Neuropsychology And Neurophysiology Of Self Consciousness 2007英文电子书.pdf

Neuropsychology and neurophysiology of self-consciousness Multisensory and vestibular mechanisms Christophe Lopez Olaf Blanke Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland Introduction How do we become self-conscious or conscious of ourselves as the subject of experience? What are the brain structures involved in generating the experience of the conscious self? And are the underlying neurobiological processes different from those when we are conscious of other objects such as the oak tree standing in the garden? Despite recent neuroscientific efforts to study the neurobiological mechanisms of consciousness (such as the conscious perception of an oak tree; i.e. Laureys, 2005), self-consciousness has received much less attention and is deemed by many scientists as not yet approachable by empirical neuroscientific experimentation. Influential scholars such as William James (1890), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), and James Gibson (1950) as well as recent philosophers (Bermudez et al., 1995; Metzinger, 1993, 2003, 2005; Gallagher, 2000, 2005; Legrand, 2007) have proposed that the investigation of the psychological, physiological and neural mechanisms involved in bodily perception and bodily experience may be crucial for the understanding of self-consciousness. The present manuscript discusses several recent findings that seem to provide empirical evidence for the claim that crucial aspects of self-consciousness are linked to the bodily experiences of body ownership and self-location. Body ownership is defined by the immediate and continuous experience that our body and its parts belong to us, whereas self-location has been