Recent philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific theories suggest that bodily experience is crucial for the phenomenology of selfhood (i.e. the experience of 'being someone'). In this thesis I have shown that two essential aspects of bodily self-consciousness that have been difficult to study in the past – self-location ('where am I localized?') and self-identification ('is this my body?') – can be manipulated experimentally with multisensory visual-tactile conflicts and virtual reality technology. A major part of this thesis was devoted to investigate how such manipulations are reflected in the oscillatory cortical resting state known as the mu rhythm. Through the mu rhythm I have also established a link between the mirror neuron system, self-other discriminations and cerebral speech representations of actions.
Olaf Blanke, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Fumiaki Iwane
Olaf Blanke, Fosco Bernasconi, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Michael Eric Anthony Pereira