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An amputee struggles to use his new prosthetic limb. A patient with a frontal-lobe brain lesion insists that her left hand has a mind of its own. The alleged criminal claims in court that he did not fire the gun, even though several eyewitnesses watched him do it. Each of these individuals is grappling with two elements of the mind-body connection: ownership, or an ability to separate ourselves from the physical and social environments, and agency, a conviction that we have control over our limbs.
We are quick to investigate a sticker placed on our forehead when looking in a mirror, recognizing the foreign object as abnormal.
The human brain typically handles these phenomena by comparing neural signals encoding the intended action with those signals ...
