The talk will be broadly divided into two parts. In the first part, I will discuss work investigating the perceptual consequences of vision of one’s own body. In particular, I will focus on our finding that seeing the body is analgesia for acute pain, reducing the perceived intensity of pain and associated neural responses. I will discuss evidence that this effect may be due to visually-induced modulation of inhibitory interneuron activity in somatosensory cortex. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss research investigating distorted body representations in healthy adults. Misperceptions and delusions about one's own body are characteristic of numerous psychiatric and neurological conditions. Such phenomena have long fascinated researchers, in large part because of their sheer strangeness. Our body is so ubiquitous in our perceptual experience and so intimately known to us, it is difficult to imagine not having accurate knowledge of it. In this talk, I will discuss several recent experiments that have shown, in striking contrast to this intuition, that our brain maintains highly distorted representations of the body, used for perceptual tasks including position sense and tactile size perception.

Matt Longo