Brain meeting: Jakub Limanowski

Brain meeting

The representation of one particular body as ‘my own’ is of fundamental importance for (inter)action in and with my environment, and one could call it one of the most important tasks a brain needs to solve. This task is far from trivial, since the body is one of many physical objects (bodies) out there. Moreover, the brain has access to several (noisy) sources of information about the body—sometimes, these can be conflicting. So how does the brain maintain a stable but adaptive body representation? How do action and attention impact on the underlying multisensory integration processes? And what (if anything) can this tell us about the principles of self-modelling in the brain? I will present some investigations in which I approached these questions using brain imaging, illusions, and virtual reality; exemplified by the cortical representation of one’s active or passive hand based on vision and somatosensation.