Brain ResearchJune 19, 2025Zoé Dary, Paul Kobliska, Jacques Léonard et al.
The vestibular system plays a crucial role in body and self perception, as evidenced by the effects of artificial vestibular stimulation in healthy individuals and the depersonalization-like symptoms observed in patients with otoneurological disorders. However, its role in the bodily self-an immediate and pre-reflective form of self-consciousness-remains relatively unexplored. This study...
The peripersonal space, that is, the limited space surrounding the body, involves multisensory coding and representation of the self in space. Previous studies have shown that peripersonal space representation and the visual perspective on the environment can be dramatically altered when neurotypical individuals self-identify with a distant avatar (i.e., in virtual reality) or during clinical...
An increasing amount of recent research has focused on the multisensory and neural bases of the bodily self. This pre-reflective form of self is considered as multifaceted, incorporating phenomenal components, such as self location, body ownership, first-person perspective, agency, and the perceptual body image. Direct electrical brain stimulation (EBS) during presurgical evaluation of epilepsy...
The bodily self is a fundamental part of human self-consciousness and relies on online multimodal information and prior beliefs about one's own body. While the contribution of the vestibular system in this process remains under-investigated, it has been theorized to be important. The present experiment investigates the influence of conflicting gravity-related visual and bodily information on...
There is increasing evidence that vestibular disorders evoke deficits reaching far beyond imbalance, oscillopsia and spatial cognition. Yet, how vestibular disorders affect own-body representations, in particular the perceived body shape and size, has been overlooked. Here, we explored vestibular contributions to own-body representations using two approaches. Study 1 measured the occurrence and...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are states during which people experience their centre of awareness as located outside of their physical body, along with the sensation of seeing the environment from an elevated viewpoint. OBE is encountered in epilepsy, migraine and depersonalization, and it is not an uncommon experience in the general population. Current neuroscientific models of bodily...
PLoS OneJanuary 20, 2017Diane Deroualle, Michel Toupet, Christian Van Nechel et al.
Recent findings suggest that vestibular information plays a significant role in anchoring the self to the body. Out-of-body experiences of neurological origin are frequently associated with vestibular sensations, and galvanic vestibular stimulation in healthy participants anchors the self to the body. Here, we provide the first objective measures of anchoring the self to the body in chronic...
The consequences of vestibular disorders on balance, oculomotor control, and self-motion perception have been extensively described in humans and animals. More recently, vestibular disorders have been related to cognitive deficits in spatial navigation and memory tasks. Less frequently, abnormal bodily perceptions have been described in patients with vestibular disorders. Altered forms of...
Partial and full own-body illusions of neurological origin have been claimed crucial to understand the contribution of bodily experience and perception to self-consciousness. Whereas partial body illusions are relatively common and well defined, much less is known about full own-body illusions, and even less is known about these illusions in children. Here we describe a 10-year-old patient with...
We describe the case of a 33-year-old man with complex partial seizures characterized by the feeling of being projected outside his body, including dissociation of "mind and self from body" (disembodiment), followed by vestibular vertigo due to right frontal lobe epilepsy caused by an oligodendroglioma. We distinguish the patient's ictal symptoms with respect to autoscopic phenomena...
The Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS) developed by Sierra and Berrios in 2000 allows to draw a comprehensive overview of the clinical symptoms pertaining to depersonalization-derealization disorders and to measure the frequency and duration of these symptoms. The CDS was validated in patients suffering from depersonalization-derealization disorders. The CDS shows high internal consistency...