Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The capacity to integrate information across multiple sensory channels is fundamental to building a cohesive representation of the environment and of our body, thereby scaffolding both our subjective experience of being present, in the here and now, and our successful navigation in a complex physical and social world. Self-awareness, the fundamental first-personal feeling that my experiences are bound to a “real” me – as a unitary entity, the “self” – is profoundly disrupted in Depersonalisation (DP). People experiencing DP report feelings of being a detached and disembodied observer of their mental and bodily processes or even of reality itself (‘derealisation’), and consequently they feel as if they are going through daily life like a zombie, robot or machine and report pervasive feelings of “unreality”. This profound disruption of bodily self-awareness affects not only a) the low-level sensory and bodily aspects of the self (detachment from one’s body or body parts), but also b) the experiential aspects (detachment from one’s subjective feelings and emotions); and c) the high-level, cognitive and narrative aspects (disconnection from one’s personal stories, memories, thoughts and future plans, often described by DP sufferers as a “loss of the narrative flow” of one’s life).

In this paper we examine the relationship between experiences of Depersonalisation and the phenomena of visual remapping of touch (VRT). VRT is an effect in which seeing another face being touch leads to higher accuracy in the perception of tactile stimuli on one’s own face. Normally the VRT effect shows a strong self-bias with maximal effect occurring when participants are seeing an image of their own face being touched. We recruited non-clinical participants with either a high or low incidents of depersonalisation experiences and compared the strength of the VRT effect when they observed either their own face or the face of another person. We found that the amount of self-bias in VRT (the strength of VRT for self compared to other) could be predicted by participants’ frequency of anomalous body experiences (a sub set of DP experiences) with greater frequency of experiences leading to less self bias and greater other bias. In addition we found that having higher DP experiences led to greater accuracy in tactile perception overall.

Building upon first-hand subjective reports from one of us (JC), phenomenological approaches and our recent empirical findings, we contrast the experiences of ‘losing’ the sense of self and the first-personal sense of ‘mineness’ in DP versus non-pathological cases such as deep meditative states. We argue that examining the relationship between altered self-experiences and feelings of unreality in DP might help us to better understand what counts as fundamental in constituting minimal self-experiences in typical individuals. We conclude that a comparison between these types of selfless experiences (enjoyable in the latter case, but not in the former) might ultimately reveal not only what makes our conscious self-experiences feel real, but most importantly what is fundamental in constituting minimal selfhood.