Cognitive Neuroscience of Body and Self – Henrik Ehrsson Group

Our research aims to understand how the human brain generates the experience of one’s limbs and body as belonging to oneself. We characterize the neural mechanisms and computations that integrate sensory signals from different modalities into a coherent perceptual representation of the body, using psychophysics, neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and computational modeling. Our findings advance understanding of bodily self-awareness and inform clinical and technological applications.

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Set-up of perceptual illusion experiment with two persons on beds and two observers
Brain, Body and Self lab
Photo: Staffan Larsson
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Brain, Body and Self lab

The Brain, Body, and Self Lab focuses on investigating the cognitive processes and brain mechanisms that underlie our perceptual awareness of our own bodies. Our research has unveiled significant insights into the perceptual and computational principles that determine bodily self-awareness, the associated cortical and subcortical networks, and the impact of bodily self-representation on higher cognitive functions, including episodic memory, sense of self-location, and self-concept.

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We study the sense of self, body representation, and the human brain. Based at Karolinska Institutet, led by Henrik Ehrsson.

Our research

The Ehrsson group investigates how the human brain generates the coherent perception of one's own body and the sense of being located within it. This work addresses a central question in neuroscience: how distributed sensory signals from vision, touch, proprioception, and interoception are integrated into the unified, conscious experience of being an embodied self. Combining psychophysics, neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and computational modeling, we study the neural and perceptual mechanisms that integrate multisensory body signals across different levels of description, from the activity of local neural populations underlying limb ownership to the neurocognitive processes linking bodily self-perception with memory, consciousness, and identity.

Goal

Our aim is to identify the perceptual and neural mechanisms that give rise to the coherent experience of one’s own body as distinct from the external environment (the sense of body ownership). We study how the brain constructs and updates a representation of one’s own body by integrating visual, tactile, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals into a coherent central body representation. A central question concerns how a unified sense of owning a single body emerges from the perception of its parts, and how body ownership interacts with self-location to generate the experience of being situated within the body in space. We also examine the relationship between voluntary movement and body ownership, for example, how sensory predictions accompanying movement shape perception of one’s own body, and how the sense of controlling one’s own actions (sense of agency) relates to the sense of ownership. Addressing these questions is fundamental for understanding how the brain distinguishes self from non-self and transforms distributed sensory signals into the unified, conscious experience of being an embodied self.

Beyond these core questions, we investigate how the neural representation of the bodily self interacts with higher cognitive processes related to the self, such as episodic memory, conscious awareness, and self-concept, and how disturbances in these interactions may contribute to neuropsychiatric symptoms. Understanding these interactions is fundamental because the sense of being an embodied self provides the experiential and neural foundation for higher forms of self-awareness, social cognition, and identity.

Our research on the fundamental mechanisms of bodily self-perception has broader impact for neuroscience, medicine, and technology. By revealing how the brain integrates sensory information to form a coherent experience of one’s own body, distinct from the extenral environent, our work advances understanding of the neural basis of selfhood and conscious experience. These insights also inform clinical neuroscience by providing experimental models for conditions involving disturbed bodily self-perception, such as limb disownership after stroke, eating disorders, and schizophrenia. Finally, our findings guide brain-technology integration, supporting the development of prosthetic limbs and virtual embodiment systems that enhance the sense of ownership over artificial or virtual bodies.

Experimental and Theoretical Approach 

The Ehrsson group studies the neural basis of the perception of one’s own body using behavioral, neuroimaging, electrophysiological, brain stimulation, and computational experiments in human participants. Because complex aspects of bodily perception, such as the feeling that a limb belongs to oneself or the perceived size, shape, and numerosity of body parts, cannot be directly manipulated through physical means, we use controlled bodily illusions that allow systematic alteration of these perceptual dimensions. These include the classical rubber hand illusion and several paradigms discovered in our laboratory, such as the out-of-body, three-arm, body-swap, and Barbie Doll illusions.

By integrating these paradigms with robotically controlled sensory stimulation and psychophysical modeling, we quantify fine-grained changes in perceived body ownership and other dimensions of bodily perception with high precision, allowing us to measure subtle perceptual effects objectively in individual participants. This approach allows us to isolate the perceptual and learning processes that shape the sense of one's own body and to develop computational models describing how the brain infers and updates the bodily self.

We formalize body ownership as a problem of causal inference, in which the brain continuously estimates the probability that observed sensory signals originate from one's own body based on multisensory correlations, temporal synchrony, and prior expectations about body structure and capabilities. This psychophysical framework also enables us to combine objective behavioral measures with participants’ subjective ratings of perceptual clarity, allowing us to quantify both the sensory discrimination and the experienced vividness of body ownership, thereby linking measurable perceptual processes with the subjective experience of bodily self-perception.

Combining behavioral and computational methods with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has revealed how multisensory integration within premotor-posterior parietal and subcortical networks gives rise to body ownership, following probabilistic principles of perceptual inference.  By integrating the spatial precision of fMRI with the millisecond temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), we can characterize both where and when body-ownership computations occur in the brain. EEG experiments have shown that alpha-band oscillations constrain the temporal precision of sensory integration underlying bodily self-perception, while MEG has revealed how body-ownership-related activity patterns unfold dynamically across the brain with millisecond resolution.

Electrocorticography (ECoG), which provides high-quality neurophysiological signals from electrodes placed directly on the cortical surface in neurological patients, has linked the sense of limb ownership to increased high-gamma power—an index of local neuronal population firing—in premotor and posterior parietal cortex.

Brain stimulation with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) allows us to perturb or modulate local brain activity at specific timings, oscillatory frequencies, or anatomical locations. These interventions affect behavioral markers of body-ownership perception and learning, enabling us to test causal mechanistic relationships between activity in premotor and posterior parietal regions and the computations underlying body-ownership experience.

Our neuroimaging studies have also demonstrated that body ownership and self-location depend on two interacting systems: lateral fronto-parietal circuits supporting body ownership and medial parieto-retrosplenial-hippocampal circuits supporting bodily self-location. Together, these systems give rise to the “in-body” experience of being located within one’s own body at a specific position in space.

Finally, we investigate how the sense of bodily self influences higher cognitive functions related to the self, including episodic memory, conscious awareness, social cognition, and self-concept. For example, we study how fragmentation of bodily self-representation disrupts episodic memory encoding and retrieval, and how transiently experiencing another person’s body as one’s own can alter self-concept and identity. This work builds on the theoretical framework of embodied cognition, which holds that higher-order aspects of selfhood are grounded in the brain’s multisensory and spatial representation of the body. From a neuroscience perspective, we examine how interactions between fronto-parietal multisensory networks, medial prefrontal regions representing conceptual aspects of the self, and hippocampal–retrosplenial circuits that link memory and experience across time and space give rise to the continuity of self-experience. Experimentally, immersive full body-illusion paradigms allow us to manipulate body ownership and self-location to test how changes in the embodied self causally influence memory processes and conceptual representations of identity. Together, these findings reveal the interplay between bodily self-perception and higher-order cognitive representations of the self.

In summary, our research program seeks to develop a comprehensive understanding of how the brain creates the experience of being a self in a body. Through the integration of neuroscience and computational theory, controlled experimentation, and multimodal brain imaging and brain stimulation, we aim to bridge the gap between the neural mechanisms of multisensory processing and the phenomenal experience of embodied selfhood, advancing both fundamental neuroscience and its applications to clinical treatment and human-technology integration.

Selected reading

Neural Substrates of Body Ownership and Agency during Voluntary Movement.
Abdulkarim Z, Guterstam A, Hayatou Z, Ehrsson HH
J Neurosci 2023 Mar;43(13):2362-2380

Causal Inference of Body Ownership in the Posterior Parietal Cortex.
Chancel M, Iriye H, Ehrsson HH
J Neurosci 2022 Sep;42(37):7131-7143

Direct Electrophysiological Correlates of Body Ownership in Human Cerebral Cortex.
Guterstam A, Collins KL, Cronin JA, Zeberg H, Darvas F, Weaver KE, Ojemann JG, Ehrsson HH
Cereb Cortex 2019 Mar;29(3):1328-1341

Hierarchical and dynamic relationships between body part ownership and full-body ownership.
O'Kane SH, Chancel M, Ehrsson HH
Cognition 2024 May;246():105697

Posterior cingulate cortex integrates the senses of self-location and body ownership.
Guterstam A, Björnsdotter M, Gentile G, Ehrsson HH
Curr Biol 2015 Jun;25(11):1416-25

Bodily disownership is associated with self-concept fragmentation.
Tacikowski P, Ehrsson HH
iScience 2025 Jul;28(7):112805

Sense of own body shapes neural processes of memory encoding and reinstatement.
Iriye H, Chancel M, Ehrsson HH
Cereb Cortex 2024 Jan;34(1):

The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness
Ehrsson HH (2022). Chapter 15 Bodily illusions. A. J. T. Alsmith & M. R. Longo. The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness, pp.201 - 229, 2022, 9780429321542.

Publications

All publications from group members

Staff and contact

Group leader

All members of the group

Students

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August Hägerdal

Medical Student

August Hägerdal is a medical student at the Karolinska Institutet that is conducting an internship in the lab. August is working with Renzo Lanfranco and Henrik Ehrsson on a project about rubber hand illusion and EEG.

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Xiaole Luan

Biomedical Student

Xiaole Luan is a student in Master’s Programme in Biomedicine at Karolinska Institutet. She is conducting a research internship on electrophysiological and psychophysical signatures of the sense of limb ownership, supervised by Renzo Lanfranco and Henrik Ehrsson.

Contact and visit us

Contact information for the Ehrsson Lab at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

Postal address

Karolinska Institutet
Department of Neuroscience
SE-171 77 Stockholm

Visiting address (visitors, couriers, etc.)

Karolinska Institutet
Biomedicum, D4
Solnavägen 9, SE-171 65 Solna

Delivery address (goods, parcels, etc.)

Biomedicum
Tomtebodavägen 16, SE-171 65 Solna

Karolinska Institutet, Biomedicum, Solnavägen 9

Our laboratory

Our laboratory, located in Biomedicum at Karolinska Institutet, is dedicated to experimental neuroscience of bodily self-perception in humans. It includes a large virtual and augmented reality facility designed for full-body illusion experiments, equipped with high-resolution head-mounted displays, motion-tracking systems, robotic tactile stimulators, and multi-camera video recording setups.

For psychophysics experiments, the laboratory features three robotically controlled setups for investigating the sense of limb ownership using the rubber hand illusion and similar bodily illusions. These setups can deliver precisely timed tactile stimulation to the participant’s real and artificial hands and can be combined with EEG or TMS for studying neural mechanisms of body ownership.

All testing rooms are equipped for psychophysiological recordings, including multichannel electromyography, skin conductance, skin temperature, heartbeat monitoring, eye tracking, and magnetic motion capture. The laboratory also houses a Nd:YAP laser stimulator (Stimul 1340 Neurolas, Deka) for selective activation of nociceptive afferents, as well as custom-built force-perception devices with high-precision sensors.

We also operate a state-of-the-art brain stimulation and electrophysiology laboratory with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS; Magstim) and neuronavigation, high-density 128-channel electroencephalography (EEG; BioSemi), and transcranial electrical stimulation systems (tDCS, tACS, tRNS). These facilities enable causal investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying body ownership and multisensory integration.

Functional brain imaging is conducted in collaboration with local facilities, including the 3 T Siemens Prisma system at the Stockholm University Brain Imaging Center and the GE SIGNA Premier XT at the Karolinska MR-Centre. Our group also has access to an ultra-high-field 7 T Siemens MAGNETOM Terra X scanner at Karolinska for high-resolution structural and functional imaging. MR-compatible setups developed in our laboratory allow psychophysics and body illusion experiments inside the scanner, using robotic tactile stimulation, motion tracking, and physiological recording.

For magnetoencephalography, we use the 306-channel Elekta Neuromag TRIUX system at the National Facility for Magnetoencephalography (NatMEG), equipped with complementary physiological sensors and robotic systems for tactile stimulation with high temporal precision. This enables millisecond-level investigation of dynamic brain processes associated with bodily self-perception.

Our experimental infrastructure is continuously developed and maintained by our research engineer, Martti Mercurio, whose expertise in mechanics, electronics, programming, and mechatronics is essential for building and integrating the laboratory’s advanced robotic, virtual reality, and neurophysiological systems. Martti also develops our custom VR-based setups involving head-mounted displays, cameras, and video signal processing, as well as robotic platforms for controlled sensory stimulation. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.

National and international collaborations

The group engages in national and international collaborations that contribute complementary expertise in neuroscience, computational modeling, and clinical science, enhancing the breadth and impact of our research. Selected examples are presented below.

International collaborations

Prof. Andrés Canales-Johnson (University of Cambridge, UK) – Collaboration on consciousness science and information-theoretic analyses of neural data, including co-information and synergy measures applied to bodily self-awareness.

Prof. Wei Ji Ma (New York University, USA) – Collaboration on Bayesian causal inference and computational modeling of multisensory body perception and perceptual decision-making.

Prof. Jeffrey Ojemann (University of Washington, USA) – Collaboration on electrocorticography (ECoG) studies investigating the neural dynamics of body ownership and self-related processing in neurological patients.

Dr. Marie Chancel (CNRS Marseille, France) – Joint projects on Bayesian and probabilistic models of body ownership, integrating psychophysics with computational theory.

Dr. Pawel Tacikowski (University of Coimbra, Portugal) – Collaborative research on self-perception, conceptual self-representation, and the interaction between body ownership and higher cognitive functions.

Collaborations at Karolinska Institutet

Prof. Karin Jensen, Department of Clinical Neuroscience – Joint studies on pain, nociception, and body representation in clinical and experimental populations.

Prof. Daniel Lundqvist, Department of Clinical Neuroscience – Collaboration on magnetoencephalography (MEG) to characterize the temporal dynamics of body ownership.

Dr. Renzo Lanfranco, Department of Clinical Neuroscience – Collaborative work on psychophysics, metacognition, and consciousness in body ownership and perceptual awareness.

Dr. Konstantina Kilteni, Department of Neuroscience and Donders Institute, the Netherlands – Ongoing projects on sensorimotor integration, prediction, and sensory attenuation of self-touch.

Funding

The lab is currently funded through Henrik Ehrsson’s ongoing grants:

  • Distinguished Professor Grant, Swedish Research Council
  • Project Grant, Hjärnfonden and Torsten Söderberg's Foundation
  • Funding from Karolinska Institutet (KID and other internal souces)

Previous major funding includes a Starting Grant (2008–2013) and an Advanced Grant (2019–2024) from the European Research Council, as well as support from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (2008–2013), the Human Frontier Science Program (2009–2011), and the James S. McDonnell Foundation (2011–2017).

Work with us

Job opportunities

Applications for external postdoc fellowships

If you are interested in joining the group as a post-doc you should contact Henrik Ehrsson at least one year in advance of the planned start date.

Please submit your CV, the names of two references, and a short description of why you want to join our group and what kind of project you would like to conduct.

There are several possible sources of funding for which you can apply to do post-doctoral research, most of which have deadlines of up to one year in advance of starting the project.

Possible sources of personal funding

  • HFSP Long-Term Fellowships, Deadline in August
  • EU Marie Curie Fellowships, Deadline in August:
  • International Incoming Fellowships, for applicants from outside the EU
  • Intra-European Fellowships, for applicants from within the EU
  • Wennergren Foundation, Deadline early October
  • Hjärnfonden, Deadline in June (a Swedish PhD is a eligibility criterion)

Applications for Student Internships

For students (at BSc or MSc level) interested in conducting a student internship in the lab, please contact Henrik Ehrsson.

Include a CV and brief motivation for why you would like to conduct an internship in the lab.

Please note that we normally do not consider internships that are shorter than 3 months (with an exception for summer students where 8 weeks is the minimum).

Summer students should contact Henrik Ehrsson before 31 January each year.

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Henrik Ehrsson

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