Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland.
Neuron. 2011 Apr 28;70(2):363-74. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.03.009.
Self-consciousness has mostly been approached by philosophical enquiry and not by empirical neuroscientific study, leading to an overabundance of diverging theories and an absence of data-driven theories. Using robotic technology, we achieved specific bodily conflicts and induced predictable changes in a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness by altering where healthy subjects experienced themselves to be (self-location). Functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) activity reflected experimental changes in self-location that also depended on the first-person perspective due to visuo-tactile and visuo-vestibular conflicts. Moreover, in a large lesion analysis study of neurological patients with a well-defined state of abnormal self-location, brain damage was also localized at TPJ, providing causal evidence that TPJ encodes self-location. Our findings reveal that multisensory integration at the TPJ reflects one of the most fundamental subjective feelings of humans: the feeling of being an entity localized at a position in space and perceiving the world from this position and perspective.
自我意识主要是通过哲学探究而不是经验神经科学研究来研究的，这导致了大量分歧的理论和缺乏数据驱动的理论。使用机器人技术，我们通过改变健康受试者自我感知的位置（自我定位），实现了特定的身体冲突，并诱导自我意识的一个基本方面发生可预测的变化。功能磁共振成像显示，颞顶联合区（TPJ）的活动反映了自我定位的实验变化，由于视触冲突和视前庭冲突，这种变化也取决于第一人称视角。此外，在对具有明确异常自我定位状态的神经科患者进行的大型病变分析研究中，大脑损伤也定位于 TPJ，这提供了因果证据，证明 TPJ 编码自我定位。我们的发现表明，TPJ 的多感觉整合反映了人类最基本的主观感受之一：作为一个位于空间某个位置的实体的感觉，并从这个位置和视角感知世界。
