Empathy and embodied self: Neural underpinnings of interpersonal relations
European Psychiatry November 17, 2023 V. Gallese
Schizophrenia involves disturbances in the minimal, bodily self—the pre-reflective sense of one's own body as one's own. Anomalies in multisensory integration and in the differential processing of self-related versus other-related bodily information may blur the distinction between self and other. This imbalance in the embodied self's pre-reflective relationship to the social world could underlie the self-disturbances and social deficits characteristic of schizophrenia. Cognitive neuroscience can now correlate first-person experiential aspects of psychiatric diseases with their neurobiological roots, adding a new descriptive level to classic psychopathology.