Is There a “Neuropsychology of Corporeal Awareness”?

Abstract

This chapter explored how bodily perception, ownership, and selfhood are constructed in the brain—and how these constructions can break down or distort in fascinating and troubling ways. Beginning with the tactile senses and the integration of somatosensory signals, the text highlighted the complexity of feeling the body and the conceptual hierarchies from basic touch to somatognosia. We then examined proprioception, affective touch, and interoception, emphasizing their interplay in forming the bodily self. A wide array of illusions and experimental manipulations in healthy individuals was presented to understand normal and altered body perception. A large portion of the chapter focused on phantom phenomena, including phantom limbs in amputees, in paraplegics, and even in people born without limbs— demonstrating that bodily awareness can feel vividly real even when it is based on no actual physical substrate. This underscores the brain’s ability to create convincing bodily illusions in the absence of limbs. Central disturbances of corporeal awareness, including asomatognosia, anosognosia, somatoparaphrenia, and misoplegia, were discussed alongside clinical vignettes and neuroanatomical data. The chapter closed with a review of autoscopic phenomena, such as heautoscopy and out-of-body experiences, and their importance for understanding the virtual nature of the bodily self. Finally, a short section addressed Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) as a potential “mirror condition” of congenital phantoms—an instance of incarnation without animation. While recent inclusion in ICD-11 provides diagnostic recognition, the chapter cautions against premature pathologization and notes possible parallels to historical shifts in psychiatric classification. Burning Questions include… * What is the status of single case reports in neuropsychology? * Why does sensory attenuation make self-tickling ineffective but spare the orgasmic potential of self-stimulation? * Do animals have phantom limbs? * Can patients with anosognosia lie?