Becoming aware of our own body: unravelling the computational and neural mechanisms of bodily self-awareness

How does our sense of self arise in our subjective experience, and why does it feel so effortless to distinguish between the information that comes from the outside world and the information that comes from within our body? At the heart of this question, there is the sense of body ownership, i.e., the feeling that our body belongs to us.

Prior work has shown that body ownership arises from the integration of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive signals that the brain attributes to a common origin. However, how does body ownership arise in our conscious awareness? How do the brain and its computations promote this multisensory information into our body ownership experience?

In this project, we will answer these questions using a novel psychophysical approach, electroencephalography, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and computational modelling; we will unveil how the brain processes body ownership information and how it promotes it to awareness to create our experience of a bodily self.

By teasing apart the computational and neural processes of body ownership and awareness, we will show how the brain accumulates multisensory evidence and how this information travels across the brain to be promoted into awareness.

Our results will represent a major advance in the understanding of the computational and neural mechanisms responsible for processing multisensory information related to body ownership and self-awareness, as well as maintaining a stable experience of bodily self.