Being aware of our own personality and identity helps us reflect on ourselves, grow in social settings, and guide complex behavior. Yet, the brain mechanisms behind self-awareness are still not well understood.
In contrast, we know more about perceptual awareness—our awareness of sights and sounds around us—which involves the lateral frontoparietal cortex. Self-awareness is thought to rely on a different network and should also be distinguished from unconscious self-related processing, like automatically turning when someone says your name.
To identify brain regions specific to self-awareness, we used two methods: BOLD adaptation, which improves spatial precision in fMRI, and visual masking, which separates conscious from unconscious processing of the same stimuli.
Our results showed that self-awareness activates the medial frontopolar and retrosplenial areas, while perceptual awareness involves the lateral frontoparietal cortex, and unconscious self-processing involves the inferior temporal cortex. This suggests that conceptual self-awareness relies on a distinct brain network, separate from those involved in perceiving the world or processing self-related information without awareness.
Full text:
Tacikowski, P., Berger, C. C., Ehrsson, H. H. (2017). Dissociating the neural basis of conceptual self-awareness from perceptual awareness and unaware self-processing. Cerebral Cortex, 27: 3768-3781. (PDF)
