I overthink—therefore I am not: Altered Sense of Self and Agency in Depersonalisation Disorder (original) (raw)
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Depersonalization - Self and Sensation.
2010
This paper examines the history and philosophy of a little-known psychological experience: depersonalization. It explores it as a phenomenal experience and as a disorder. It examines nosological debates over the condition, both past and present. It presents speculative hypotheses about phenomenal consciousness, the self and sensation.
Feeling Unreal: Cognitive Processes in Depersonalization
American Journal of Psychiatry, 2000
Objective: Depersonalization disorder is characterized by a detachment from one's sense of self and one's surroundings that leads to considerable distress and impairment yet an intact testing of reality. Depersonalized individuals often report difficulties in perception, concentration, and memory; however, data on their cognitive profiles are lacking. Method: Fifteen patients with depersonalization disorder were compared to 15 matched normal comparison subjects on a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery that assessed cognitive function. Results: The subjects with depersonalization disorder showed a distinct cognitive profile. They performed significantly worse than the comparison subjects on certain measures of attention, short-term visual and verbal memory, and spatial reasoning within the context of comparable intellectual abilities. Conclusions: The authors propose that depersonalization involves alterations in the attentional and perceptual systems, specifically in the ability to effortfully control the focus of attention. These early encoding deficits are hypothesized to have a deleterious effect on the short-term memory system; they manifest as deficits in the ability to take in new information but not in the ability to conceptualize and manipulate previously encoded information.
Depersonalization and the sense of bodily ownership
Routledge eBooks, 2022
Depersonalization and the sense of bodily ownership (7680 including footnotes, excluding bibliography) Alexandre Billon Routledge Handbook of Bodily awareness, Alsmith A. and Longo M. (ed.) This is a pre peer-reviewed version, please quote the published version Depersonalization consists in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, and his mind, and even from himself. Even though, when it was discovered at the end of the 19th century, this psychiatric condition was widely used to probe certain aspects of bodily awareness, and more specifically the sense of bodily ownership (SBO), it has been strangely neglected in contemporary debates. In this chapter, I argue that because of three specific features, depersonalization raises some important challenges for current theories of the SBO. The first feature-call it "generality"-is that depersonalization does not only affect the sense of bodily ownership but also, typically, the sense of ``mental ownership'' (SMO), the sense of agency or ``action ownership'' (SOA), and the subject's core sense of herself (CSS), that is, her awareness of herself as an I. The second feature is that except for the symptoms of depersonalization, depersonalized patients are hard to distinguish, psychologically, from normal subjects. This makes it hard to find psychological features that might explain their condition. The last feature, call it "fundamentality" is that the psychological features that do seem abnormal among depersonalized patients seem more likely to be explained by depersonalization than to explain it. These three features raise three challengesthe centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge, and the grounding challenge. Taken together, I will argue, these challenges suggest that the SBO depends on a form of phenomenal "mineness" that would mark my mental states as mine and that cannot be accounted for in sensorimotor, cognitive, or even affective terms. A phenomenal mineness that indeed seems to be psychologically primitive, and only accountable in neurophysiological terms.
Depersonalization Disorder, Affective Processing and Predictive Coding
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2018
A flood of new multidisciplinary work on the causes of depersonalization disorder (DPD) provides a new way to think about the feeling that experiences Bbelong^to the self. In this paper I argue that this feeling, baptized Bmineness^(Billon 2013, 2018a, b) or Bsubjective presence^(Seth, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11): 565-573, 2013) emerges from a multilevel interaction between emotional, affective and cognitive processing. The Bself^to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the world. When the world no longer produces predicted affect, the organism needs to explain or explain this unpredicted absence of feeling away. It is important to this account that cognition and perception are otherwise intact. Consequently the mind's representation of the world and its emotionally salient properties are unchanged, leading the mind to predict a characteristic affective response. When that prediction is not fulfilled the organisms feels as if she is no longer present in experience. This is reported at the as feeling of depersonalization.
Emotion and the Unreal Self: Depersonalization Disorder and De-Affectualization
Emotion Review, 2012
Depersonalization disorder (DPD) is a psychiatric condition in which there is a pervasive change in the quality of subjective experience, in the absence of psychosis. The core complaint is a persistent and disturbing feeling that experience of oneself and the world has become empty, lifeless, and not fully real. A greatly reduced emotional responsivity, or “de-affectualization,” is frequently described. This article examines the phenomenology and neurobiology of DPD with a particular emphasis on the emotional aspects. It is argued that the study of DPD may provide valuable insights into the relationship between emotion, experience, and identity.
Inside-out Minds: Consciousness, Attention, and Depersonalization
Depersonalization disorder (DPD), which results in a specific impairment and modification in the construction of self and representation of the body and external world, is close to a model system to investigate the structure of phenomenal consciousness, but has been almost completely neglected by philosophers of consciousness. This is due to persistent misinformation on the nature of the disorder, an underestimation of its prevalence, and extreme difficulty in accurately expressing and understanding the anomalous experiences of its sufferers in the technical language and pre-framed problems of philosophy of mind. Having intimate and long-term personal experience of depersonalization, I hope to both clear up some of this misunderstanding and give compelling reasons why the intensive study of this disorder is imperative to gain much needed empirical information illuminating the relationship between phenomenal consciousness, attention, and self-representation.
Depersonalization Puzzle: A New View from the Neurophenomenological Selfhood Perspective
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
While there is still a limited understanding of the Selfhood phenomenon, an emerging consensus is that the experiential Selfhood refers to a sense of the undergoing experience in its implicit firstperson mode of givenness that is immediately and tacitly given as "mine". It is also evident that there are phenomenological disruptions within self-consciousness ranging from normal everyday short-lived dissociative episodes to pathological, intense and prolonged forms of dissociative experience classified as depersonalization disorder (DD). In the present study we explored the neurophenomenology of Selfhood (using the recently introduced neurophysiological threedimensional construct model of experiential Selfhood, Fingelkurts et al., 2020) in a newly diagnosed and untreated 29-year-old female who suffers from DD. According to the triad model of Selfhood, three major components of Selfhood (phenomenal first-person agency-"Self", embodiment-"Me", and reflection/narration-"I") are related to three operational modules (OMs) of the self-referential brain network (reliably estimated by electroencephalogram operational synchrony analysis). We have found that subject with DD exhibited a strong enhancement of functional integrity of the brain Self-module, a moderate decrease in the functional integrity of Memodule, and a pronounced decrease in the functional integrity of I-module,-all of which were associated with severity of specific DD symptoms.
Anomalous Self-and World Experiences in Depersonalization Traits: a Qualitative Study
This paper proposes a qualitative study exploring anomalous self and world-experiences in individuals with high levels of depersonalization traits. Depersonalization (DP) is a condition characterized by distressing feelings of being a detached, neutral and disembodied onlooker of one's mental and bodily processes or even of reality itself ('derealization'). Feelings of depersonalization are extremely common in the general population, yet under-acknowledged and under-examined. Our findings indicate the presence of a wide range of anomalous experiences traditionally understood to be core features of depersonalization, such as disembodiment and disrupted self-awareness. However, our results also indicate experiential features that are less highlighted in previous work, such as faster time perception and blurriness of the self/other boundaries which may play a key role in altering one's sense of self and sense of presence in the world. Our qualitative study provides an in-depth examination of self-reported disturbances of one's relatedness to one's self and the world, thereby shedding further light on the nature of altered subjective experiences in DP. In doing so, this paper draws attention to key aspects yet overlooked that may prove valuable for potential diagnosis and therapy. We conclude by highlighting limitations of this study and a number of open questions that further work needs to address in the future, in order to better understand this condition and to improve the quality of life of those experiencing depersonalization.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2018
So long as I maintain the ordinary modes of experience such as walking or eating, the body appears to me as something inseparable from myself. Through and with the body I act in the world, and through and from the body I perceive the world. However, this is not the case in the pathological condition known as depersonalization/ derealization disorder (DD). People with DD frequently claim that their self is disconnected from the body and their bodily actions feel like those of a robot. This symptom raises an important question about the paradigm of the embodied self, which is whether the union of body and self is contingent or not. In this paper, I describe the split between the self and body experienced in DD, then compare it with experiences of the full-body illusion, in which the self is perceived to be located 240 S. TANAKA out of the physical body. Through this comparison, it is made clear that the self in DD is not totally disembodied even though the basic sense of self has gone through a qualitative change.