The felt-presence experience: from cognition to the clinic.

Felt presence is the basic feeling that someone else is nearby without clear sensory evidence, ranging from benevolent to distressing and appearing in neurological conditions, psychosis, sleep paralysis, endurance sports, and spiritualist communities. This review summarizes philosophical, phenomenological, clinical, and non-clinical correlates, along with psychometric, cognitive, and neurophysiological approaches. It presents current mechanistic explanations, proposes a unifying cognitive framework, and identifies outstanding questions. Felt presence offers a way to understand the cognitive neuroscience of own-body awareness and social agency detection as an intuitive but poorly understood experience in both health and disorder.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The felt presence experience is the basic feeling that someone else is present in the immediate environment, without clear sensory evidence. Ranging from benevolent to distressing, personified to ambiguous, felt presence has been observed in neurological case studies and within psychosis and paranoia, associated with sleep paralysis and anxiety, and recorded within endurance sports and spiritualist communities. In this Review, we summarise the philosophical, phenomenological, clinical, and non-clinical correlates of felt presence, as well as current approaches that use psychometric, cognitive, and neurophysiological methods. We present current mechanistic explanations for felt presence, suggest a unifying cognitive framework for the phenomenon, and discuss outstanding questions for the field. Felt presence offers a sublime opportunity to understand the cognitive neuroscience of own-body awareness and social agency detection, as an intuitive, but poorly understood, experience in health and disorder.