body awareness

Aida Kiandoost- 20204001

Peter Esther -20202779
 what is body
awareness?

Body awareness is the subjective, phenomenological aspect of proprioception and

interoception that enters conscious awareness and is modifiable by mental
processes including attention, interpretation, appraisal, beliefs, memories,
conditioning, attitudes, and affect.
 Too difficult to really grasp the idea ,No?

At the sensory level we continuously receive a flow of information

about our own body through external and internal perceptions.
Not only can we see our body and touch it, but we also have several
inner receptors that convey information about the position of our
limbs, the balance of our body, and its physiological condition.
Unlike external perception, the inner sensory flow never stops and
cannot be voluntarily controlled. Thus, an important amount of
information is constantly available whether we want it or not, whether
we pay attention to it or not.
 In that respect, our body qualifies as the object that we know best.
Yet, despite numerous sources of information, the phenomenology
of bodily awareness is limited.

So,how close are we with

our body ?
or how much are we aware
of this flow of information
going through our body ?
In painful and learning situations, our body appears at the core of our
interest, but when we walk in the street, we are rarely aware of the
precise position of our legs and of the contact of the floor on our feet.

One may then question whether we are completely unaware of it.

First of all, what makes our relationship with our body unique ?

The body is a material entity located in space and time in the same way as
a rock, a tree or a bird. But do we perceive and experience our body like
those other objects?

One way to characterize it is to say that many

bodies, including our own, can appear to us
from the outside but only our own body
appears to us from the inside.
How can we tune in, feel, or
become aware of our body?
Special Senses

Through sensation Tactile sensation

Proprioception

Balance or equilibrioception

Interoception

body ownership
special senses Tactile sensation

• sight Our tactile sense keeps us in touch

• smell with our environment. Our sense
• taste of touch is derived from a range of
receptors in our skin that take
• hearing
messages about pressure,
• touch
vibration, texture, temperature,
pain.
 Superficial Sensation Deep Sensation Combined Cortical Sensation

pain perception Kinesthesia Awareness Stereognosis perception

Temperature Awareness
Touch Awareness
Pressure perception
Vibration perception
Tactile Localization
Two-point discrimination
Double Simultaneous stimulation
Graphesthesia
Recognition of Texture
Barognosis

Stereognosis : the ability to perceive and recognize the form of an object in the absence of visual and auditory
information, by using tactile information.
Graphesthesia :also called graphagnosia, is the ability to recognize symbols when they're traced on the skin.
Barognosis, or baresthesia, refers to is the ability to perceive and evaluate the weight of objects, or to
differentiate objects of different weights, by holding or lifting them.
 All those bodily sensations listed before describe the
‘anecdotal’ state of the body, so to speak, that is, the state
of the body that keeps changing

However, there is another aspect of bodily awareness, which is

less directly connected to sensory receptors

That is body ownership

imagine having a terrible nightmare in which you are floating in
the sky but then suddenly start falling down. After waking up,
you become aware that you are alive and that all your limbs are
intact. You are aware of your body being here in your bedroom,
no longer floating up in the sky. You also regain awareness that
this body has two legs and two arms that can cycle and swim,
but that cannot fly. You are finally aware that this body is of a
highly peculiar significance for you: it is yours, or maybe even it
is you.
It includes the sense of bodily presence (awareness of one’s
body as being here), the sense of bodily ownership (awareness
of one’s body as being one’s own), and the sense of bodily
agency (awareness of one’s bodily capacities for action). These
senses are rarely at the forefront of consciousness because they
normally do not vary, and thus do not attract attention.
Despite their differences, all bodily experiences seem to display the
same epistemological signature: they ground the immunity to error.
Our senses are subjective and private and that is why we are sure
about them.

For instance, if I think that I am anxious because I feel

anxious, my thought is immune to error through
misidentification of the subject. But if I think that I am
anxious because my psychoanalyst told me so, my
thought is not immune to error. I might start to doubt
that. Indeed, the psychoanalyst may have confused me
with another patient, who is the person suffering from
anxiety.
you are seated around a small
table with several other
persons.
Can you rationally doubt that
they are yours?
If you make this judgment on
the basis only of you seeing
legs, then you can confuse
your legs with the legs of the
person seated next to you. By
contrast, if you make this
judgment because you feel
your legs as being crossed,
then the answer is negative.
 So far we talked about our body from an inside
point of view. The question is how much the
outside world affects our awareness and the
flow of information about our body for us.

Do you know about the rubber hand experience?

Participants in the rubber hand experiment are
aware that the rubber hand is a fake hand and
they rarely endorse the belief that the rubber
hand is their own hand. Vice-versa: some
patients know that their hand belongs to them,
and yet it still seems to them as if it did not, as
described by this patient: ‘my eyes and my
feelings don’t agree, and I must believe my
feelings. I know they look like mine, but I can
feel they are not, and I can’t believe my eyes.
the experiment raises the question about the fact that the inside mode
exclusively results from body senses, with no influence from external senses
maybe is not complete

“Normal’ way of gaining bodily self-knowledge is not on the basis of body

senses only, but rather on the basis of their integration with vision.

the rubber hand illusion, results from the incorrect integration of

somatosensory information and visual information about the
rubber hand. It induces not only a sense of ownership for the
rubber hand, but also proprioceptive drift and referred sensation
of touch.
 This can be explained three major facts about the sensory systems.
First, optimal estimates of bodily properties require combination of information from
various sensory channels.
Second, vision can dominate over proprioception and touch because it often offers more
accurate and precise spatial information.
Third, visual information can affect the phenomenal content of bodily experiences. What
we feel is determined not only by information from body senses, but also by information
from external senses.
Our access to the intrinsic properties of our body is also partly based on vision.
Although it has been claimed that that our body image is nothing more than a collection
of information from body senses, it has been found that blind individuals have a less
accurate representation of the size of their body parts compared to sighted individuals
 so,why did we talk about all this?

• Chronic pain is accompanied by a variety of alterations in body perception. Pain

patients often exhibit distortions in the perception of limb positions and sizes: back
pain patients have problems in delineating the outline of their backs and their body
image is distorted in the painful area (Moseley, 2008)

• Patients with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) suffer from intense pain in
their affected hand and often perceive it as being larger than it actually is (Moseley,
2005).

• Amputees often report pain in their amputated limb and the amount of pain
seems to be related to distorted spatial perception of the limb (Grüsser et
al.,2001).
• Results from CRPS patients show that not only the perception of the body is
affected, but that pain leads to a distorted perception of the peripersonal space
surrounding the body (Reinersmann et al., 2011).

Heightened body awareness can be adaptive

and maladaptive. Improving body awareness
has been suggested as an approach for treating
patients with conditions such as chronic pain,
obesity and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Another important aspect of us knowing more about body awareness is the impact
it has on children development and future disorders that we can prevent with
proper body awareness education.
Children who have problem with body awareness might have difficulty with visual
spatial relations, tracking and reading, knowing their left hand from their right
hand.
thank you for
listening
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