We perceive our own bodies in many different ways. We can look at our bodies, feel touch on our bodies, and also feel our body from within, as when we experience our hearts racing or butterflies in our stomachs. One way to check how good people are at perceiving their body from within is to ask them to count their heartbeats over a few seconds, but without taking their own pulse. Neuroscientists believe that the more accurate people are at this task, the better their perception of internal bodily states is. Can our ability to detect our own heartbeat tell us something about our body-image, that is, the conscious and mainly visual representation of how our body looks like?

To answer this question, we, first, measured how good people are at feeling their body from within, using the heartbeat counting task. We then measured how good people are at perceiving their own body-image from the outside, by using a procedure that tricks them into feeling that a fake, rubber hand is their own hand.

The less accurate people were in monitoring their heartbeat, the more they were influenced by the illusion. (…)

It seems that a stable perception of the body from the outside, what is known as “body image”, is partly based on our ability to accurately perceive our body from within, such as our heartbeat.

{ Body in Mind | Continue reading }

photo { Corrado Dalcò }

guide, science | February 10th, 2011