Out of body Self?
An MRI scanner test showed that a brain region called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is behaving differently when people said they were drifting outside their bodies.
The TPJ shares a common trait with other brain regions that researchers believe are associated with body illusions: it helps to integrate visual, tactile and proprioceptive senses with the signals from the inner ear that give us our sense of balance and spatial orientation.
The brain’s ability to integrate various sensory stimuli appears to play a key role in locating the self in the body.
Philosopher Thomas Metzinger states that understanding how the brain performs this trick is the first step to understanding how the brain puts together our autobiographical self – the sense we have of ourselves as entities that exist from a remembered past to an imagined future.
“The test manipulates low-level dimensions of the self: self-location and self-identification.
The feeling of being in a body is perhaps the most basic facet of self-consciousness. It could be the foundation on which more complex aspects of the self are built.
