“Everyone,” William James (1890, p. 402) famously asserted, “knows what attention is.” The same is true of the experience of embodiment: Everyone knows what it’s like to have a body.
The body is a ubiquitous element in perceptual experience and is the most familiar object people encounter. The ubiquity of experience of the body, however, has not translated into clarity or consensus about its fundamental nature. On the contrary, research on bodily awareness has historically been and continues to be plagued by disagreement, confusion, and inconsistent terminology. Despite these difficulties, recent investigations have shed new light on bodily awareness, providing rich insight into this fundamental underpinning of psychological life.
The central difficulty in any empirical study of bodily awareness is the control condition. An ideal experimental investigation would compare two conditions: one in which the participant has a body and another in which he or she does not. For obvious reasons, such “brain-in-a-vat” studies are restricted to thought experiments. The body, as James (1890, p. 242) memorably stated, is “always there.” Recent progress in the study of bodily awareness has resulted from the development of novel methods for circumventing this dilemma and allowing experimental manipulation of bodily awareness and of our conscious model of our body (the body image). Such methods include perceptual techniques, such as the rubber hand illusion (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), and emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (Slater, Perez-Marcos, Ehrsson & Sanchez-Vives, 2009), in which the usual physical laws affecting the body can be altered."
in "What is like to have a body"
by Matthew R Longo and Patrick Haggard
http://bbk.ac.uk/psychology/bodylab/docs/longo&haggard-cdps-2012.pdf
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário