What Happens in Your Brain During Mental Dissociation? A Quest Towards Neural Markers of a Unified Sense of Self

Abstract

Whether you feel dissociated from the rest of the world or from yourself, you feel some kind of mental dissociations. Each form of mental dissociations varies in symptomatology and associated deficits. Nevertheless, psychiatrists, neurologists, and neuroscientists have discussed, for decades, the possibility of a holistic neural mechanism underlying the core feature of mental dissociations, i.e., disruption of a unified sense of self and a failure to accurately integrate multisensory information between self and social environment. Recently, functional and electrical neuroimaging studies shed light on this question by pointing to a correlation between the core symptomatology of mental dissociations and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)—an area involved in sense of self, agency, perspective taking, and multimodal integration of somatosensory information. Interestingly, results also suggest that each specific aspect of each form of mental dissociation is associated with brain areas that are specific to that domain.