Why do we do this? 

I like to think of these confabulations as necessary half-truths to preserve the unity of the self. At any given moment, our mind is overstuffed with disparate sensations and fleeting thoughts; our different hemispheres want different things 

and distinct blobs of brain pump out distinct emotions. 

Why, then, do we feel like a unified person? 

Why do I feel like ‘Jonah’ and not like a collection of random and stray neural emanations? Because we tell ourselves a story. 

Just as a novelist creates a narrative, we create a sense of being. 

The self, in this sense, is our work of art, 

a fiction created by the mind in order to make sense of its own fragments.

 Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex