Laura Kaltwasser
Berlin School of Mind and Brain
Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin
Look up – what do you see? Probably a ceiling, or the pure sky, most likely a void that you are unable to directly manipulate. Now look down – what do you see? Possibly your feet, your hands, your desk with a keyboard or maybe even your mug. What do they have in common? They provide affordances and thereby in most cases the possibility to assert immediate control over them, i.e. by manipulating them. The prediction and control of one’s own actions and, through them, the course of events in the environment, is trivial to most of us, yet of utmost importance to the experience of a ‘self’. As such the ‘sense of agency’ forms a central aspect of action regulation, which can be disturbed in mental disorders where self-efficacy is impaired. For example, patients suffering from the schizophrenia spectrum report that their actions are not their own but may be imposed on them by some other agent. Schizophrenia as a disorder of the self has been linked to deficits in internal monitoring processes, and, more broadly speaking, to a failure to predict one’s own actions and their consequences in the environment. In my talk I will outline theories of the self before I dive into recent neuroscientific and neurophenomenological research on altered states of the self in mental illness as well as altered states of consciousness. I would like to close by discussing the potential of an interdisciplinary research plan studying the spatio-temporal hierarchy of self-processing in the brain for informing psychopathology and treatment of self disorders.
View a recording of this session here.