Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which encode location in space using environmental and bodily cues, also respond to illusory shifts in self-location caused by multisensory bodily stimulation, even without actual movement or visual navigation. In this fMRI study, participants experienced controlled illusory forward drifts in self-location through visuo-tactile stimulation while their visual viewpoint remained fixed. The entorhinal cortex showed grid cell-like representations that correlated with the magnitude of the perceived self-location and had the same grid orientation as during conventional virtual navigation. This indicates that the same neural representation is recruited for navigation based on environmental cues and for self-location changes driven by bodily signals.
The inferior parietal lobule, particularly the angular gyrus, may be a shared brain region for both bodily self-consciousness—the sense of being located in a body and experiencing the world from a first-person perspective—and episodic autobiographical memory, the conscious reliving of past events. An anatomical overlap in the angular gyrus was found bilaterally when comparing a prior study on spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness with a new meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies on episodic autobiographical memory. No overlap appeared with semantic autobiographical memory, which involves factual knowledge about one's past. These preliminary findings suggest the bilateral angular gyrus is a key structure for both online self-awareness and the re-experiencing of personal memories.