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...
medRxiv
July 10, 2026
Lada Kohoutová, Jevita Potheegadoo, Léa F Duong Phan Thanh et al.
Background: Hallucinations, ranging from minor (MH) to structured, are a common non-motor symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD). Structured hallucinations have been associated with altered functional connectivity (FC) between dorsal/ventral attention (DAN, VAN) and default mode (DMN) networks. As structured hallucinations are linked to rapid cognitive decline and MH are often viewed as their...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
July 3, 2026
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Oussama Abdoun et al.
Nonduality is a foundational but conceptually elusive notion across several contemplative traditions. Nondual traditions challenge the assumption that a subject-object structure characteristic of ordinary experience is an intrinsic feature of conscious awareness. However, little remains known about the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with such experiential state. Here, we investigated how...
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
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...
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...
medRxiv
June 25, 2025
Devon Stoliker, Fosco Bernasconi, Olaf Blanke et al.
1 citation
preprint
Abstract Serotonergic psychedelics alter self-boundaries and can induce out-of-body experiences (OBEs)—the sense of being located outside one’s physical body. While OBEs also occur in clinical conditions and can be experimentally induced, their neural basis under psychedelics remains underexplored. In an open-label, baseline-controlled MRI study of 62 healthy adults administered psilocybin, we...
Elife
May 22, 2025
Michael Pereira, Nathan Faivre, Fosco Bernasconi et al.
3 citations
Subcortical brain structures such as the subthalamic nucleus or the thalamus are involved in regulating motor and cognitive behavior. However, their contribution to perceptual consciousness remains unclear, due to the inherent difficulties of recording subcortical neuronal activity in humans. Here, we asked neurological patients undergoing surgery for deep brain stimulation to detect weak...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
August 1, 2024
Teresa Campillo-Ferrer, Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez, Ema Demšar et al.
14 citations
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective experience of being located outside the physical body. Little is known about the neurophysiology of spontaneous OBEs, which are often reported by healthy individuals as occurring during states of reduced vigilance, particularly in proximity to or during sleep (sleep-related OBEs). In this paper, we review the current state of...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
March 19, 2024
Hyuk-June Moon, Louis Albert, Emanuela De Falco et al.
9 citations
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual's location in space, integrating both environmental and multisensory bodily cues. Notably, body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self. While studies have demonstrated that continuous application of visuo-tactile bodily stimuli can induce perceptual shifts in self-location, it remains unexplored whether these...
Psychological Medicine
February 1, 2024
Pavo Orepic, Fosco Bernasconi, Melissa Faggella et al.
9 citations
Inducing hallucinations under controlled experimental conditions in non-hallucinating individuals represents a novel research avenue oriented toward understanding complex hallucinatory phenomena, avoiding confounds observed in patients. Auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVH) are one of the most common and distressing psychotic symptoms, whose etiology remains largely unknown. Two prominent...
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...
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...
NeuroImage. Clinical
2021
Eva Blondiaux, Lukas Heydrich, Olaf Blanke
33 citations
Autoscopic phenomena (AP) are illusory own body reduplications characterized by the visual perception of a second own body in extrapersonal space, and include three main forms: autoscopic hallucination (AH), heautoscopy (HAS) and out-of-body-experience (OBE). Past research showed that lesions were heterogeneously distributed and affected many different brain regions within and across patients,...
Psychophysiology
March 12, 2020
Sophie Betka, Elisa Canzoneri, D. 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...
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
November 1, 2019
Jean-Paul Noel, Nathan Faivre, Elisa Magosso et al.
6 citations
Neural evidence suggests that mechanisms associated with conscious access (i.e., the ability to report on a conscious state) are "all-or-none". Upon crossing some threshold, neural signals are globally broadcast throughout the brain and allow conscious reports. However, whether subjective experience (phenomenal consciousness) is categorical (i.e., transitioning abruptly from unconscious to...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
May 1, 2019
Hyeong-Dong Park, Olaf Blanke
Although recent studies on self-consciousness emphasized the importance of bodily processing and multisensory integration, such research has focused solely on bodily signals originating from the outside of the body (i.e., exteroceptive bodily signals) or internal bodily signals from visceral organs (i.e., interoceptive bodily signals) and how each system contributes to self-consciousness,...
NeuroImage. Clinical
2019
Lampros Perogamvros, Hyeong-Dong Park, Laurence Bayer et al.
Nightmares are characterized by the experience of strong negative emotions occurring mainly during REM sleep. Some people suffer from nightmare disorder, which is defined by the repeated occurrence of nightmares and by significant distress in wakefulness. Yet, whether frequent nightmares relate to a general increase in emotional reactivity or arousal during sleep remains unclear. To address...
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
2018
Lucie Bréchet, Petr Grivaz, Baptiste Gauthier et al.
Parietal cortex and adjacent parts of the temporal cortex have recently been associated with bodily self-consciousness (BSC). Similarly, growing evidence suggests that the lateral parietal cortex is crucial for the subjective aspects of episodic autobiographical memory (EAM), which is based on the conscious experience of reliving past events. However, the neuroanatomical relationship between...
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...
European journal of pain (London, England)
September 2011
Alexander Hänsel, Bigna Lenggenhager, Roland Von Känel et al.
Pain and the conscious mind (or the self) are experienced in our body. Both are intimately linked to the subjective quality of conscious experience. Here, we used virtual reality technology and visuo-tactile conflicts in healthy subjects to test whether experimentally induced changes of bodily self-consciousness (self-location; self-identification) lead to changes in pain perception. We found...
Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
August 1, 2011
Olaf Blanke, Estelle Paluelle, Christian Pfeiffer
We review recent research about human subjectivity and self-consciousness that has focused on cognitive psychology and neuroimaging of bodily self-consciousness. Multidisciplinary research on the fields of neurology, cognitive neuroscience and virtual reality opens new avenues to investigate brain mechanisms underlying a fundamental sense of the bodily self. Clinical evidence for the...
Neuron
April 28, 2011
Silvio Ionta, Lukas Heydrich, Bigna Lenggenhager et al.
Self-consciousness has mostly been approached by philosophical enquiry and not by empirical neuroscientific study, leading to an overabundance of diverging theories and an absence of data-driven theories. Using robotic technology, we achieved specific bodily conflicts and induced predictable changes in a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness by altering where healthy subjects experienced...
Epilepsy & behavior : E&B
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
2011
Silvio Ionta, Roger Gassert, Olaf Blanke
88 citations
Scientific investigations on the nature of the self have so far focused on high-level mechanisms. Recent evidence, however, suggests that low-level bottom-up mechanisms of multi-sensory integration play a fundamental role in encoding specific components of bodily self-consciousness, such as self-location and first-person perspective (Blanke and Metzinger, 2009). Self-location and first-person...
Neuropsychologia
May 2010
O A Kannape, L Schwabe, T Tadi et al.
An important principle of human ethics is that individuals are not responsible for actions performed when unconscious. Recent research found that the generation of an action and the building of a conscious experience of that action (agency) are distinct processes and crucial mechanisms for self-consciousness. Yet, previous agency studies have focussed on actions of a finger or hand. Here, we...