The Rhythm of Bodily Self-Consciousness

Recent philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific theories suggest that bodily experience is crucial for the phenomenology of selfhood (i.e. the experience of 'being someone'). In this thesis I have shown that two essential aspects of bodily self-consciousness that have been difficult to study in the past – self-location ('where am I localized?') and self-identification ('is this my body?') – can be manipulated experimentally with multisensory visual-tactile conflicts and virtual reality technology. A major part of this thesis was devoted to investigate how such manipulations are reflected in the oscillatory cortical resting state known as the mu rhythm. Through the mu rhythm I have also established a link between the mirror neuron system, self-other discriminations and cerebral speech representations of actions.