Abstract
Do conscious beliefs about the body affect defensive mechanisms within the body? To answer this question we took advantage from a monothematic delusion of bodily ownership, in which brain-damaged patients misidentify alien limbs as their own. We investigated whether the delusional belief that an alien hand is their own hand modulates a subcortical defensive response, such as the hand-blink reflex. The blink, dramatically increases when the threated hand is inside the defensive peripersonal-space of the face. In our between-subjects design, including patients and controls, the threat was brought near the face either by the own hand or by another person’s hand. Our results show an ownership-dependent modulation of the defensive response. In controls, as well as in the patients’ intact-side, the response enhancement is significantly greater when the threat was brought near the face by the own than by the alien hand. Crucially, in the patients’ affected-side (where the pathological embodiment occurs), the alien (embodied) hand elicited a response enhancement comparable to that found when the threat is brought near the face by the real hand. These findings suggest the existence of a mutual interaction between our conscious beliefs about the body and the physiological mechanisms within the body.
Highlights
Do conscious beliefs about the body affect defensive mechanisms within the body? To answer this question we took advantage from a monothematic delusion of bodily ownership, in which braindamaged patients misidentify alien limbs as their own
During the rubber hand illusion (RHI) procedure, watching a rubber hand being stroked, while one’s unseen hand is stroked synchronously, can lead to qualitative and quantitative modulation of the sense of bodily ownership, so that the rubber hand is embodied and the real hand is subjected to a sort of disembodiment[5]
We extracted the area under the curve (AUC) of the average HBR waveform and we normalized it in z-scores
Summary
Do conscious beliefs about the body affect defensive mechanisms within the body? To answer this question we took advantage from a monothematic delusion of bodily ownership, in which braindamaged patients misidentify alien limbs as their own. In the patients’ affected-side (where the pathological embodiment occurs), the alien (embodied) hand elicited a response enhancement comparable to that found when the threat is brought near the face by the real hand. These findings suggest the existence of a mutual interaction between our conscious beliefs about the body and the physiological mechanisms within the body. Converging multidisciplinary approaches described the sense of bodily ownership (i.e., the belief that a specific body part belongs to one’s own body) as a fundamental component of the self-consciousness[1,2,3] In normal conditions, it seems immediate and even obvious. Because of the hemiplegia, in the patients’ affected side the hand postural manipulation (far from the face; near to the face) was passively
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