Body and movement: consciousness in the parietal lobes

Abstract

A critical issue related to the notion of identity concerns our ability to discriminate between internally and externally generated stimuli. This basic mechanism likely relies on perceptual and motor information, and requires that both motor plans and the resulting activity be continuously mapped on a reliable body representation. It has been widely demonstrated that the parietal cortices of the two hemispheres play a crucial role, albeit differently specialized, in both monitoring internal representation of our own actions and sustaining body representation. Ample neuropsychological evidence indicates that while damage to the left parietal cortex affects the ability to generate and/or monitor an internal model of one's own movement, lesions of the right parietal lobe are largely responsible for severe perturbations of the internal representation of one's own body. In the present paper, we discuss the processes involved in body perception and self-recognition and propose a tentative model describing how the right and left parietal cortices contribute in integrating various sources of information to produce the unique, elementary experience of one's own body in motion. The ecological value of this process in constructing identity and autobiographical experience will be discussed.