Our new PNAS study shows that body ownership information has privileged access to consciousness. Using psychophysical methods and computational modeling, we found that conscious awareness closely tracks body ownership discrimination across varying multisensory integration levels. These findings support William James's view: the bodily self is indeed a constant presence grounding all experience.
Click here to see the artcile
A group of students recently explored The Cell’s new educational programme, with KI researcher Henrik Ehrsson’s work on body perception featured throughout their visit. In the exhibition Me, You & We – Exploring Human Behaviour, the class encountered interactive pieces that introduce how we experience ourselves. The visit continued in The Cell’s lab, where the students watched a film of Ehrsson explaining the neuroscience of the bodily self and the principles behind the well-known rubber hand illusion. Guided by their teacher, they tested the illusion themselves—experiencing how readily the brain can accept an artificial hand as its own.
Click here to read more on Karolinska Institutet’s website, and here to explore The Cell’s museum page.
Four members of the lab — Sara Coppi, Heather Iriye, Renzo Lanfranco, and Mariano D'Angelo — participated in the ICON 2025 symposium “Recent Developments in Bodily Self-awareness Research” in Porto, which was organized by Sara Coppi.
In a new study led by Pawel Tacikowski, it is demonstrated that reducing body ownership through a perceptual illusion leads to fragmentation in self-concept. This connection between the bodily and conceptual self may shed light on dissociative experiences and mental health.
Click here to read.
A new study published in iScience, led by Sara Coppi, demonstrates that during the classic rubber hand illusion, pain is mislocalized toward the rubber hand. Just as touch and proprioception are transferred to the rubber hand, this “nociceptive drift” reveals that pain—like other senses—is integrated into the bodily self.
Click here to read.
In a new study published in Scientific Reports, Ryu Ohata and Henrik Ehrsson show that illusory body ownership amplifies subjective fear in response to nearby fear-relevant animals (spiders) and increases fear of safety-margin violations. These findings offer new insights into the interaction between body ownership and emotional responses to spatially proximal threat events.
Click here to read.
In a preprint, we demonstrate that alpha oscillation frequency plays a crucial role in integrating self-related sensory information into body ownership perception, as well as in distinguishing this bodily self from external sensory events.
Click here to read.