The Felt Presence experience: From cognition to the clinic
November 7, 2022 Joseph M Barnby, Sohee Park, Tatiana Baxter et al. 1 citation preprint
The felt presence (FP) experience—the sense that someone else is nearby without sensory evidence—ranges from benevolent to distressing and can be personified or ambiguous. FP occurs in neuropsychological conditions, psychosis, paranoia, sleep paralysis, anxiety, endurance sports, and spiritualist communities. This review covers philosophical, phenomenological, clinical, and non-clinical aspects of FP, along with psychometric, cognitive, and neurophysiological measurement methods. It presents current mechanistic explanations, proposes a unifying cognitive framework, and identifies outstanding questions. FP provides a window into the cognitive neuroscience of own-body awareness and social agency detection, an intuitive but poorly understood experience in health and disorder.