there has been a revival in psychedelic research. One of the most exciting findings is that drugs such as psilocybin, the psychoactive substance in magic mushrooms, can lead to long-term positive effects on mental health. The study, conducted at Johns Hopkins University, found that psilocybin was reliably able to stimulate a mystical experience. One of the key features of the experience was ego loss, usually accompanied by a feeling of unity to nature or the universe (so-called cosmic consciousness). Interestingly, the larger the extent of ego loss, the more positive the effect on the participant’s future mental health.

Using fMRI, researchers at Imperial College London have shown that the loss of self after ingesting psilocybin corresponds to reduced activity of the default mode network (DMN). The DMN is the part of the brain that is active when our mind is wandering or during periods of self-reflection and rumination. Sometimes referred to as the ‘me network’, it was discovered relatively recently and not all scientists agree on which brain regions actually make it up.

The study found that the most dramatic drops in DMN activity, measured by reductions in blood flow, correlated with the participant’s extent of ego dissolution. One participant who displayed significant reductions in DMN activity reported “I didn’t know where I ended and my surroundings began”.

The opposite — increases in DMN activity — have been reported among patients with major depression, perhaps unsurprising for a disorder characterised by pathological rumination. In the words of

 in his brilliant book, How to Change Your Mind, a propensity for self-reflection and rumination can cause the ego to turn inwards, obscuring reality with negative thoughts.

That’s not to say that ego dissolution is always a good thing. The loss of identity, particularly after ingesting psychedelics, can sometimes be terrifying. In fact, the very first account of an LSD trip by its creator, Albert Hoffman, describes the sense of horror associated with ego loss:

‘A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, my mind and my soul.. My ego was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa.’

Similar drops in DMN activity have been documented in fMRI scans of the brains of experienced meditators. One of the central tenants of Buddhism is the loss of self to reach enlightenment or nirvana, which is cultivated through regular meditation. According to the Dalai Lama, overattachment to the ego and personal narratives lead to unnecessary suffering.

Daydreaming can decrease wellbeing

Research has found that the more our mind drifts, the unhappier we feel. In their much-cited study, Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app to collect data on happiness. At random intervals, the app asked volunteers how they were feeling and what they were doing. Participants were at their lowest whenever their minds were wandering and occupied this daydream state a remarkable 47% of the time, even when doing things like cooking or watching television. Internal chatter was the quietest when participants were exercising, having sex or chatting to a friend.

Mind-wandering is what we do when nothing is dominating our attention. It happens when we’re on the bus, in the shower, in a meeting when we really ought to be paying attention. It’s the brain’s go-to, its default setting and results from increased activity in the default mode network.

Mindfulness techniques can help prevent mind-wandering and focus our minds on what is actually going on around us. By engaging all of the senses — the warmth of the sun on your skin, the sound of leaves crunching, birds chirping — we can silence our inner monologues and feel more present.

Lost in music

Music has the power to help people lose their sense of self. Dancing in a crowd, we coordinate our movements and become a single entity. As

 explains in The Art of Losing Control, losing yourself through music has given people opportunities for transcendence in an increasingly secular world. Many blues, jazz and rock and roll musicians — the likes of Elvis Presley, James Brown and Tina Turner — were inspired by the Sanctified church.

In an interview with Evans, Sister Bliss from the band Faithless recounts a crowd who have worked themselves up into a frenzy resembling religious fervour:

‘The drugs, the lights, the music and the sense of the illicit turned raves into communal ecstatic experiences where one could forget the self. There was a palpable energy, like I imagine you would get in the middle of a religious service with the laying-on of hands and talking in tongues. People lost themselves in the music in a really primal, tribal way.’

Even heavy metal headbanging may have religious roots. Eighteenth-century methodists and followers of the Greek mountain Goddess Cybele would throw their heads back and forth to reach a trance-like state.

The performance of music can give artists permission to push the boundaries of the ego, playing at being another persona. Evan’s points to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Beyonce’s Sasha Fierce and Lady Gaga’s Jo Calderone as examples of how music can liberate artists, allowing them to adopt alternative sexualities, genders or personalities. This can inspire the audience to also express themselves more fluidly, shaking off the narratives and labels that we attach to ourselves.

Reality isn’t real in an objective sense. It’s an illusion, or a shared hallucination, created by our brain to simplify the cacophony of sensory information. In the words of Aldous Huxley, the brain acts as a ‘reducing valve’, allowing only relevant data to filter into consciousness to aid our survival. It also acts as a prediction machine, using educated guesses to convert electrical impulses into perception based on our prior experience. We don’t experience reality passively; we actively construct it.

Likewise, the feeling of a unified self is also a construction, one that is not as fixed as we like to think it is. It’s a clever illusion: one shaped by millions of years of evolution and one of the reasons humans have thrived. Yet it is still an illusion. One that may be healthy to shake off now and then.