Neurological Basis of Bodily Self-Consciousness and Related Psychopathologies

Bodily self-consciousness—the awareness of one's own body—depends on how the brain dynamically processes and integrates multisensory signals such as vestibular and somatosensory information. Recent research shows that the perception of body parts and the whole body can shift based on whether signals from different senses are congruent. This article reviews experimental methods used to study bodily self-consciousness, discusses the underlying sensory processes, and identifies limitations in prior studies.

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Abstract

The change in the body awareness of people depending on the dynamic processing of the multisensory signals from the body has been revealed the bodily self-consciousness approach. Recent studies have proposed that the processing and integration of multisensory signals (i.e. vestibular, somatosensory) are fundamental requirement for bodily self-consciousness. Perception of body-parts and global aspect of whole body can dynamically change depending on the congruency between signals from multiple modalities (i.e. vestibular, somatosensory). The basic assumption of the studies investigating bodily self-consciousness is that the bodily experiences are related with the multisensory signal processing. The aim of the present article is to review how the bodily self-consciousness is studied experimentally and discuss the underlying sensory processes. In addition to that, we discussed the limitations of the previous experimental studies.