Self-Body Recognition and its Impairment
Sotaro Shimada · Advances in bioinformatics and biomedical engineering book series · 2012
Self-body recognition is the ability to recognize one’s body parts as one’s own. This ability is impaired in some neuropsychiatric patients. The present chapter reviews symptoms that demonstrate impaired self-body recognition. Several studies have repeatedly shown that the parietal lobe plays an important role in self-body recognition. In particular, the superior parietal lobe is involved in maintaining short-term memory about the self-body image that produces the sense of ownership of one’s body. The right inferior parietal lobule is crucial for detecting discrepancies among multiple afferent sensory inputs, such as the proprioceptive and visual inputs of the body. The authors suggest that temporal consistency among multisensory feedback inputs is important for self-body recognition, which is most likely integrated in the parietal lobe.