The sense of self: one body and multiple mechanisms

At first sight, the sense of bodily self seems a straightforward concept. However, upon a closer look, it quickly becomes a mystery. Having one unique body seems an evidence, but this sense of bodily self is altered in many instances: out-of-body experiences can be induced during meditation or experimentally, and are observed in many different pathologies, from vestibular syndromes to schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder. The mystery is how we achieve the integration of multiple sources of information into the experience of one unique sense of self, and still have access to these threads of information separately. The sense of bodily self indeed covers interoceptive, proprioceptive, vestibular and tactile information, but also agency, body ownership, or the fact that we perceive our environment via these bodily perception channels. Many models have been proposed, and the speakers in this conference will approach the question of the bodily self from different perspectives and disciplines, such as philosophy, experimental psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry. The aim of the conference is precisely to bring together specialists of these complementary approaches to discuss the most recent models and data, convergences and divergences.