During the rubber hand illusion (RHI), subjects experience an artificial hand as part of their own body, while the real hand is subject to a sort of’disembodiment’. Can this altered belief about the body also affect physiological mechanisms involved in body-ownership, such as motor control? Here we ask whether the excitability of the motor pathways to the real (disembodied) hand are affected by the illusion. Our results show that the amplitude of the motor-evoked potentials recorded from the real hand is significantly reduced, with respect to baseline, when subjects in the synchronous (but not in the asynchronous) condition experience the fake hand as their own. This finding contributes to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between body-ownership and motor system, and provides the first physiological evidence that a significant drop in motor excitability in M1 hand circuits accompanies the disembodiment of the real hand during the RHI experience.

Decreased motor cortex excitability mirrors own hand disembodiment during the rubber hand illusion / F. della Gatta, F. Garbarini, G. Puglisi, A. Leonetti, A. Berti, P. Borroni. - In: ELIFE. - ISSN 2050-084X. - 5:October 2016(2016 Oct 20).

Decreased motor cortex excitability mirrors own hand disembodiment during the rubber hand illusion

F. della Gatta
Primo
;
G. Puglisi;A. Leonetti;P. Borroni
Ultimo
2016

Abstract

During the rubber hand illusion (RHI), subjects experience an artificial hand as part of their own body, while the real hand is subject to a sort of’disembodiment’. Can this altered belief about the body also affect physiological mechanisms involved in body-ownership, such as motor control? Here we ask whether the excitability of the motor pathways to the real (disembodied) hand are affected by the illusion. Our results show that the amplitude of the motor-evoked potentials recorded from the real hand is significantly reduced, with respect to baseline, when subjects in the synchronous (but not in the asynchronous) condition experience the fake hand as their own. This finding contributes to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between body-ownership and motor system, and provides the first physiological evidence that a significant drop in motor excitability in M1 hand circuits accompanies the disembodiment of the real hand during the RHI experience.
body ownership; human; magnetic transcranical stimulation-; neuroscience; primary motor cortex; Neuroscience (all); medicine (all); immunology and microbiology (all); n'biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology (all)
Settore BIO/09 - Fisiologia
20-ott-2016
Article (author)
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/450342
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