A Neural Signature of the Bias Towards Self-Focus

Abstract

People are remarkably self-focused, disproportionately choosing to think about themselves relative to other topics. Self-focus can be adaptive, helping individuals fulfill their needs. It can also go haywire, with maladaptive self-focus a risk and maintenance factor for internalizing disorders like depression. Yet, the drive to focus on the self remains to be fully characterized. We discovered a brain state that when spontaneously brought online during a quick mental break predicts the desire to focus on oneself just a few seconds later. In Study 1, we identified a default network neural signature from pre-trial activity that predicts multiple indicators of self-focus within our sample. In Study 2, we applied our neural signature to independent resting-state data from the Human Connectome project. We found that individuals who score high on internalizing, a form of maladaptive self-focus, similarly move in-and-out of this pattern during rest, suggesting a systematic trajectory towards self-focused thought. This is the first work to "decode" the bias to focus on the self and paves the way towards stopping maladaptive self-focus in its course. Significance StatementSelf-help aisles in bookstores, the popularity of self-care culture, curating identities on social media, and the mental health crisis surrounding the rise in depression and anxiety are all symptoms of modern lifes emphasis on the self. Why are people so preoccupied with themselves? Our results suggest self-focus may emerge spontaneously because of the brain state people enter in the default network as soon as they have a mental break. The brain state participants entered in the first few seconds of rest could be used to decode whether they next chose to focus on themselves, as well as subjective and neural markers of self-focus. Moreover, internalizing, a maladaptive form of self-focus, corresponded with systematic timing of the pre-self pattern during a resting state scan, perhaps shaping the timecourse of spontaneous, self-focused thought.