Out-of-body-induced hippocampal amnesia.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America March 25, 2014 Loretxu Bergouignan, Lars Nyberg, H Henrik Ehrsson
Episodic memory—the ability to recall personal experiences—depends on experiencing the world from the vantage point of one's own body. When an out-of-body illusion displaced participants' sense of bodily self away from their real body during a social interaction, their later recall of those events was worse compared to when the bodily self remained aligned with the real body. Brain imaging linked this memory impairment to altered activity in the posterior hippocampus. The findings indicate that a first-person, body-centered perspective is necessary for efficient hippocampus-based encoding of real-life events, with implications for understanding memory deficits in psychiatric disorders involving dissociation.