Theatres of the Body

In this symposium we will place the experience of the human body and its mental representations in central stage. As in a “scientific theatre of the body”, we will adopt different clinical and experimental perspectives in order to investigate the mechanisms underlying the sense of body experience, i.e. the experience of having a body and the experience of using it to interact with the world. We will first focus on normal mechanisms of body representation. Manos Tsakiris will present fMRI data showing how the sense of body ownership and agency are represented in dissociable brain networks, located respectively in midline cortical structures and premotor-parietal areas. Then, Andrea Serino will show how the boundaries of one’s own body representations are highly plastic, changing after changes in the structure, or in the function, of the physical body, such as in case of amputation, surgery for limb elongation and tool-use. Aikaterini Fotopoulou will present what happens when the mechanisms and experience of action awareness and body ownership are disturbed due to brain lesions, as in case of anosognosia for hemiplegia and somatoparaphrenia, and how these conditions can be manipulated through providing visual feedback via realistic rubber-hands, video recordings and mirror-viewing. Finally, Cosimo Urgesi will explore the possibility of overcoming the sense of body, as in case of spiritual experience, by showing how lesions in parietal areas involved in body representation induces a specific increase of self-transcendence.