The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness

Abstract

Bodily illusions are changes in immediate awareness of one's body that do not correspond to the body's veridical state. They offer a unique tool for investigating the perceptual processes and brain mechanisms that mediate the sense of our own bodies. This chapter analyzes bodily illusions from the perspectives of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I discuss classic illusion paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion and illusory limb movements elicited by muscle-tendon vibration. Moreover, I consider both bodily illusions that involve changes in the location and movement of single limbs and more complex illusions that involve interactions between multiple limbs and body segments. Furthermore, I review illusions that involve changes in size, ownership, and number of body parts. We also highlight full-body illusions that involve changes in the perceptual aspects of one’s entire body. Bodily illusions reveal how information from different sensory modalities, such as proprioception, touch, and vision, are continuously and automatically integrated to generate a coherent multisensory representation of one's body in space. This multisensory body representation is dynamic and based on information from both prior bodily experiences and bottom-up sensory signal processing.

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