Cerebral cortex communications
2022
Maëva Moyne, Guillaume Legendre, Luc Arnal et al.
The waking brain efficiently detects emotional signals to promote survival. However, emotion detection during sleep is poorly understood and may be influenced by individual sleep characteristics or neural reactivity. Notably, dream recall frequency has been associated with stimulus reactivity during sleep, with enhanced stimulus-driven responses in high vs. low recallers. Using...
Annals of Neurology
December 20, 2021
Umberto Nencha, Laurent Spinelli, Serge Vulliemoz et al.
For the first time, an ecstatic aura has been evoked through the electrical stimulation of the dorsal anterior insula during presurgical invasive intracerebral monitoring in a patient who did not suffer from an ecstatic form of epilepsy. This case provides more evidence that the anterior insula is the major generator of such a mystical-type experience even in individuals with no underlying...
Nature Communications
May 31, 2021
M. Pereira, P. Mégevand, Mi Xue Tan et al.
A fundamental scientific question concerns the neural basis of perceptual consciousness and perceptual monitoring resulting from the processing of sensory events. Although recent studies identified neurons reflecting stimulus visibility, their functional role remains unknown. Here, we show that perceptual consciousness and monitoring involve evidence accumulation. We recorded single-neuron...
Cerebral Cortex
July 1, 2018
Hyeong-Dong Park, Fosco Bernasconi, Roy Salomon et al.
Recent research has shown that heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), brain activity in response to heartbeats, are a useful neural measure for investigating the functional role of brain-body interactions in cognitive processes including self-consciousness. In 2 experiments, using intracranial electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated (1) the neural sources of HEPs, (2) the underlying...
Epilepsy & Behavior
March 1, 2011
Lukas Heydrich, Christophe Lopez, Margitta Seeck et al.
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...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 2010
Lukas Heydrich, Sebastian Dieguez, Thomas Grunwald et al.
Neurological disorders of body representation have for a long time suggested the importance of multisensory processing of bodily signals for self-consciousness. One such group of disorders--illusory own body perceptions affecting the entire body--has been proposed to be especially relevant in this respect, based on neurological data as well as philosophical considerations. This has recently...
Epilepsy & Behavior
February 1, 2010
Christophe Lopez, Lukas Heydrich, Margitta Seeck et al.
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...
Journal of Neuroscience
January 19, 2005
Olaf Blanke, Christine Mohr, Christoph M. Michel et al.
573 citations
The spatial unity of self and body is challenged by various philosophical considerations and several phenomena, perhaps most notoriously the "out-of-body experience" (OBE) during which one's visual perspective and one's self are experienced to have departed from their habitual position within one's body. Although researchers started examining isolated aspects of the self, the neurocognitive...
Brain
January 15, 2004
Olaf Blanke, Théodor Landis, Laurent Spinelli et al.
746 citations
During an out-of-body experience (OBE), the experient seems to be awake and to see his body and the world from a location outside the physical body. A closely related experience is autoscopy (AS), which is characterized by the experience of seeing one's body in extrapersonal space. Yet, despite great public interest and many case studies, systematic neurological studies of OBE and AS are...
Nature
September 1, 2002
Olaf Blanke, Stéphanie Ortigue, Théodor Landis et al.
'Out-of-body' experiences (OBEs) are curious, usually brief sensations in which a person's consciousness seems to become detached from the body and take up a remote viewing position. Here we describe the repeated induction of this experience by focal electrical stimulation of the brain's right angular gyrus in a patient who was undergoing evaluation for epilepsy treatment. Stimulation at this...