Psychodynamic Neuropsychology: Anosognosia as Faulty, Wishful Inference
Katerina Fotopoulou
ICN, UCL, London, UK.
In this talk I will briefly consider the neuropsychological insights on self-awareness generated by the unlikely marriage of psychoanalysis and computational neuroscience. I present a set of experimental and voxel-based, lesion mapping studies on 'anosognosia for hemiplegia' and 'somatoparaphrenia' (total N = 40) in order to examine how inferential processes may determine our body perception. I specifically consider (a) the deep interdependency of prior beliefs and sensory data; as the brain uses sensory data to update its virtual model of the world, lack or imprecision of sensory prediction errors may lead to aberrant inferences influenced disproportionally by outdated, wishful predictions about the premorbid body; (b) interoception and interoceptive salience have a unique role in our inferences about body awareness and (c) social, Œobjectified¹ prior beliefs about the body may have a silent but potent role in our bodily self-awareness.