Body ownership and embodiment: vestibular and multisensory mechanisms.
Neurophysiologie clinique = Clinical neurophysiology June 1, 2008 C Lopez, P Halje, O Blanke
Body ownership and embodiment are fundamental to self-consciousness. This review examines neurological conditions—autoscopic phenomena (out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, autoscopic hallucination, feeling-of-a-presence) and the room tilt illusion—where these mechanisms are differentially affected. These conditions arise from failures to integrate body-related information (vestibular, proprioceptive, tactile cues) and a mismatch between vestibular and visual references. Pathological activity at the temporoparietal junction and other vestibular-related areas underlies altered body ownership and embodiment. In healthy subjects, weightlessness and caloric or galvanic vestibular stimulation can disrupt self-processing by interfering with vestibular cortex, leading to disintegration of bodily information. The authors propose that different vestibular cortical areas contribute differentially to these altered states.