Repetto Claudia, Riva Giuseppe
Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
Humane Technology Lab, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
EXCLI J. 2023 Feb 7;22:191-206. doi: 10.17179/excli2023-5877. eCollection 2023.
The body is a very special object, as it corresponds to the physical component of the self and it is the medium through which we interact with the world. Our body awareness includes the mental representation of the body that happens to be our own, and traditionally has been defined in terms of body schema and body image. Starting from the distinction between these two types of representations, the present paper tries to reconcile the literature around body representations under the common framework of body memory. The body memory develops ontogenetically from birth and across all the life span and is directly linked to the development of the self. Therefore, our sense of self and identity is fundamentally based on multisensory knowledge accumulated in body memory, so that the sensations collected by our body, stored as implicit memory, can unfold in the future, under suitable circumstances. Indeed, these sets of bodily information had been proposed as possible key factors underpinning several mental health illnesses. Following this perspective, the Embodied Medicine approach put forward the use of advanced technologies to alter the dysfunctional body memory to enhance people's well-being. In the last sections, recent experimental pieces of evidence will be illustrated that targeted specifically bodily information for increasing health and wellbeing, by means of two strategies: interoceptive feedback and bodily illusions. See also Figure 1(Fig. 1).
身体是一个非常特殊的客体，因为它对应着自我的物理组成部分，并且是我们与世界互动的媒介。我们的身体意识包括恰好属于我们自己身体的心理表征，传统上它是根据身体图式和身体意象来定义的。从这两种表征类型的区分出发，本文试图在身体记忆的共同框架下协调围绕身体表征的文献。身体记忆从出生开始在个体发育过程中发展并贯穿整个生命周期，并且与自我的发展直接相关。因此，我们的自我意识和身份认同从根本上基于身体记忆中积累的多感官知识，这样我们身体收集到的感觉作为内隐记忆存储下来，在合适的情况下可以在未来展现出来。事实上，这些身体信息集已被认为是支撑几种心理健康疾病的可能关键因素。按照这个观点，具身医学方法提出使用先进技术来改变功能失调的身体记忆以增进人们的幸福感。在最后几节中，将说明最近的实验证据，这些证据通过两种策略专门针对身体信息来增进健康和幸福感：内感受反馈和身体错觉。另见图1（图1）。
