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WHO AM “I”? BOTH BODY AND MIND, NEW RESEARCH SAYS  
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Renzo Lanfranco
December 4, 2025
The Conversation
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_ New research shows why our physical bodies may be a core part of
conscious experience. These results have implications for treatment of
body perception disorders and speak to big-picture theories of
consciousness. _

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Most of us go through the day without thinking much about our bodies
– until something goes wrong. Yet beneath that apparent simplicity
lies a remarkable achievement: the brain must constantly knit together
sights, touches and signals from muscles and joints into a coherent
sense of “this body is mine”.

Psychologists and neuroscientists call this body ownership. It is a
key part of self-consciousness: the feeling of being a self located in
a particular body, separate from the world around you. It’s partly
what makes us different to AI.

For decades, theories have proposed that a lot of this bodily
processing happens outside awareness. It’s a kind of unconscious
process that quietly guides our movements while consciousness focuses
on other things. Now our new study challenges this idea
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interesting insights into theories of consciousness.

Most experiments on consciousness have used flashes of light or
sounds, asking when and how these external stimuli reach awareness
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very little work has directly tested how conscious awareness relates
to the bodily self.

Rubber hand experiments

To investigate this, we used a modern version of the famous rubber
hand illusion [[link removed]]. In this
illusion, a participant’s real hand is hidden from view while a
lifelike rubber hand is placed in front of them. If both hands are
stroked in synchrony, most people begin to feel that the rubber hand
is, strangely, part of their own body.

We built a robotic set-up
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that allowed us to control this illusion with millisecond precision.
In our main experiment, 32 participants saw two rubber hands side by
side, while a robot tapped their real, hidden hand.

On every trial, one rubber hand was tapped in perfect synchrony with
the real hand and the other was tapped with a slight delay – from 18
to 150 milliseconds. After a short sequence of taps, people had to
choose which rubber hand felt more like their own. Then they rated how
clear that feeling was.

This gave us two things to compare. One was objective performance –
how accurately people’s feeling of hand ownership could tell which
hand matched their real hand’s timing. The second was subjective
awareness – how clearly they reported feeling that sense of
ownership.

If a lot of body ownership processing happens unconsciously, we might
expect people to be more likely to pick the correct rubber hand, even
when they report only a vague or unclear feeling of ownership.

[Illustration of the rubber hand illusion]
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The rubber hand illusion with two rubber hands presented
simultaneously. Illustration by Mattias Karlén, CC BY
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That is not what we found. As we increased the lack of synchrony
between the real and fake hands, people became better at picking the
“correct” hand. Crucially, their awareness ratings improved in
lockstep.

Both objective performance and reported clarity started to rise at
around 30 milliseconds of mismatch. Below that, people were
essentially guessing; above that, they both chose more accurately and
reported clearer feelings of ownership.

In other words, as soon as the brain started to reliably tell the
difference between “my hand” and “not my hand”, people’s
conscious experience reflected that difference. We did not see the
common pattern reported in visual studies, where unconscious
processing can occur before stimuli reach awareness
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Body ownership vs timing

To test whether this was really about body ownership – rather than
simply noticing timing – we ran two control experiments. When we
rotated the rubber hands into an anatomically impossible position, the
illusion disappeared and people mostly reported no clear feeling of
ownership, regardless of timing.

And when we replaced the hands with wooden blocks and asked people to
judge simultaneity instead of ownership, their awareness no longer
tracked their performance as tightly. This suggests that strong
conscious access is specific to body ownership, not just to any kind
of multisensory integration.

In further experiments, we asked whether the same close relationship
holds when body ownership builds up gradually. In one study, we varied
how many taps people received before making their choice. More taps
meant more sensory evidence. As expected, their ability to
discriminate ownership improved with more touches. But again, their
awareness ratings improved proportionally.

Taken together, our findings point to a simple but powerful
conclusion: for body ownership, consciousness seems to have
continuous, privileged access to the relevant information.

This contrasts with many studies of vision and hearing, where stimuli
can be processed and influence behaviour without ever entering
awareness. It suggests that the bodily self may occupy a special place
in our conscious lives.

One reason may be that body ownership is intrinsically self-related:
it anchors a first-person perspective in space and underpins almost
everything else we experience. Another is that it depends on complex
integration across many senses, which may require the kind of
widespread brain activation associated with conscious experience
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Implications for mental health

Understanding how body ownership and awareness are linked is not just
a philosophical exercise. Distortions of bodily self-perception are
common in conditions such as schizophrenia
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eating disorders
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borderline personality disorder
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spectrum disorders
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people may feel alienated from their bodies or misperceive their size,
shape or boundaries. Our work offers new tools to study how finely
tuned the system is.

The findings also resonate with rapidly developing technologies in
virtual reality and prosthetics. Many applications aim to “embody”
a user in a digital or artificial body. Knowing that body ownership is
tightly tied to awareness suggests that successful embodiment will
depend on keeping multisensory signals aligned in a way that sustains
a clear, conscious sense of “this is me”.

Finally, our results speak to big-picture theories of consciousness.
If information about our own body is almost always admitted into
awareness, this supports the idea that maintaining a stable, embodied
self may be one of the core functions of conscious experience. This
perspective ultimately highlights a key gap between humans and current
artificial systems, challenging the idea that AI – at least in its
current forms – could resemble human consciousness.[The
Conversation]

_Renzo Lanfranco_
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Principal Researcher, Department of Clinical Neuroscience,
__Karolinska Institutet_
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_This article is republished from __The Conversation_
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the __original article_
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The Conversation is a nonprofit, independent news organization
dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good.
Get fact-based journalism written by experts in your inbox each
morning with a __Conversation newsletter_
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