IntraConnected

Siegel examines how the sense of being a self takes shape over the course of a lifetime. Blending autobiographical reflection with research from neuroscience and the study of relationships, he considers how the mind, the brain, and our bonds with other people together shape who we become. The book is part personal account and part broader meditation on what it means to have an identity and to belong somewhere.

He challenges the cultural story that presents each person as a separate, self-contained individual. Setting that view beside a more expansive one, he proposes that the self may extend past the brain and even the body, and that it plays a foundational role in social groups and in the natural world. Siegel distinguishes the bodily basis of the individual self from the shared sense of 'we' that arises within the relationships people live in, and he treats that relational dimension as central to how humans find belonging.

The pandemic, he notes, made the reality of human connection hard to ignore. The book takes that lesson as a starting point for a closer look at the bonds that link us and at other aspects of living in interconnected ways.

The book is illustrated with 21 black-and-white figures. Siegel is a psychiatrist and clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, and he leads the Mindsight Institute.