Helen Berns, Basic Books

Gregory Berns, author of “The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent ― and Reinvent ― Our Identities”

How much of who we are is real and how much is a story we make up in our brains?

Greg Berns wants to help answer that question in his book, “The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent — and Reinvent — Our Identities.”

Berns, a psychology professor at Emory University, and his team had 20 people read the 2003 novel “Pompeii,” an historical fiction about the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. In between sections of the book, the readers would come in for a brain scan, to see if their brains had changed based on what they’d read.

Berns talked to The Show about what he found — and about what question or questions he was trying to answer and why that was so important to him.

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