Mindfulness
August 5, 2026
Hang Yang, Bruno Herbelin, Elena Pecchini et al.
Abstract Objectives Regular self-compassion practice is associated with improved mental health by fostering kindness toward one’s suffering and relying on self-related processes like perspective-taking. It is not known whether recently described self-related processes that rely on multisensory bodily signals, induced by exposing participants to an avatar and multisensory stimulation, also...
May 20, 2026
Chuong Ngo, Lionel A Newman, Monika Stasytyte et al.
preprint
Advanced meditative absorption states remain difficult to study scientifically because they are rare, challenging to elicit under controlled conditions, and depend strongly on first-person phenomenology. This study presents a neurophenomenological case report of an advanced Yogic meditator with more than 20 years of sustained practice who reliably entered a deeply absorbed state referred to by...
Cortex
October 2025
Nathalie H Meyer, Mariana Babo-Rebelo, Jevita Potheegadoo et al.
Episodic autobiographical memory (EAM) is a building block of self-consciousness, involving recollection and subjective re-experiencing of personal past experiences. Any life episode is originally encoded by a subject within a body. This raises the possibility that memory encoding is shaped by bodily self-consciousness (BSC), a basic form of self-consciousness arising from the multisensory and...
Brain and Spine
August 1, 2025
Abdullah Al Awadhi, Daniel Kiss-Bodolay, S. Grannò et al.
Introduction The preservation of the human self—a fundamental yet underexplored aspect of neurosurgical practice—has gained increasing attention in recent years. Research question How can neural correlates of self-consciousness be identified, monitored, and protected during brain tumor surgery, and how might this reshape the concept of “onco-functional balance”? Material and methods This review...
Neuroimage
July 1, 2025
Hang Yang, Bruno Herbelin, Chuong Ngo et al.
6 citations
Experienced meditation practitioners often report altered states of their sense of self, including decentering and distancing the self from the body and one's current concerns. Altered states of the sense of self, such as disembodiment and distancing of the self from the body, have also been induced experimentally using virtual reality (VR) and linked neurally to heartbeat-evoked potentials...
iScience
January 19, 2024
Hsin-Ping Wu, Estelle Nakul, Sophie Betka et al.
9 citations
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective feeling of being located outside one's physical body and perceiving one's own body from an elevated perspective looking downwards. OBEs have been correlated with abnormal integration of bodily signals, including visual and vestibular information. In two studies, we used mixed reality combined with a motion platform to manipulate...
Frontiers in Psychology
January 18, 2021
Lukas Heydrich, Francesco Walker, Larissa Blättler et al.
Adopting the perspective of another person is an important aspect of social cognition and has been shown to depend on multisensory signals from one's own body. Recent work suggests that interoceptive signals not only contribute to own-body perception and self-consciousness, but also to empathy. Here we investigated if social cognition - in particular adopting the perspective of another person -...
Neuroimage
September 12, 2020
Baptiste Gauthier, Lucie Bréchet, Florian Lance et al.
Episodic memory (EM) is classically conceived as a memory for events, localized in space and time, and characterized by autonoetic consciousness (ANC) allowing to mentally travel back in time and subjectively relive an event. Building on recent evidence that the first-person visual co-perception of one's own body during encoding impacts EM, we used a scene recognition task in immersive virtual...
Psychophysiology
March 12, 2020
Sophie Betka, Elisa Canzoneri, Dan Adler et al.
Abstract Previous studies investigated bodily self‐consciousness (BSC) by experimentally exposing subjects to multisensory conflicts (i.e., visuo‐tactile, audio‐tactile, visuo‐cardiac) in virtual reality (VR) that involve the participant's torso in a paradigm known as the full‐body illusion (FBI). Using a modified FBI paradigm, we found that synchrony of visuo‐respiratory stimulation (i.e., a...
Scientific Reports
June 18, 2018
Lukas Heydrich, Jane Elizabeth Aspell, Guillaume Marillier et al.
Prominent theories highlight the importance of bodily perception for self-consciousness, but it is currently not known whether this is based on interoceptive or exteroceptive signals or on integrated signals from these anatomically distinct systems, nor where in the brain such integration might occur. To investigate this, we measured brain activity during the recently described 'cardio-visual...
Cortex
April 2018
Roy Salomon, Roberta Ronchi, Jonathan Dönz et al.
Interoceptive signals, such as the heartbeat, are processed in a network of brain regions including the insular cortex. Recent studies have shown that such signals modulate perceptual and cognitive processing, and that they impact visual awareness. For example, visual stimuli presented synchronously to the heartbeat take longer to enter visual awareness than the same stimuli presented...
PLoS One
2018
Alessandro Nesti, Giulio Rognini, Bruno Herbelin et al.
Current neuroscientific models of bodily self-consciousness (BSC) argue that inaccurate integration of sensory signals leads to altered states of BSC. Indeed, using virtual reality technology, observers viewing a fake or virtual body while being exposed to tactile stimulation of the real body, can experience illusory ownership over-and mislocalization towards-the virtual body (Full-Body...
Scientific Reports
August 24, 2017
Étienne Allard, Elisa Canzoneri, Dan Adler et al.
55 citations
Dyspnoea, a subjective experience of breathing discomfort, is a most distressing symptom. It implicates complex cortical networks that partially overlap with those underlying bodily self-consciousness, the experience that the body is one's own within a given location (self-identification and self-location, respectively). Breathing as an interoceptive signal contributes to bodily...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
May 9, 2016
C. Pfeiffer, Petr Grivaz, Bruno Herbelin et al.
Abstract A fundamental component of conscious experience involves a first-person perspective (1PP), characterized by the experience of being a subject and of being directed at the world. Extending earlier work on multisensory perceptual mechanisms of 1PP, we here asked whether the experienced direction of the 1PP (i.e. the spatial direction of subjective experience of the world) depends on...
2016
Bruno Herbelin, R. Salomon, Andrea Serino et al.
Recent neuroscience research emphasizes the embodied origins of the experience of the self. This chapter shows that further advances in the understanding of the phenomenon of VR-induced presence might be achieved in connection with advances in the understanding of the brain mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness. By reviewing the neural mechanisms that make the virtual reality experience...
Frontiers in Psychology
December 18, 2013
Lukas Heydrich, Trevor J Dodds, Jane E. Aspell et al.
In neurology and psychiatry the detailed study of illusory own body perceptions has suggested close links between bodily processing and self-consciousness. One such illusory own body perception is heautoscopy where patients have the sensation of being reduplicated and to exist at two or even more locations. In previous experiments, using a video head-mounted display, self-location and...