Bodily disownership is associated with self-concept fragmentation

Pawel Tacikowski; H Henrik Ehrsson

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.112805

Bodily disownership is associated with self-concept fragmentation

iScience. 2025 May 31;28(7):112805. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.112805. eCollection 2025 Jul 18.

Authors

Pawel Tacikowski^{1

2}, H Henrik Ehrsson¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
² Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.

Abstract

How does one's sense of identity change when one feels disconnected from one's own body? To explore this, we induced a perceptual illusion that diminished participants' sense of ownership over their bodies using asynchronous visuotactile stimulation in sixty-six healthy individuals. Moreover, we asked them to rate how much certain personality traits described themselves. We found that reduced body ownership was linked to more dispersed self-description clusters. Control analyses confirmed that this main finding was not driven by unspecific semantic factors or asynchronous visuotactile stimulation alone. Thus, our results highlight the flexibility and interconnection between the bodily and conceptual aspects of the sense of self, which has important implications for dissociative experiences and overall mental health.

Keywords: Behavioral neuroscience; Cognitive neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience.