24.2multisensory Disintegration in Out-of-body and Related Experiences of Neurological Origin

The most basic foundations of the self arguably lie in those brain systems that represent the body (Blanke and Metzinger 2009;Damasio 2000; Gallagher 2005; Jeannerod 2006; Knoblich 2002; Metzinger et al. 2007). The representation of the body is complex, involving the encoding and integration of a wide range of multisensory (somatosensory, visual, auditory, vestibular, visceral) and motor signals (Damasio 2000; Gallagher 2005; Metzinger 2003). One’s own body is thus possibly the most multisensory “object” in the world. Importantly, whereas external objects of perception come and go, multisensory bodily inputs are continuously present, and have thus been proposed as the basis for bodily self-consciousness—the nonconceptual and prereflective representation of body-related information (Gallagher 2000; Haggard et al. 2003; Jeannerod 2007; Metzinger et al. 2007; Pacherie 2008).