Mind the Body

Book excerpt: Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature. Mind the Body is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. Fr�d�rique de Vignemont seeks to answer questions such as: how do I perceive my body? How do I perceive other people's bodies? Can I really feel your pain? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? Why do I care about it? To what extent can I feel an avatar's body as my own? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. This volume combines philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science, leading us to question some of our most basic intuitions.