The minimal bodily Self - Behavioural and neuroscientific evidence

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1 Mirror Neurons, Embodied Empathy and the Boundaries of the Self London, January 2014 The minimal bodily Self - Behavioural and neuroscientific evidence Vittorio Gallese Dept. of Neuroscience University of Parma Italy

2 The bodily roots of the Self

3 The ego is first and foremost a body-ego (S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 1923, p. 26)

4 The main early sources of learning about reality are in the child s relation to his own body and objects Hartmann, Notes on the reality principle 1936.

Levels of Self-knowledge From a phenomenological

reflective level: EXPLICIT awareness of self as an

5 Levels of Self-knowledge From a phenomenological perspective (Parnas 2000; 2003) 1. pre-reflective level: IMPLICIT awareness that this is my experience (Ipseity) 2. reflective level: EXPLICIT awareness of self as an invariant subject of experience and action 3. social or narrative self: individual characteristics (personality, habits, style )

6 IPSEITY - mineness of experience - corporeality - stream of consciousness - self-demarcation - existential orientation (Parnas & Handest, 2003; Parnas & Sass, 2001)

7 even if all the unessential features of self are stripped away, there is a basic, immediate or primitive something that we are willing to call a self (Gallagher, 2000, p. 15).

8 Bodily self as power for action

9 Being There: The Body as the Power of Having a World We have to recognize that there is something between movement as a third person process [i.e. as a pure physical movement] and thought as a representation of movement [i.e. as a pure mental state] something which is in anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective and is ensured by the body itself as motor power, a motor project (Bewegungsentwurf), a motor intentionality Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962, p159

10 Being There: The Body as the Power of Having a World In other terms, we have to realize that motility has to be construed as basic intentionality, without confusing movement with thought about movement - that is, to recognize that consciousness is in the first place not a matter of I think that but of I can, and that our bodily experience of movement [ ] provided us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a praktognosia, which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962, p159

11 We must rethink the role of the motor system

13 Woolsey

14 The cortical motor system, long-confined to the exclusive role of motor programming and control, plays a crucial role in cognition, e.g. in terms of object and space representation and action understanding

15 A New Perspective (Matelli et al. 1985, 1991)

16 Multi-Modal Integration in the motor system Cortical motor areas are endowed with sensory properties They contain motor neurons that respond to visual, somatosensory, and auditory stimuli Posterior parietal areas, traditionally considered to process and associate purely sensory information, also play a role in motor control.

17 Area F4 Motor properties of F4 neurons Arm reaching Head turning

18 Somato-Centered Bimodal RFs of F4 motor neurons Fogassi, Gallese, Fadiga, Luppino, Matelli and Rizzolatti, J Neurophysiol 1996

19 F4 motor neurons map peri-personal space in gaze-independent body-centred coordinates Fogassi, Gallese, Fadiga, Luppino, Matelli and Rizzolatti, J Neurophysiol 1996

20 Fogassi, Gallese, Fadiga, Luppino, Matelli and Rizzolatti, J Neurophysiol 1996

21 Trimodal RFs of F4 motor neurons (Graziano, Yap and Gross 1999)

22 Embodied Simulation How do F4 neurons perceptually work? By means of embodied motor simulation Seeing or hearing an object or event at a given location within peri-ersonal space evokes the motor simulation of the most appropriate acts towards that very same spatial location

23 1=VIP 2=VPMc 3=SII/PV

24 Area F5 Bank region of F5: Canonical neurons Grasping-related motor neurons Convexity region of F5: Mirror neurons

25 F5 Canonical Neurons Murata, Gallese et al. J Neurophysiol. 78: , 1997

26 F5 Canonical Neurons Murata et al. J Neurophysiol. 78: , 1997

27 Embodied Simulation How do F5 canonical neurons perceptually work? By means of embodied motor simulation. Seeing a manipulable object evokes the motor simulation of its grasping. Seeing the object evokes an object-related motor potentiality.

28 Area F5 Bank region of F5: Canonical neurons Convexity region of F5: Mirror neurons

30 The discovery of MNs in the macaque monkey brain and in the human brain suggests that a more direct access to intentional states of others is available

31 Multi-Modal Motor Integration Fronto-parietal motor areas are neurally integrated not only to control action, but also to serve the function of building an integrated bodilyformatted representation of: (a) actions (b) objects acted upon (c) locations to which actions are directed

32 Hypothesis: The basic experience we entertain of ourselves as bodily selves is from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies.

34 Our proposal: There is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to capture the most primitive sense of self

35 The body is primarily given to us as source of or power for action, that is, as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live.

36 The primitive sense of self we are dealing with: Is supposedly antecedent the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership; Provides a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral and psychopathological data

39 Left Right Results showed an advantage when judging one s own right hand compared to others hands. Reaction times were faster when responding to the former stimulus compared to the latter ones

40 Left Right The self advantage was lacking in the second experiment where self recognition was explicitly required Indeed, in Experiment 2 a worse performance with self-related stimuli compared to other-related stimuli was observed

41 The presence of the self-advantage in Experiment 1 and its absence in Experiment 2 suggest that the bodily self is ultimately linked to a motor representation A dissociation between implicit and explicit self body processing is in agreement with the independence of implicit from explicit self-body processing reported by infancy research

44 Yellow = involved in the mental rotation task of self-dominant hand Red = involved in the mental rotation task of Self s hands White = Involved in the mental rotation task, but not in Self discrimination.

45 Ventral premotor cortex Self-advantage Multisensory representation of own body (Rizzolatti et al. 1988; Gentilucci et al. 1988; Fogassi et al. 1992; Bremmer et al. 2001; Ehrsson et al., 2004) Anatomical connections with visual and somatosensory areas in PPC and frontal motor areas (Rizzolatti, Luppino, & Matelli, 1998) General self/other distinction SMA and pre-sma Self/other differentiation in the domain of action (Yoshida et al., 2011; Mukamel et al., 2010) Anterior Insular Cortex Bodily self awareness, sense of agency, sense of ownership (Craig, 2009; Farrer & Frith, 2002; Ehrsson et al., 2007) Convergence of interoceptive and exteroceptive self-related information (Craig, 2010)

46 Implicit access to bodily self-knowledge allows a self-advantage to emerge... What does the self-advantage effect reveal? could the lack of such effect be associated to a deficit of ipseity?

47 Bodily Self and psychopathology

presence, appears to be one of the most critical features affecting ipseity, but not the only one Other anomalous

48 Ipseity disturbance may account for many of the key phenomenological changes that occur during the prodrome of schizophrenia (Parnas, 2005; Parnas, Jansson, & Sass, 1998) Disturbance of mineness of experience, or sense of presence, appears to be one of the most critical features affecting ipseity, but not the only one Other anomalous experiences of ipseity include anomalous bodily experiences, stream of consciousness, self-demarcation, and existential reorientation

49 Schizophrenic patient does not inhabit her body any more, in the sense of using as takenfor-granted its implicit structure [...] as a medium for relating to the world (Fuchs, 2005)

50 Loss of the Implicit Structure of the Body in Schizophrenia a 28-year-old female patient: For some time I had a feeling as if my clothes did not seem appropriate any more. My gait had changed, I walked stiffly and did not know how to hold my hands. Then I often looked into the mirror and found that my facial expression had changed, and I began to think that I might be regarded as a prostitute. Men looked so strange at me I took passport pictures of myself in order to examine whether I only imagined that. Then I began to feel a kind of charging or tension in my body when others came near to me, as if it were passing over from them. Finally I thought I should be made a prostitute by brain manipulation (Fuchs 2000, 165) Is the Bodily Self-Advantage preserved in Schizophrenia?

51 Demographic information about the First Episode Schizophrenic (FES) Patient group and Control group Patients (N=24) Controls (N=22) Age 27.3 ± (±3.3) Mean time from psychotic episode 7.5 ± 4.7 months n.a. Handedness score 65.3 ± 18.1 % 69.3 (±15.8) % Male/female 16/8 12/10 Diagnosis First Episode Psychosis n.a. SCID-II Cluster A n.a. negative SCID-II Cluster B n.a. negative SCID-II Cluster C n.a. negative PANSS Positive scale score 10.4 ± 6.2; min. 0, max. 21 n.a. PANSS Negative scale score 9.9 ± 6.8; min 0, max. 24 n.a. PANSS General Psychopathology scale score 19.3 ± 11.1; min. 0, max. 37 n.a. SPI-A total score 61.1 ± 38.4; min. 0 max. 138 n.a. Medication Quetiapine, Risperidone, Paliperidone, Aripiprazole, Olanzapine n.a.

53 TASKS STIMULI Exp. 1 Exp. 2 Inanimate Object Body

54 Main results of ANOVA ANALYSIS Group x Type of s-mulus X Owner x Perspec-ve Effect of Group [F = 13.3; p<.001] Effect of Type of s=mulus [F = 20.2; p<.001] Group x Type of s=mulus x Owner [F = 5.5; p<.05]

55 Main results of ANOVA ANALYSIS Group x Type of s-mulus X Owner x Perspec-ve - Effect of Group [F=22.6; p<.001] - Effect of Type of s=mulus [F =63.7; p<.001] - Group x Type of s=mulus [F =8.6; p<.01] - Type of s=mulus x Owner [F =17.8; p<.001]

56 Schizophrenic patients do not show the self-advantage for their own body parts in the implicit task. Similarly to controls, they do not show the self-advantage when explicitly asked. Schizophrenic patients likely have problems in activating a motor representation of their own body parts when looking at them. Such deficit shows the relevance of implicit motor representations of the body for a coherent sense of bodily self.

57 Schizophrenia and self-other distinction Schizophrenic patients have difficulties differentiating their own from other voices and tend to misidentify their own voices as alien (Allen et al. 2004; McGuire et al. 2005) Schizophrenic patients have difficulties in discriminating self-generated tactile sensations from those generated by others Schizophrenic patients experience altered perception of their own bodily actions (Blakemore et al. 2000) (Daprati et al 1997)

61 The borders of the bodily self appear to be blurred in schizophrenic patients This is epitomized by a lack of self-other differentiation in the domain of affective tactile experiences, given the lack of deactivation of pic in patients during touch observation

62 Reduced activation in premotor multimodal integration regions (RH IFG-PMC), and consistent correlations between BOLD response and Basic Symptoms, could reflect the neural basis of a reduced sense of a coherent bodily self in schizophrenia

63 Thank You!

Giacomo Rizzolatti - selected references

Giacomo Rizzolatti - selected references 1 Rizzolatti, G., Semi, A. A., & Fabbri-Destro, M. (2014). Linking psychoanalysis with neuroscience: the concept of ego. Neuropsychologia, 55, 143-148. Notes: Through