FLICKR, TUNCAY
The hallucination of a ghostly presence is common among people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and sometimes occurs in healthy people under extreme conditions. To investigate the cause of this “feeling of presence” (FoP), researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and their colleagues observed study participants’ reactions to a specially designed robot that mimicked their movements. The findings, reported last week (November 6) in Current Biology, suggest that FoP results from a mismatch between perceptions of the self and of external signals.
As part of the study, the team scanned the brains of 12 patients who had reported FoP and discovered lesions in the frontoparietal cortex, which integrates sensory and motor signals and is involved in self-awareness. This led to ...
