Memory and The Sense of Personal Identity: Stanley B. Klein

Memory and the Sense of Personal
Identity
Stanley B. Klein
University of California, Santa Barbara
stan.klein@psych.ucsb.edu
Downloaded from http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ at Apollo Group on February 9, 2015

Shaun Nichols
University of Arizona
sbn@email.arizona.edu
Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity — the sense that
I am the same person as someone in the past. We present a neurological case study
of a patient who has accurate memories of scenes from his past, but for whom
the memories lack the sense of mineness. On the basis of this case study, we
propose that the sense of identity derives from two components, one delivering
the content of the memory and the other generating the sense of mineness. We
argue that this new model of the sense of identity has implications for debates
about quasi-memory. In addition, articulating the components of the sense of
identity promises to bear on the extent to which this sense of identity provides
evidence of personal identity.
1. Introduction
Memory is at the heart of the way most people think about personal
identity. It is because I remember my first kiss that I think I am the
same person as that awkward adolescent. If I had no memory of past
experiences, the sense that I existed in the past would be dramatically
compromised.
Memory is also at the heart of philosophical discussions of personal
identity. Perhaps the most prominent account of personal identity,
attributed to Locke, holds that these kinds of memories are (part of )
what make me the same as the person I was in the past. Memories
of past actions go towards constituting personal identity. Locke’s
immediate philosophical opponents, Reid and Butler, rejected the
constitution thesis. But they did not shrink from relying on
memory to ground judgements of personal identity. On the contrary,
Reid and Butler took memory to provide the critical evidence of
Mind, Vol. 0 . 0 . 2012 ß Klein and Nichols 2012

doi:10.1093/mind/fzs080
2 Stanley B. Klein and Shaun Nichols
past existence. Thus, Reid writes:

Our own personal identity and continued existence, as far back as we
remember anything distinctly … we know immediately, and not by
reasoning. It seems, indeed, to be a part of the testimony of memory.
Everything we remember has such a relation to ourselves as to imply
necessarily our existence at the time remembered. (Reid 1785, p. 586).
Even philosophers like Hume, who reject the idea that there is an
enduring self, still typically acknowledge the force of memorial experi-
ence in giving the impression of identity across time. Hence we find
Hume saying, ‘As memory alone acquaints us with the continuance

and extent of this succession of perceptions, ‘tis to be considered,
upon that account chiefly, as the source of personal identity ’
(Hume 1739/2000, p. 168; see Baxter 2008 for treatment of Hume’s
complex and evolving position on self and memory). Indeed, it is
incumbent on theorists who deny persistence of self to prove that
memory presents us with an illusion of identity.
Despite the manifest role for memory in philosophical discussions of
personal identity, there is remarkably little discussion of the sense of
personal identity that memory delivers — the sense that I am the same
person as someone in the past. Lockeans use this sense to build a theory
of personal identity; Reid and Butler appeal to this sense as evidence for
a persisting self; and Humeans maintain that the sense presents us with
an illusion of a persisting self. This raises a cluster of philosophical
issues about personal identity and memory. Does memory of experi-
ences always bring with it a conviction of identity? Does memory ne-
cessarily presuppose personal identity? Does memory provide evidence
for personal identity across time? To address these issues adequately,
we need a sharper picture of the nature of the sense of identity.
In this paper, we will begin by reviewing the work on memory, and
we will present and discuss a neurological case study of a patient
who lacks an experienced sense of ownership of his autobiographical
memories. We suggest that this illuminates the psychological under-
pinnings of the sense of identity and that this might have important
implications for issues surrounding personal identity.
2. Memory and personal identity
2.1 Contemporary psychological treatments of long-term memory

Prior to presenting the case study, we need to be explicit about
how contemporary psychologists conceptualize long-term memory.

Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity 3
Our view of memory is based on the widely held position that

long-term memory consists in multiple systems (for reviews, see
Foster and Jelicic 1999; Klein et al. 2004; Schacter and Tulving 1994).
Most psychologists agree that, at its most general level, long-term
memory can be characterized as containing two basic systems: pro-
cedural and declarative (e.g. Cohen 1984; Squire 1987; Tulving 1983,
1995). The procedural memory system makes possible the acquisition
and retention of motor, perceptual, and cognitive skills (for example,
knowing how to ride a bike); it consists in the nonconscious expres-
sion of previously acquired behavioural skills and cognitive proced-

ures (see Parkin 1997; Tulving and Schacter 1990). Declarative
memory, by contrast, consists in facts and beliefs about the world
(for example, knowing that canaries are yellow; knowing that Nolan
Ryan pitched seven no-hitters).
Tulving (1972, 1983) further distinguishes two types or systems
within declarative memory: episodic and semantic (see also Cermak
1984; Furlong 1951; Gennaro 1996; Parkin 1997). Semantic memory
contains relatively generic, context-free information about the
world, such as Grapes are edible, 2 + 2 = 4, and Sacramento is the capital
of California. Semantic memory lacks a source tag — it does not spe-
cify when or where the memory was acquired; rather, it is retrieved as
knowledge without regard to where and when that knowledge was
obtained (e.g. Klein 2004; Tulving 1983, 1995; Wheeler, Stuss, and
Tulving 1997). Although semantic memory typically does not make
reference to the self, it can contain propositions expressing facts about
the self (for example, Stan Klein was born in New York in 1952), just as
it can about other things in the world. But this information is known
in the same way that one knows that 2 + 2 = 4; it is not recollected or
re-experienced vis-à-vis the context in which it was originally learned.
In contrast to semantic memory, episodic memory records events as
having been experienced at a particular point in space and time. On
standard characterizations, what distinguishes episodic memory is that
an episodic memory represents the ‘what, where, when’ of an event.
As such, it is experienced as a memory that makes explicit reference to
the time and place of its acquisition. Examples of episodic memory are
I remember eating chicken for supper yesterday evening; I recall my
meeting with Judith last Monday.1
1
There are delicate issues about how the self is represented in episodic memory, and this
will be a concern later in the paper.

LTM
Semantic Episodic
Autobiographical Narrative
Factual self- Trait self-

knowledge knowledge

Figure 1: Standard model of long-term memory systems that
implicate self representations
Not surprisingly, it is the episodic component of declarative

memory that historically has been the focus of interest for psycholo-
gists (for review, see Klein 2001, 2004; Klein and Gangi 2010) and
philosophers (e.g. Brennan 1985; Campbell 2004; Parfit 1984;
Northoff 2000; Schechtman 1990) studying the relation between self
and memory. This is because retrieval from episodic memory is
assumed to have a self-referential quality thought to be largely
absent from other types of memory (for discussion, see Klein 2001;
Klein et al. 2002). In particular, episodic memory has been thought to
involve re-experiencing events from one’s past, thus providing its
owner with content by which he or she is able to construct a personal
narrative, that is, his or her life stories (see, for example, Eakin 2008;
Fivush and Haden 2003; Klein 2001; Klein and Gangi 2010). By con-
trast, semantic memory is assumed not to be accompanied by aware-
ness of re-experiencing one’s personal past (e.g. Klein 2001; Perner and
Ruffman 1994; Tulving 1993a; Wheeler et al. 1997): I may know where I
was born, but I do not know this by virtue of having re-experienced
my birth. That is why this bit of personal history would be considered
semantic memory knowledge, despite its being about oneself.
The self is represented by a number of systems and subsystems
within long-term memory (see fig. 1).2 Within semantic memory,
there are (at least) two different kinds of self-related memories.
First, we have semantic factual knowledge of the self — for example,
the memory that I am 58 and live in Goleta. This kind of memory is
2
For reviews, see Gillihan and Farah 2005; Klein et al. 2004; Klein and Gangi 2010;
Rathbone, Moulin, and Conway 2009.

dissociable from a second kind of semantic self-knowledge, knowledge

of one’s own traits (for review, see Klein et al. 2008; Klein and Lax
2010). Research over the past twenty years has provided evidence that
the semantic memory system contains a specific subsystem that stores
information about one’s own personality in the form of trait gener-
alizations (for example, Self: usually stubborn). These trait summaries
form a fast-access database, which provides quick answers to decision
processes that require trait judgements (for review, see Klein et al.
2002; Klein and Gangi 2010). This system delivers a sense of the self
given by pre-computed summaries of the dispositions one manifested

in various behavioural episodes (e.g. Klein and Loftus 1993).
This dispositional sense of the self turns out to be resilient across
dramatic damage to memory systems. There now exists an extensive
database showing that even patients suffering total anterograde and
retrograde episodic amnesia can describe their own personal charac-
teristics both reliably and accurately (e.g. Klein, Loftus, and Kihlstrom
1996; Tulving 1993b; for reviews, see Klein 2001, 2004, forthcoming a;
Klein and Lax 2010). This, of course, is not unexpected given the
extensive literature demonstrating clinical and experimental dissoci-
ations between episodic recollection and trait self-knowledge (for re-
views, see Klein forthcoming a; Klein et al. 2008; Klein and Lax 2010).
Although self-trait memory provides a critical sense of self, it is not
sufficient for a sense of personal identity across time. This is illustrated
by a number of patients, but the patient D.B. provides what is perhaps
the most dramatic case. Following cardiac arrest and presumed
hypoxic brain damage, D.B. had knowledge of his own traits, and
yet he was ‘unaware that he had a past and unable to imagine what
his experiences might be like in the future’ (Klein et al. 2004, p. 466;
see also Klein, Loftus, and Kihlstrom 2002). This presumably is be-
cause D.B. had severe damage to episodic memory rendering him
incapable of recollecting a single event or experience from any point
in his past. This absence of episodic memory in D.B. explains his lack
of a sense that he existed in the past.3 Episodic memory seems to be
essential for the sense of personal identity across time (Atance and
O’Neill 2005).4
3
Perhaps more strikingly, the absence of episodic memory in D.B. seems to coincide with
an inability to imagine himself into the future (Klein, Loftus, and Kihlstrom 2002).
4
This is not the only sense of personal continuity available, however. While it is true that
D.B. lacks a memory-based sense of diachronic identity, there is a sense of self — a sense of
who he is — that is preserved. Indeed, even when a person experiences cognitive chaos so
extreme that it partitions conscious access to his thoughts, memories, and perceptions into

Strikingly, when episodic memory is partially intact, people retain a

sense of identity even if there has been dramatic memory loss.
Consider the famous case of H.M., who had a large portion of his
medial temporal lobes surgically removed to alleviate seizures. After
the surgery, H.M. could not form new episodic memories. But
he reveled in telling a few stories about his childhood. One of
H.M.’s biographers recounts: ‘He tells of living in South Coventry,
Connecticut, where he could go behind the house to shoot guns. He
had a rifle, “One with a scope!” he says, always enthusiastic at this
point in his story. “And I had handguns too! A .38 and a .32”’ (Hilts

1995, p. 138). The difference here between the child and the man is
profound. After surgery, H.M. was no longer capable of taking care of
himself, he could not remember whether his parents were alive or
dead, he did not know where he was living, and he was, as noted,
unable to form new episodic memories. And yet he seems to take
himself to be identical with the young man with a .38 and a .32.
In his critique of memory-based accounts of personal identity, Reid
recognized something like this distinction between episodic and se-
mantic memory. Although Reid famously rejects the Lockean view
that memory constitutes personal identity, he maintained that
memory provides ‘irresistible’ evidence that I am the very person
who did the action (Reid 1785, p. 318). To remember a past action is
to identify oneself as existing at the time: ‘Every man in his senses
believes what he distinctly remembers, and every thing he remembers
intervals of one second (that is, awareness of current thought and perception fades and is
replaced each passing second!), a sense of self-unity and continuity reportedly is felt during
each momentary slice of awareness. This held for Storring’s ‘Patient B’ (Storring 1936). The
patient under discussion was unable to maintain a continued focus on any internal or external
topic, event, or scene exceeding his brief limit of continued awareness, yet he had a sense of
himself as an existing, continuous entity (for review and discussion, see Klein forthcoming a).
Given the episodic criterion for psychological continuity discussed above, what might pro-
vide for this personally felt and unwavering sense of personal continuity? One possibility is
that there is a sense of personal continuity that derives from trait self-knowledge, a subsystem
within semantic memory (see also Rathbone et al. 2009). An extensive review of the available
research (Klein and Lax 2010) shows that knowledge of one’s traits (a) is immune to loss in
the face of multiple, often severe, neurological and cognitive insult (including total retrograde
and anterograde amnesia, autism, Alzheimer’s Dementia, and Prosopagnosia), (b) is empiric-
ally dissociable from trait knowledge of others (even well-known others such as the patient’s
family members) as well as from purely factual, non-dispositional self-knowledge, and (c) can
serve as a firmly entrenched foundation for one’s sense that one ‘is, was, and will be’ (for a
similar view, see Rathbone et al. 2009).
In short, the surprising and unanticipated resilience of trait self-knowledge may serve as the
bedrock for one’s sense that one is a continuing, experiencing self even when one’s
memory-based personal narrative has succumbed to the ravages of episodic amnesia.

convinces him that he existed at the time remembered’ (Reid 1785,

p. 318).5 Reid here clearly has in mind what we now call episodic
memory. He acknowledges that I might know who gave birth to
me, but denies that this is achieved through memory. Today, we
would classify knowledge of one’s birthmother as a fact retrieved
from semantic memory, but Reid simply has a narrower use of
‘memory ’ that seems restricted to episodic memory (as is true of
many psychological and philosophical treatments of memory prior
to the early 1970s — though not all; see, for example, Bergson 1911/
1970; De Biran 1803; Furlong 1951; Musant 1966). More important for

present purposes, Reid maintains that it is logically impossible to have
such a memory without also having the conviction that one existed at
that time: ‘There can be no memory of what is past without the con-
viction that we existed at the time remembered.’ To suppose otherwise
is a contradiction (Reid 1785, p. 315). Similarly, in the contemporary
literature, Marya Schechtman maintains the ‘mineness’ of a memory
‘cannot be separated from its content’ (Schechtman 1990, p. 87).
Psychologists do not typically trade in issues of logical impossibility,
but there is a natural psychological thesis that resonates with Reid’s
point. It might well be that the nature of episodic memory is such that
it is nomologically impossible to remember a past action without ‘the
conviction that one existed at that time’. It is possible that the episodic
memory system simply cannot produce any output unless the output
includes the sense that the same self had the experience that is being
remembered (see, for example, Suddendorf and Corballis 1997).
Some psychological systems seem to be tied to very particular kinds
of representations. For instance, the facial perception system simply
cannot produce a percept of a frontal concave face. As the hollow-face
illusion shows, if the facial features are present in a concave mask, it is
inevitable that we see the face as convex. It is possible that something
similar holds for episodic memory and the representation of the self.
One viable psychological hypothesis is that the retrieval of an episodic
memory inevitably issues a representation of self-as-owner. On this
view, one simply cannot get the content of episodic memory without
also getting the ‘mineness’ along with it (see, for example, Klein et al.
2004; Wheeler et al. 1997).
5
Reid argues that the Lockean attempt to define personal identity in terms of memory is
circular because memory presupposes identity. Contemporary theorists invoke ‘quasi-memory ’
to address this problem, and we will discuss at length below how the case studies might bear
on the notion of quasi-memory.

2.2 The case of patient R.B.

Having situated the discussion within the context of the memory
systems, we turn to the case of Patient R.B., a right-handed, forty-
three-year-old male with a BA and a Master’s degree in physics. While
riding his bike, he was struck by an automobile, resulting in multiple
injuries, including broken ribs, multiple fractures of his pelvis, a col-
lapsed lung (pneumothorax), and head trauma. At the time of his
accident, which took place in 2002, he was employed as an electronic
design engineer.
Of direct relevance to the issues at hand is the nature of the cog-

nitive and memory impairments sustained as a result of his trauma.
These included difficulty in maintaining attention, mild aphasia, and
retrograde and anterograde amnesia for the events in close temporal
proximity to the accident (for example, several days both prior to and
following neural insult. After several months, R.B. was able to recover
memories for a few of these pre- and post-accident events). Verbal
fluency (the ability to generate exemplars of categories in a fixed
amount of time — for example, names of zoo animals) and short-term
memory span both were slightly (but significantly) below scores pro-
vided by neurologically healthy age-matched controls.
While in the hospital, R.B. was placed on morphine (IV drip,
followed by pills) and Oxycontin to alleviate the considerable pain
he endured. He was switched to Vicodin following release from the
hospital, and, as the intensity of pain subsided, he weaned himself off
medication. Importantly, at the time of memory testing R.B. was not
on any pain medication. After returning home, he was seen regularly
by speech and physical therapists to help with his aphasia and to
regain his ability to walk (lost due to the shattering of his pubic
ramus; for additional case details, see Klein forthcoming b).
Of particular relevance to the question at hand — personal owner-
ship and episodic memory — is that R.B. was able to remember par-
ticular incidents from his life accompanied by temporal, spatial, and
self-referential knowledge, but he did not feel the memories he experi-
enced belonged to him. In his words, they lacked ‘ownership’. This
particular form of memory impairment — episodic recollection absent
a sense of personal ownership, is a form of memory dissociation that,
to our knowledge, has not previously been documented in the neuro-
logical literature. There are, however, two cases that bear some simi-
larity. One is from a case study of an amnesic reported by Talland
(1964). Unfortunately, the data available from that brief report, while
suggesting a similar dissociation, are too limited to support strong

conclusions. In the other case (Stuss and Guzman 1988), a patient

semantically relearned his ‘personal history ’ following a case of
severe retrograde episodic amnesia spanning most of his past life his-
tory. The patient commented that the relearned memories seemed to
lack a feel of real happenings in his life. They were, to him, more like
stories and facts told to him by others (which, indeed, they were!). In
this sense, they were more like semantic facts about himself (e.g. Klein
forthcoming a; Klein and Lax 2010) than episodic recollections: the
patient knew his memories were about him, but he did not remember
them as temporally and spatially acquired in the correct context (that

is, when they transpired). Instead, they were memories that temporally
and spatially were experienced episodically (they consisted in the epi-
sodic recall of information acquired following the onset of his retro-
grade memory loss) as second-hand stories told to him at a particular
time and place.
So, are R.B.’s recollections episodic or semantic? The evidence sug-
gests the former. Almost immediately following his accident, R.B. was
able to intentionally recall specific events temporally and spatially
situated in his personal past, but his recollection of those events was
compromised in an unusual manner — memory for those events,
though fitting the standard criteria for episodic recollection, was not
accompanied by a sense of personal ownership.
For example, approximately two months following release from the
hospital (by which time he was no longer taking pain medication),
R.B. offered the following description of what it is like for him to recall
personal events:
What I realized was that I did not ‘own’ any memories that came before
my injury. I knew things that came before my injury. In fact, it seemed that
my memory was just fine for things that happened going back years in the
past [the period close to the injury was more disrupted]. I could answer
any question about where I lived at different times in my life, who my
friends were, where I went to school, activities I enjoyed, etc. But none of it
was ‘me’. It was the same sort of knowledge I might have about how my
parents met or the history of the Civil War or something like that.
R.B. himself initiated use of the language of ‘ownership’, and he uses
this expression throughout his reports. We simply adopt his expres-
sion below.
In our review of contemporary theories of memory, we noted that
psychologists maintain that episodic memories are temporal, spatial,
and self-referential. Semantic memory, by contrast, largely (though,
as we have noted, not exclusively) enables retrieval of impersonal

facts (for example, A bird is an animal ). By these criteria, R.B.’s de-

scriptions of his memory experience leave little doubt that they are
personal recollections, appropriately situated in time and space, rather
than factual semantic knowledge. For instance, following R.B.’s recall
of events from his childhood, he added:
I was remembering scenes, not facts … I was recalling scenes … that is … I
could clearly recall a scene of me at the beach in New London with my
family as a child. But the feeling was that the scene was not my memory. As
if I was looking at a photo of someone else’s vacation.

Note that these memories were substantiated by third parties as valid
renditions of events that actually transpired in R.B.’s life. While
this recollection satisfies the criteria for episodic memory — time,
place, and self — it simultaneously exhibits a highly atypical absence
of experienced ownership. This absence of ownership again is evident
in R.B.’s response to instructions to recall personal memories from
time spent in graduate school:
Things that were in the present, like my name, I continue to own. Having
been to MIT had two different issues. My memories of having been at MIT
I did not own. Those scenes of being at MIT were vivid, but they were not
mine. But I owned ‘the fact that I had a degree from MIT’. That might have
simply been a matter of rational acceptance of fact.
He continues:
I can picture the scene perfectly clearly … studying with my friends in our
study lounge. I can ‘relive’ it in the sense of re-running the experience of
being there. But it has the feeling of imagining, [as if] re-running an
experience that my parents described from their college days. It did not
feel like it was something that really had been a part of my life.
Intellectually I suppose I never doubted that it was a part of my life.
Perhaps because there was such continuity of memories that fit a pattern
that lead up to the present time. But that in itself did not help change the
feeling of ownership.
Once again, R.B.’s memory performance adheres to the definition of
episodic recollection: he can remember where the events transpired,
when the events took place, and that they directly involved him.
Moreover, they are not simply autobiographical semantic knowledge
or inferences based on semantic memory (although, as his response
makes clear, he is capable of such inference).
An important attribute of episodic recollection is that it can be
intentionally called into awareness. While episodic recollections can
be spontaneous (e.g. Bernsten 2010; Salaman 1970), their ability to be

auto-cued (Donald 1991) is one of the features that separates this

type of memory ability from the types of cue-dependent memories
that appear to characterize most non-human sentient creatures
(Suddendorf and Corballis 1997). In this regard, R.B. shows clear
ability to intentionally bring to mind past personal events.
Consider, for example, the following exchange between Klein and
patient R.B.:
SBK: Can you recall personally important events from your pre-injury
period?

RB: I remember things that came before my injury. In fact, it seems that
my memory is just fine for things that happened going back years in the
past. I can answer questions about where I lived at different times in my
life, who my friends were, where I went to school, activities I enjoyed … To
clarify, I am remembering scenes, not facts. Since I was remembering
scenes, I think this means I am dealing with exactly what you are asking
about.
Note that R.B.’s responses exhibit a clear sense of self both narratively
and factually. That he also has an intact dispositional self can be seen
from his remarks as the interview continues.
SBK: Can you recall who you are? More specifically, what you were like and
what you are like — that is, your trait characteristics. If so, are your traits
felt as your own?
RB: Yes, I definitely have no identity problem. And the memories created
since the injury I have full ownership of.
SBK: Can you recall for me a personal event concerning your time at
college that would involve knowing what happened to you as a personal
experience. Or is the recall more of a factual nature?
RB: I can see the scene in my head. I’m studying with friends in the lounge
at my residence hall. I am able to re-live it. I have a feeling … a sense of
being at there, at MIT, in the lounge. But it doesn’t feel like I own it. It’s
like I’m imagining, re-living the experience but it was described by
someone else.
SBK: Can you recall memories whenever you desire to do so?
RB: I can recall memories [from the non-ownership period of his life] at
will. I have normal control over remembering facts and scenes from my
past. But when I remember scenes from before the injury, they do not feel
as if they happened to me — though intellectually I know that they did —
they felt as if they happened to someone else.
Commenting on his gradual recovery of physical function (for
example, walking) and the eventual return of feelings of personal

ownership of his episodic recollections, R.B. observes:

It [that is, loss of experience of personal ownership of his episodic
recollections] helped explain the other puzzle: I didn’t feel ‘down’ about
not being able to walk, etc. Because it was as if I was learning to walk for
the first time. There was no sense of loss. Only a sense of gaining new skills
and meeting these interesting new challenges. I knew that I once could
walk, but it wasn’t ‘me’ who once could walk.
With respect to the recovery of episodic ownership:
When I did ‘take ownership’ of a memory, it was actually quite isolated.

A single memory I might own, yet another memory connected to it I
would not own. It was a startling experience to have no rhyme or reason to
which memories I slowly took ownership of, one at a time at random over
a period of weeks and months.
He continues:
What happened over the coming months was interesting: every once in a
while, I would suddenly think about something in my past and I would
‘own’ it. That was indeed something ‘I’ had done and experienced. Over
time, one by one I would come to ‘own’ different memories. Eventually,
after perhaps eight months or so, it seemed as if it was all owned. As if once
enough individual memories were owned, it was all owned.
From a related perspective in the psychological memory literature,
R.B. has at least some capacity for what Suddendorf and Corballis
(1997, 2007) have termed the act of mental time travel (see also
Klein, Loftus, and Kihlstrom 2002; Wheeler et al. 1997) — that is,
the ability to recollect one’s personal past as well as imagine or project
one’s self into a possible future. Importantly, to date, this ability has
only been found in individuals with intact episodic memory (for
recent review, see Suddendorf and Corballis 2007). What is unique
to R.B.’s case is the phenomenological distance at which he experi-
ences his episodic recollections. He knows they are his in some sense,
but he feels as though they are not ‘owned’. The following quote
makes clear that even during the period of non-ownership, R.B. re-
tained his capacity to consciously plan for his personal future, an
ability, as we have noted, widely considered causally linked to the
presence of intact episodic memory function (e.g. Hassabis et al.
2007; Klein, Loftus, and Kihlstrom 2002; Tulving 1985; for review see
Klein 2010; Suddendorf and Corballis 2007).
During the un-owned period I was able to plan for the future. Although
my working memory loss and lack of skill at compensation made it
challenging. When I slowly returned to work, it was hard to plan a complex

strategy. I had to think of useful things to do and then do them. The best
compensation I found was to separate the planning of the strategy from the
execution. It worked best if I made a list of Things To Do. Then I could
handle doing them one at a time.
3. Implications
3.1 A sketch of a model of the sense of identity

As we have seen, the sense of personal identity given by episodic

memory is robust — it gives us an ‘irresistible’ sense of being the
same person, and it has seemed to many to be a necessary concomitant
of episodic memory. But the case of R.B. indicates that this sense of
identity is dissociable from episodic memory itself. The sense of iden-
tity turns out to be, pace Reid, a contingent feature of memory.
The apparent paradox — episodic memory of past events absent the
feeling of personal ownership — can be understood by situating epi-
sodic memory in the context of a system of interrelated memory
processes, some of which provide the raw data for experience and
some of which enable the experience to be ‘mine’ (for extended treat-
ment, see Klein 2004, 2010, forthcoming a, forthcoming b; Klein et al.
2004). R.B.’s recollections during his ‘unowned’ period can be ex-
plained in the context of the view that there is specialized neural
machinery that inserts the conceptual element self into the agent
slot of an episodic memory attribution (Klein forthcoming b; see
also Klein et al. 2004). This neural machinery in R.B. seems to have
been compromised by his injury, but only for those events that
occurred in the time period preceding his injury. That is, R.B. suffered
a form of retrograde amnesia that compromised his ability to experi-
ence his personal recollections as his own.
During the non-ownership period, R.B. had episodic memory for
past events, but lacked a sense of numerical personal identity with the
past person. The case of R.B. suggests that the sense of numerical
personal identity is quite narrowly circumscribed. R.B. had factual
self-knowledge, trait self-knowledge, and knowledge of episodes, but
he did not have the sense of personal identity with the past person.
Importantly, during his ‘unowned’ period R.B. had no trouble rep-
resenting that R.B. had experiences on a beach in New London. He
presumably also had no trouble representing that his body was present
for those experiences. He knows that the memories are about him
rather than his mother. And he can auto-cue the memories at will.

So, in that sense, the memories involve self-reference. However, there

seems to be another type of self-reference that typically accompanies
episodic recollections (‘ownership’, ‘mineness’) that has been im-
paired in his case. His apparent deficit was in representing, from the
first person, ‘I had these experiences’. The nature of this deficit re-
mains unclear. One natural explanation is that there is a special kind
of conceptual self-representation that is missing in R.B.’s episodic
memories. There is independent reason to think that there is a special
kind of conceptual self-representation corresponding to (some uses
of ) ‘I’ (see, for example, Rey 1997, p. 291; Nichols 2008, pp. 522–3). To

adapt an example from John Perry, if Hector learns that Hector is
about to be attacked by a bear, this will not generate the appropriate
action unless Hector also thinks I am Hector (Perry 1977, p. 494). The
corresponding ‘I’-concept plays a special role in our cognitive econ-
omy. It is plausible that this concept is also implicated in typical cases
of episodic recollection and that it is this special representation that is
somehow missing in R.B.’s episodic recollections, giving rise to a phe-
nomenological difference in the sense of ownership.
The fact that R.B. was able to recover these functions suggests that
one facet of the self-referential aspect of his recollections was not
destroyed by his injury. This is also implied by the fact that he had
a sense of personal ownership of ongoing experiences that occurred
after the accident that impaired his memory (with the exception of his
temporally moderate anterograde memory loss). Why his mental ma-
chinery was able to insert a distinctive I-tag into memories as they
were being built but not when recollecting memories of past events is
yet another feature that remains unclear (for relevant discussion, see
Dalla Barba 2002; Tulving and Lepage 2000).
3.2 The sense of identity and quasi-memory

According to psychological continuity approaches to personal iden-
tity, what makes me the same person as someone in the past is a
psychological relation between me and that past person. Until recently,
discussions of personal identity have been dominated by psychological
approaches, and, in particular, memory-based approaches to personal
identity (but see Olson 1997; Shoemaker forthcoming). On a simple
Lockean memory theory, I am the same person as someone in the past
just in case I remember having an experience as that person. Reid and
Butler maintained that this proposal entails an obvious circularity, for

I can only remember my own experiences (Butler 1736; Reid 1785).

Thus, for the Lockean account, remembering presupposes personal
identity. And if memory presupposes personal identity, then trying
to give an account of identity in terms of memory seems hopeless.
Although philosophers widely agree that the circularity objection
is a serious problem for a simple Lockean theory, a number of
theorists still favour a psychological continuity account of diachronic
personal identity (as opposed to, say, biological accounts; e.g. Olson
1997, 2007). Accordingly, potential emendations have been proposed
to rein in the tautology identified in the simple Lockean account (e.g.

Bernecker 2010; Brennan 1985; Collins 1997; Grice 1941; Hamilton 1995;
Lund 2005; Quinton 1962; Slors 2001a). The most widely discussed
technique for reformulating the Lockean account in the face of the cir-
cularity objection draws on the notion of quasi-memory. Originally
proposed by Shoemaker (1970), Parfit defines quasi-memory as
follows.
I have an accurate quasi-memory of a past experience if:
(1) I seem to have an experience,
(2) someone did have this experience,
(3) my apparent memory is causally dependent, in the right kind of way,
on that past experience. (Parfit 1984, p. 220)
Quasi-memories thus do not presuppose a persisting self. With this
definition of quasi-memory, a Lockean can maintain, without circu-
larity, that quasi-memory partly constitutes personal identity.
Advocates of psychological-continuity accounts of personal identity
tend to take the quasi-memory account as solving the problem of cir-
cularity, thus making it safe to hold a Lockean theory of some form.
However, in a lovely paper in The Journal of Philosophy, Schechtman
offers a powerful contemporary defence of the circularity objection.
She argues that it is impossible to specify how memory matters for
personal identity without presupposing identity (1990, p. 79).
To make her case, she begins by noting that the notion of
quasi-memory is supposed to evade the circularity objection by char-
acterizing ‘a nondelusional memory without reference to personal
identity ’ (Schechtman 1990, p. 79). Schechtman charts the relation
between memories, delusions, and quasi-memories as follows: to
have a memory, she suggests,
is to have an apparent memory of an experience that one actually had, and
to take it (correctly) to be one’s own experience. To have a delusion is to

have an apparent memory of an experience that one did not in fact have,
and to take it (incorrectly) to be one’s own. To have a quasi-memory is to
have an apparent memory (properly caused) and to hold no view about
whose memory it is. (Schechtman 1990, p. 78)
Quasi-memories then, are supposed to be nondelusional apparent
memories, and since having a quasi-memory leaves open whose
memory it is, quasi-memory does not presuppose personal identity.
With this framework in place, Schechtman develops an ingenious
argument against the possibility of quasi-memories, which we will call
Schechtman’s dilemma. The dilemma holds that, for any candidate

quasi-memory, the state will either be a delusion or it will presuppose
personal identity.6 As a result, no candidate quasi-memory will work
to solve the problem of circularity: in each case, the apparent memory
will either be a delusion or it will be a state that presupposes sameness
of rememberer and experiencer. She writes, ‘simply deleting the
“nametag” from a memory is not sufficient to make it nondelusional’
(Schechtman 1990, p. 79). The only way for an apparent memory not
to be delusional will be to ‘presuppose the identity of the rememberer
with the person who had the experience’ (Schechtman 1990, p. 79).
The root of the problem, according to Schechtman, is that ‘The mine-
ness of a psychological state cannot be separated from its content’
(Schechtman 1990, p. 87).
We think that the case of R.B. provides a way for the quasi-memory
theorist to evade Schechtman’s dilemma.7 Schechtman’s dilemma
6
We are simplifying Schechtman’s argument here, since she in fact allows a further alter-
native — however, that alternative is, in her view, another dead end for quasi-memory. The
other way to make the quasi-memory nondelusional would be to strip away much of the
content of the apparent memory; but in that case, she says, ‘it is no longer plausible to say that
what is relevant to personal identity in genuine memory is preserved in quasi-memory ’
(Schechtman 1990, p. 79). Relatedly, in recent work, Schechtman has noted that even if it is
possible to transfer some quasi-memories, there remains a question about whether the trans-
ferred quasi-memories are the sort that can be constitutive of personal identity (Schechtman
2011, p. 70). Our primary interest in this paper is the sense of identity, and so we focus on the
narrower dilemma drawn from Schechtman. We note, though, that responding to this nar-
rower dilemma will be a necessary part of any defence of quasi-memory. The question then
arises whether quasi-memories that evade the dilemma can be partly constitutive of personal
identity; but we leave that question to others.
7
The debate about personal identity and memory is often framed in terms of conceptual
analysis and conceivability (see, for example, Schechtman 1990, pp. 71, 73, 76). Thus, one might
maintain that actual empirical evidence on memory cannot be relevant to what is conceivable.
We reject this assumption. Empirical work can show that a distinction is empirically viable,
and this might change the way we think about what is conceivable. For instance, after the
discovery of blindsight, people plausibly find it easier to conceive of a distinction between
perception and awareness.

casts doubt on the coherence of the notion of quasi-memory. It seems

that there is no space for the relevant notion of quasi-memory because
for any apparent memory, it will either (i) be a delusion or (ii) pre-
suppose identity. Now consider R.B.’s recalling ‘a scene of me at the
beach in New London with my family as a child.’ The veracity of his
account was corroborated (as were the other events R.B. recounted).
So these recollections are accurate recountings of events. The original
fixation of the event in memory was presumably caused by the normal
processes of memory consolidation (for recent reviews, see Roediger,
Dudai, and Fitzpatrick 2007). And R.B. reports being able to retrieve

these sorts of memories at will, just as we can normally retrieve epi-
sodic memories. Furthermore, R.B. does not doubt the content of the
recollections. So it is hard to see why these states should count as
delusions in any sense at all.
Consider the other horn of the dilemma — that the apparent
memory presupposes personal identity. Does R.B.’s apparent
memory of the scene on the beach presuppose personal identity
with the person on the beach? We think the answer is ‘no’. To see
why, note that it is an open theoretical question whether, at the time
of recall, R.B. is the same person as the child on the beach. R.B. himself
seems to regard the child on the beach in much the way he regards his
mother on the beach — as a separate person. Schechtman’s own ac-
count might well take R.B. to be a different person after the accident.
She writes,
Part of what is involved in a psychological state’s being mine in the sense
which is at issue in the self-knowledge question, then, is its coherence with
my total psychology — my ability to view it as a comprehensible part of my
life, and to take it to be my own. (Schechtman 1990, p. 90, emphasis added)
What we find in R.B. is precisely that he does not take the apparent
self-referential memory to be clearly his own. He reports not being
depressed by the fact that he could not walk because ‘it was as if I was
Northoff (2000) draws on empirical findings in support of the realizability, and thus con-
ceivability, of quasi-memory. However, to address Schechtman’s dilemma, he relies primarily
on work on schizophrenia. He describes a case of a schizophrenic woman who maintained that
she was the granddaughter of the last czar. At late stages of the pathology, Northoff maintains
that the patient’s apparent memories were clearly delusional (Northoff 2000, p. 205). However,
at earlier stages, Northoff maintains, the apparent memories were not delusional because the
patient could still distinguish between ‘her own and others’ memories’ (Northoff 2000, p. 206).
We are sympathetic to Northoff ’s project here. However, the schizophrenic patient’s apparent
memories, even in early stages, are clearly delusions in some sense, and this makes the case less
than optimal as a response to Schechtman’s dilemma.

learning to walk for the first time’. This would lead some theorists to
maintain that R.B. really is not the same person as the person repre-
sented in the apparent memory. Of course, some psychological con-
tinuity theorists might want to say that R.B. really is the same person
as the person who figures in his apparent memories, even if he denies
it. Indeed, many philosophers would maintain that R.B. remains mor-
ally responsible for his past actions, even if he lacks a sense of own-
ership over them. The kinds of psychological connections that are
critical to identity on some theories — convictions, values, character
traits, knowledge of friends and relatives — show great continuity in

R.B.’s case. A psychological continuity theory that affirms the persist-
ence of R.B. might be wrong, but it cannot be accused of circularity.
R.B.’s recollections provide an existence proof for a kind of memory
that navigates between the horns of Schechtman’s dilemma. In R.B.,
the ‘mineness’ of episodic recollection is separated from the content.
Thus far, we have argued that the case of R.B. offers the quasi-
memory theorist a response to an important objection. But the case
also raises important questions about quasi-memory.8 In his definition
of quasi-memory, Parfit says that an accurate quasi-memory must be
‘causally dependent, in the right kind of way ’ on a past experience
(Parfit 1984, p. 220). What counts as a memory being caused in the
right kind of way? In section 3.1, we suggested that a special kind of
conceptual self-representation (the ‘I’-concept) is typically implicated
in episodic memory. During his non-ownership period, R.B.’s epi-
sodic recollections seem to lack this conceptual element. But even
during this time, R.B. retained other kinds of self-representations
that he connected with the ‘unowned’ memories, as reflected by his
remark, ‘Intellectually I suppose I never doubted that it was a part of
my life.’ Thus, in some sense, he was capable of representing himself as
having had the experience.
The case of R.B., in conjunction with broader research on memory,
suggests that there are critically different kinds of self-representations
associated with recollection (e.g. Klein 2010; Klein and Gangi 2010).
Typical cases of episodic recollection plausibly implicate both the dis-
tinctive ‘I’-concept as well as richer representations of the self, includ-
ing a representation of self as a constellation of traits. The notion of
quasi-memory is supposed to undergird a theory of personal identity,
but which (if any) of these self-representations is required in order for
a candidate quasi-memory to count as being ‘caused in the normal
8
We thank an anonymous referee for pressing this point.

way ’? A more specific way to put the point is, do R.B.’s recollections
during his un-owned period count as quasi-memories, given that they
do not carry the distinctive conceptual self-representation? To answer
this question, quasi-memory theorists will need to say more about
exactly which aspect of quasi-memory is supposed to constitute per-
sonal identity.
3.3 The sense of identity and evidence of personal identity

One of the major challenges facing a theory of personal identity is to
explain how there can be identity of self through apparent changes in

the self: How can I be the same person as a person who existed forty
years ago, given all of the apparent differences between the person now
and the person then? This issue has exercized theorists from the ear-
liest days of the debate.
Hume’s reaction to the problem was to maintain that it simply
makes no sense to claim that there could be a genuine identity of
person across time (Hume 1739). The fact that a person’s psychology
is constantly changing entails that there can be no strict identity across
time. Reid and Butler drew the opposite conclusion. They maintained
that since there is a strict diachronic personal identity, there must be
something that really is unchanging. Reid faced the issue quite directly
and maintained that memory provides the evidence for a strict iden-
tity of self across time. He writes:
My thoughts, and actions, and feelings change every moment — they have
no continued, but a successive existence; but that self or I to which they
belong is permanent, and has the same relation to all the succeeding
thoughts, actions, and feelings, which I call mine … But perhaps it may be
said this may all be fancy without reality. How do you know — what
evidence have you — that there is such a permanent self which has a claim
to all the thoughts, actions, and feelings which you call yours?
To this I answer, that the proper evidence I have of all this is
remembrance, I remember that twenty years ago I conversed with such a
person; I remember several things that passed in that conversation: my
memory testifies, not only that this was done, but that it was done by me
who now remember it. If it was done by me, I must have existed at that time,
and continued to exist from that time to the present. (Reid 1785, p. 318)
Reid takes his memory of past existence as the evidence that he — the
exact same self — did exist in the past. Similarly, Butler writes,
Every person is conscious, that he is now the same person or self he was, as
far back as his remembrance reaches; since, when any one reflects upon a
past action of his own, he is just as certain of the person who did that

action, namely himself, the person who now reflects on it, as he is certain
that the action was at all done. (Butler 1736, p. 295)
Does the sense of personal identity provide evidence of numerical
identity? These are large and difficult issues, but future investigations
into the matter might draw on the fact that the sense of personal
identity is really a byproduct of the episodic memory system. That
is just how episodic memory happens to work. The case of R.B. indi-
cates that this sense of numerical personal identity is subserved by a
distinctive, contingent, and poorly understood part of memory sys-
tems (see also Klein forthcoming a). Knowing the nature of the sys-

tems that deliver these judgements might be an important source of
information for evaluating the extent to which the sense of identity
can be taken to reflect the reality of identity. We leave discussion of
those issues for another occasion. For the purposes of this paper, we
are satisfied simply to have begun to articulate the systems implicated
in the sense of personal identity.9
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Memory and The Sense of Personal Identity: Stanley B. Klein

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Memory and the Sense of Personal

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past existence. Thus, Reid writes:

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2. Memory and personal identity

2.1 Contemporary psychological treatments of long-term memory

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Our view of memory is based on the widely held position that

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Factual self- Trait self-

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Not surprisingly, it is the episodic component of declarative

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dissociable from a second kind of semantic self-knowledge, knowledge

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Strikingly, when episodic memory is partially intact, people retain a

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convinces him that he existed at the time remembered’ (Reid 1785,

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2.2 The case of patient R.B.

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conclusions. In the other case (Stuss and Guzman 1988), a patient

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facts (for example, A bird is an animal ). By these criteria, R.B.’s de-

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auto-cued (Donald 1991) is one of the features that separates this

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ownership of his episodic recollections, R.B. observes:

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3.1 A sketch of a model of the sense of identity

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So, in that sense, the memories involve self-reference. However, there

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3.2 The sense of identity and quasi-memory

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I can only remember my own experiences (Butler 1736; Reid 1785).

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casts doubt on the coherence of the notion of quasi-memory. It seems

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3.3 The sense of identity and evidence of personal identity

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