Evaluating Bodily Self-Consciousness and the Brain Using Multisensory Perturbation and fMRI

Abstract

In this article, we consider the usefulness of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and perturbation in evaluating causal relationships between bodily self-consciousness and the brain. We argue that fMRI research is not always restricted to correlational statements when it is combined with perturbation techniques and can sometimes permit some degree of causal inferencing, such as when bodily illusions are examined with fMRI. In these instances, one is changing a participant’s conscious bodily self by experimentally perturbing mechanisms that are involved in multisensory integration

Visual hallucinations associated with multimodal hallucinations, suicide attempts and morbidity of illness in psychotic disorders

“…These could indicate that hallucinations, regardless of type, may share a centralized highlevel psychopathologic mechanism in psychotic disorders. This possibility is intriguing as the integration of multisensory processing is important for providing one's sense of self (Chouinard et al, 2017). This is evident in body transfer illusions, such as the rubber hand illusion (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998), in which a person's awareness of self is altered by providing false information from one sense while maintaining accurate information from a different sense, altering one's perceived reality of where their body or parts of their body are located (Chouinard et al 2017).…”