Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness

TLDR

Humans normally localize the conscious self within bodily borders, but this spatial unity can break down in conditions such as out‑of‑body experiences, causing a disturbance of bodily self‑consciousness. The study aimed to disrupt the spatial unity between self and body by employing conflicting visual‑somatosensory input in virtual reality. The experiment used this conflicting multisensory input in a virtual reality setting to perturb the perceived spatial relationship between self and body. During multisensory conflict participants perceived a virtual body as their own and mislocalized themselves beyond their bodily borders, showing that spatial unity and bodily self‑consciousness can be experimentally studied and depend on multisensory and cognitive processing.

Abstract

Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders. This spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body experiences, leading to a striking disturbance of bodily self-consciousness. On the basis of these clinical data, we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. We found that during multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. Our results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.