Autoscopic phenomena: Clinical and experimental perspectives

Abstract

The study of abnormal self-processing in autoscopic phenomena of neurological origin has allowed fundamental insights into the scientific study of bodily self-consciousness. In the last two decades, autoscopic phenomena have received greater attention and have been investigated systematically within the framework of cognitive neurology and neuroscience. From these clinical reports, multisensory integration processes and sensorimotor mechanisms emerged as fundamental principles for the sense of self, which have been studied further experimentally in behavioral studies trying to induce analogous (but transient) experiences in healthy subjects. This has also led to the investigation of their neural basis using neuroimaging techniques. We will first review neurological data about autoscopic phenomena characterized by the visual illusory reduplication of the patient's own body and highlight recent literature pointing toward a decomposition of bodily self-consciousness in distinct major aspects. Then the principal findings of related studies manipulating multisensory information to affect self-processing in healthy people will be described and summarized.