Rubber Hand Illusions Shed New Light on Our Bodily Sense of Self

“We project our individual mental experience into the world, and thereby mistake our mental experience to be the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of perception by our sensory systems, personal histories, goals, and expectations,”

The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the idea of a permanent and fixed essence that constitutes the "true self," the "real me."

The more I read about theories of mind, the more I’ve come to see my interior life as a hall of mirrors, capable of all kinds of tricks and sleights of hand.

‘The sense of self emerges from the activity of the brain in interaction with other selves.’

In subsequent work he was able to locate neurological damage to the part of their brains that create and control our sense of body image. This damage had occurred at birth, or very early on. This meant that the brain could create a body image in a perfectly healthy person that was highly irrational. It seemed as well that our sense of self is far m

Clinicians and educators who work with embodied self-awareness often talk about “mind” and “body.” This is an oversimplification that leads to misconceptions: the “mind” is in the head and the “body” is below the neck. The problem is that the mind is part of the body and the body has a mind of its own in its peripheral nerve cells and receptors and