@BrainSelf

We study the sense of self, body representation, and the human brain. Based at Karolinska Institutet, led by Henrik Ehrsson.

Stockholm, Sweden
Joined November 2018
Can the rubber hand illusion change how much pain we feel? We combined evidence from 22 experiments and found no meaningful effect in healthy participants, challenging the idea that body-ownership illusions reduce pain. Study led by @coppi_sara. sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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Congratulations Dr. Sara Coppi (@coppi_sara) on the superb defense of your PhD thesis, 'The Relationship between Nociception, Pain, and Body Ownership'!
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Brain, Body, and Self Lab retweeted
See you at #BRNET2026! I'll be giving a short talk today (~16:20, Palazzo Bo, Padova) on the role of body ownership in visuo-nociceptive interactions within peripersonal space. 🧠✨
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New study! SDT used to dissociate body ownership sensitivity from perceptual bias in the rubber hand illusion with partial visual occlusion. Disrupting visually-driven tactile predictions shifts perceptual bias but not visuotactile sensitivity. See below.
What makes a body feel like our own? Body ownership is a core aspect of self-awareness, & it depends on the integration of multiple sensory signals. What role do visual predictions play in body ownership? See our paper out in Royal Society Open Science: doi.org/10.1098/rsos.252132
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New results! Faster parietal alpha frequency sharpens the temporal window for vision–touch integration, yielding a more precise sense of one’s own body. Slower alpha widens it. Nature Communications. Link and thread by @DAngeloMariano below
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Mariano D'Angelo @DAngeloMariano presents a new study at this year's Karolinska Department of Neuroscience retreat (in press).
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Brain, Body & Self lab celebrating 2025 with a traditional Julbord at Hasselbacken, Stockholm
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Our new PNAS study shows that bodily self-perception has privileged access to consciousness. While vision and hearing often involve unconscious processing, the sense of one’s own body appears to emerge directly in awareness. See link and thread below.
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Check out the symposium “Recent Developments in Bodily Self-awareness Research” hosted by @coppi_sara at ICON 2025 in Porto tomorrow!
Excited to host the symposium “Recent Developments in Bodily Self-awareness Research” at ICON 2025, in Porto 🧠 🗓️ Fri 19th | ⏰ 1:30 PM Speakers: @IriyeIriye @DAngeloMariano @Renzo_Lanfranco + me @BrainSelf @Icon2025 #CognitiveNeuroscience
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Congratulations Arvid!
Happy and grateful that my @ERC_Research StG was approved for funding! Goal: understanding the brain mechanisms of spontaneous theory of mind, revealing potential differences between neurotypical and autistic people, and exploring ways to boost theory-of-mind ability
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New study led by @PTacikowski shows that reducing body ownership through a perceptual illusion leads to fragmentation in self-concept. This link between the bodily and conceptual self may shed light on dissociative experiences and mental health. cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S…
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New study out in iScience, led by @coppi_sara: During the rubber hand illusion, pain is mislocalized toward the rubber hand, just like touch and proprioception. This nociceptive drift reveals how pain, like other senses, is integrated into the bodily self. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4054…
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Feeling fear through a fake body? Our new study, led by @RyuOhata, shows that illusory body ownership amplifies subjective fear in response to nearby fear-relevant animals (spiders) and increases fear of safety-margin violations. nature.com/articles/s41598-0…
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New preprint exploring the role of alpha oscillations in integrating self-related sensory information and distinguishing the bodily self from external events. See link and thread below. Led by @DAngeloMariano
In a new preprint we demonstrated that the frequency of alpha oscillations plays a crucial role in binding self-related sensory information into a coherent perceptual experience of one’s body and distinguishing this bodily self from external sensory events biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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