Day 3617, Bodily Awareness.

Bodily Awareness (SEP)

At the sensory level we continuously receive a flow of information about our own body through external and internal perceptions. Not only can we see our body and touch it, but we also have several inner receptors that convey information about the position of our limbs, the balance of our body, and its physiological condition. Unlike external perception, the inner sensory flow never stops and cannot be voluntarily controlled. Thus, an important amount of information is constantly available whether we want it or not, whether we pay attention to it or not. In that respect, our body qualifies as the object that we know best. Yet, despite numerous sources of information, the phenomenology of bodily awareness is limited. In painful and learning situations, our body appears at the core of our interest, but when we walk in the street, we are rarely aware of the precise position of our legs and of the contact of the floor on our feet. Schwitzgebel (2007), for instance, asked how frequently participants wearing a device beeping at random intervals had tactile experiences in their left foot just before the beeping sound. He found a high variability in the answers, but one participant reported tactile sensations only 16% of the time. Our conscious field is primarily occupied by our environment, instead of the bodily medium that allows us to perceive it and to move through it. Hence, the most permanent and preponderant object in life may also be the most elusive one (Leder 1990; Merleau-Ponty 1945; O’Shaughnessy 1980).

One may then question whether we are completely unaware of it. Except in rare illusory or pathological cases, we never feel fully disembodied. James (1890: 242), for instance, claims that we are constantly conscious of the presence of our body, although at the margin of the stream of our consciousness:

Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know.

What is the content of this marginal body consciousness? James (1890: 242) alludes to a “feeling of the same old body always there” or a mere “feeling of warmth and intimacy” but can we go beyond this rough and metaphorical description?

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bodily-awareness/

Chatbot

Bodily awareness refers to the way you experience your own body from the inside.

It includes several distinct but related phenomena.

First, proprioception. This is your sense of where your body parts are in space without looking at them. If you close your eyes and raise your arm, you still know where it is. This information comes from muscles, tendons, and joints.

Second, interoception. This is awareness of internal bodily states: hunger, thirst, heartbeat, breathing, nausea, tension, fatigue. It is how you feel your body “from within.”

Third, kinaesthesia. This is the sense of movement. You do not just know that your arm is raised; you feel it moving upward.

In philosophy, bodily awareness is often contrasted with perception of external objects. When you see a tree, the tree is presented as something “out there.” When you feel a pain in your knee, the pain is not experienced as an external object but as something happening to you. This raises questions about subjectivity, selfhood, and ownership: why is this pain felt as my pain?

Phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty argue that bodily awareness is not just another object of perception. The body is not merely something you have; it is the medium through which you experience the world. Your body is both subject (that which perceives) and object (that which can be perceived).

There are also clinical angles. Disturbances in bodily awareness occur in conditions like phantom limb syndrome (feeling a limb that is no longer there), depersonalization (feeling detached from one’s body), or certain neurological disorders where patients deny ownership of a limb. These cases show that bodily awareness is constructed and can fragment.

In cognitive science, bodily awareness is linked to predictive processing models: the brain continuously integrates sensory signals and predictions to maintain a stable sense of bodily self.

Conscious awareness, sensory integration, and evidence accumulation in bodily self-perception

Significance

How is conscious awareness related to our sense of bodily self? Researchers have long believed that many sensory signals from one’s body are processed without reaching conscious awareness, with studies on consciousness mainly focusing on how we become aware of visual and auditory information after it has first been processed subconsciously. Using bodily illusion experiments and computational modeling, we show that bodily self-perception is surprisingly closely connected to conscious awareness, shedding light on this important connection.

Abstract

Conscious awareness refers to the subjective experience of perceiving, thinking, and feeling and the ability to report these experiences. These perceptions and thoughts are experienced as bound to an individual self. A fundamental aspect of this self-consciousness is the sense of bodily self—the experience of one’s physical presence distinct from the external world, serving as the spatial reference point for conscious perceptions. A key component of the bodily self is body ownership, the experience of the body as one’s own. Research shows this sense involves integrating signals from different sensory modalities, including vision, touch, and proprioception, into a coherent multisensory percept. However, the relationship between body ownership and conscious awareness remains unclear. To investigate this, we developed a psychophysical paradigm to objectively quantify multisensory integration, conscious awareness, and their relationships within a bodily illusion manipulating body ownership perception. Using signal-detection analysis, metacognitive computational modeling, and drift–diffusion modeling, we found conscious awareness reports closely matched objective discrimination of body ownership. This relationship remained consistent across different levels of multisensory integration and evidence accumulation. A visuotactile control experiment revealed that this strong conscious access is specific to body ownership, not general to multisensory integration. These findings suggest that conscious awareness has continuous and prioritized access to body ownership, implying that the self-related form of multisensory integration supporting body ownership is largely implemented at the level of conscious processing. This provides theoretical insight into how conscious awareness and the bodily self are intertwined, with wide-reaching implications for consciousness and body representation research.

Read the rest here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2503629122#bibliography

R.C. Lanfranco, S. Katyal, A. Hägerdal, X. Luan, V. Nos, & H.H. Ehrsson, Conscious awareness, sensory integration, and evidence accumulation in bodily self-perception, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (49) e2503629122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2503629122 (2025).