Lectures and seminars Cognitive Neuroscience Club: Distortion of Mental Body Representations

Abstract

Our body is central to our sense of self, and distorted body representations are found in several serious medical conditions. In this talk, I will discuss evidence that distortions of body representations are also common in healthy individuals, and occur in domains including tactile spatial perception, proprioception, perception of body weight, and the conscious body image. Across domains, there is a general tendency for body width to be overestimated compared to body length. Intriguingly, distortions in both eating disorders and chronic pain appear to be exaggerations of this baseline pattern of distortions, suggesting that these conditions may relate to dysfunction of mechanisms for body perception.