Mind the Body : An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness

Mind the Body is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. It explores questions such as: How do I perceive my body? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? These questions are vividly illustrated with examples of bodily illusions and puzzling bodily disorders, which lead us to question some of our most basic intuitions.

Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature. Mind the Body is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. Frédérique de Vignemont seeks to answer questions such as: how do I perceive my body? How do I perceive other people''s bodies? Can I really feel your pain? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? Why do I care about it? To what extent can I feel an avatar''s body as my own? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. This volume combines philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science, leading us to question some of our most basic intuitions.