Lenggenhager, B., Tadi, T., Metzinger, T. & Blanke, O. (2007). Video ergo sum: manipulating bodily self-consciousness. Science 317(5841), 1096–1099. DOI 10.1126/science.1143439.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-999.
- From hand to whole body. The rubber hand illusion manipulates ownership and location of a body part, “a part-to-whole relationship”, and so “did not experimentally manipulate selfhood per se”. This experiment aims at the whole body: global self-attribution and global self-localization.
- Synchrony moves felt self-location. In study I, after synchronous stroking participants returned to a point 24.1 ± 9.0 cm (mean ± SEM) toward the seen body, against 12.5 ± 8.5 cm, not significant, after asynchronous stroking. The first three questionnaire items, on where the touch was felt, what caused it, and whether the seen body felt like one’s own, were answered positively only after synchronous stroking.
- Body-likeness matters. In study II, synchronous stroking drew participants toward their own filmed body (17.1 cm) and a mannequin (25.4 cm), but only 14.3 cm, not significant, toward a white rectangular object. People felt the touch on the object but did not feel it was their body. The authors read this as bottom-up integration with a cognitive constraint, “rejecting a pure Bayesian account”.
- Not an out-of-body experience. No participant reported overt disembodiment or a change in visual perspective. The authors call the result closer to heautoscopy and propose that a full out-of-body experience needs more, such as visual-vestibular conflict. Their pointer to the temporo-parietal junction is speculation; nothing was imaged.
- The effects are modest. The drift is about a tenth of the 2 m distance; in study II the own-body condition did not differ between synchronous and asynchronous stroking; and critics in the 2008 e-letters argued that the result may be recognising oneself in a video, not an illusion of ownership.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-19 at the owner’s request to fill the record’s gap around the rubber hand illusion and bodily self-consciousness. It is the experiment that Metzinger’s “Self models” (LIT-450, read in NOTE-372) cites for its claim C6, that body ownership can be manipulated by multisensory conflict and is the simplest form of self-awareness. Metzinger is a co-author. The reading supports the first half of C6 as NOTE-372 graded it, moderate, with smaller and less consistent effects than the citation suggests. The second half, that global ownership is the simplest self-awareness, is imported in this paper from Metzinger’s book, not tested.
It bears on THEORY-064 only in the way that theory’s promote_when already
anticipates: it shows the bodily self-model can be manipulated, not that
it is all a self is. It bears on LIT-1186, an attempted out-of-body
perception study, by drawing a line between illusory self-location and
the disembodiment that defines an out-of-body experience. It carries no
instruction for machine-learning practice.
Filed alongside, in the 2026-10-19 batch on the rubber hand illusion and bodily self-consciousness: Botvinick & Cohen 1998, the rubber hand illusion (LIT-1277); Blanke & Metzinger 2009, minimal phenomenal selfhood (LIT-1274); Apps & Tsakiris 2014, the free-energy self (LIT-1262); Seth 2013, interoceptive inference (LIT-1263).
Filed from this work on 2026-10-20: THEORY-768, on minimal selfhood, as the full-body illusion it leans on.