Our aim is to unravel the perceptual and neural mechanisms that give rise to bodily self-awareness. We focus on how the brain constructs, maintains, and updates a flexible representation of the body through the integration of visual, tactile, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals with prior bodily experience. A central question concerns how a coherent sense of owning a single, unified body emerges from the perception of individual body parts, and how bodily perception and self-location interact to produce the experience of being situated within the body in space. Another line of research examines the interplay between voluntary movement and bodily self-perception—for example, how movement-related sensory predictions shape body perception and how the sense of agency relates to the sense of body ownership.
Beyond these core questions, we also investigate how bodily self-representation influences higher cognitive processes such as emotion, memory, self-concept, and identity, and how disturbances in these mechanisms may contribute to neuropsychiatric symptoms. In parallel, our findings inform translational applications, including the development of prosthetic limbs and virtual body interfaces designed to evoke more natural sensations of embodiment.
We study bodily self-perception through behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational experiments with human participants. Because the physical body cannot easily be manipulated, investigating the perception of one’s own body presents a unique experimental challenge. To overcome this, we use controlled bodily illusions that allow us to alter specific aspects of bodily perception in a systematic and measurable way. These include well-known paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion, as well as several discoveries from our laboratory, including the out-of-body illusion, the three-arm illusion, the body-swap illusion, the invisible hand illusion, and the Barbie Doll illusion.
By integrating these illusion-based paradigms with robotically controlled sensory stimulation and psychophysical modeling, we can precisely quantify changes in perceived body ownership or other high-level aspects of bodily perception at the level of individual participants. This approach allows us to isolate the perceptual and learning processes that shape bodily self-awareness and to build computational models of how the brain infers and updates the bodily self. The psychophysical approach has also enabled us to investigate the link between objective perception and subjective experience in body ownership and explore how body ownership information gains access to conscious perceptual awareness.
Combining these methods with functional neuroimaging and electrophysiological recordings enables us to identify the underlying neural mechanisms. Our research has revealed how multisensory integration in fronto-parietal and subcortical networks gives rise to bodily ownership perception, and how these neural computations follow probabilistic principles of perceptual inference. Electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography experiments have further shown how brain oscillations from these regions in specific frequency ranges (alpha and beta) constrain the temporal integration of sensory signals for body ownership, and revealed the temporal dynamics of body ownership-related brain activity. Our imaging experiments have also demonstrated that body ownership and self-location are supported by two interacting neural systems involving lateral fronto-parietal and medial parieto-retrosplenial circuits.
Finally, we investigate how the perception of one’s own body influences higher cognitive functions, such as memory, emotion, and social cognition. For example, we study how disturbances in the coherence of the bodily self representation affect episodic memory formation and how experiencing another person’s body as one’s own can transiently reshape self-concept and identity.
Our laboratory at Biomedicum, Karolinska Institutet, combines psychophysics, computational modeling, bodily illusion paradigms, and advanced neuroimaging and brain stimulation. We develop high-precision, robotically controlled setups for multisensory stimulation and bodily perception experiments, integrated with EEG, TMS, and physiological recordings. With local access to state-of-the-art high- and ultra-high-field MRI and MEG, we bridge innovative behavioral experimentation with high-resolution brain imaging to uncover the neural mechanisms of bodily self-awareness.
The Brain, Body, and Self Laboratory is supported by a Distinguished Professor Grant from the Swedish Research Council (2018–2028) and Project Grants from Hjärnfonden (2023–2026) and the Torsten Söderberg Foundation (2024–2027), as well as funding from Karolinska Institutet.
The lab was originally established with major grants from the European Research Council (Starting Grant 2008–2013; Advanced Grant SELF-UNITY 2018–2023), the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (2008–2013), the Human Frontier Science Program (2009–2011), and the James S. McDonnell Foundation (2011–2017).
We have established international collaborations with Prof. Wei Ji Ma (New York University, USA), Prof. Jeffrey Ojemann (University of Washington, USA), Prof. Marcin Szwed (Jagiellonian University, Poland), Prof. Chris Dijkerman (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), Dr. Marie Chancel (CNRS, Marseille, France), Dr. Pawel Tacikowski (University of Coimbra, Portugal), and Prof. Andrés Canales-Johnson (University of Cambridge, UK). At Karolinska Institutet, we collaborate closely with Prof. Karin Jensen (Department of Clinical Neuroscience), Prof. Daniel Lundqvist (Department of Clinical Neuroscience), and former lab members Dr. Renzo Lanfranco (Department of Clinical Neuroscience) and Dr. Konstantina Kilteni (Department of Neuroscience and also at Donders Institute, The Netherlands).
In the Karolinska Institutet’s most recent external research quality assessment (2011), our laboratory received the highest grade (“Outstanding; 6/6”), placing us among the top research groups at the university.
Lanfranco RC, Katyal S, Hägerdal A, Luan X, & Ehrsson, H. H. Conscious awareness, sensory integration, and evidence accumulation in bodily self-perception. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025
O'Kane SH, Chancel M, Ehrsson HH. Hierarchical and dynamic relationships between body part ownership and full-body ownership. Cognition. 2024 May;246:105697.
Iriye H, Chancel M, Ehrsson HH. Sense of own body shapes neural processes of memory encoding and reinstatement. Cereb Cortex. 2024 Jan 14;34(1):bhad443.
Chancel M, Ehrsson HH. Proprioceptive uncertainty promotes the rubber hand illusion. Cortex. 2023 Aug;165:70-85.
Abdulkarim Z, Guterstam A, Hayatou Z, Ehrsson HH. Neural Substrates of Body Ownership and Agency during Voluntary Movement. J Neurosci. 2023 Mar 29;43(13):2362-2380.
Chancel M, Iriye H, Ehrsson HH. Causal Inference of Body Ownership in the Posterior Parietal Cortex. J Neurosci. 2022 Sep 14;42(37):7131-7143.
Chancel M, Ehrsson HH, Ma WJ. Uncertainty-based inference of a common cause for body ownership. Elife. 2022 Sep 27;11:e77221.
Guterstam A, Larsson DEO, Szczotka J, Ehrsson HH. Duplication of the bodily self: a perceptual illusion of dual full-body ownership and dual self-location. R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Dec 9;7(12):201911.
Tacikowski P, Weijs ML, Ehrsson HH. Perception of Our Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence Impairs Episodic Memory. iScience. 2020 Aug 26;23(9):101429.
Guterstam A, Collins KL, Cronin JA, Zeberg H, Darvas F, Weaver KE, Ojemann JG, Ehrsson HH. Direct Electrophysiological Correlates of Body Ownership in Human Cerebral Cortex. Cereb Cortex. 2019 Mar 1;29(3):1328-1341.