Autoscopy
Encyclopedia
Autoscopy is the experience in which the individual while believing himself to be awake sees his or her body position outside of his body. Autoscopy comes from the ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 αὐτός ("self") and σκοπός ("watcher").

Autoscopy has intrigued humankind from time immemorial and is abundant in the folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

, mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

, and spiritual narratives of most ancient and modern
Modern Age
Modern Age is an American conservative academic quarterly journal, founded in 1957 by Russell Kirk in close collaboration with Henry Regnery...

 societies
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

. Cases of autoscopy are commonly encountered in modern psychiatric practice.

Factors

Experiences - are characterized by the presence of the following three factors:
  • disembodiment , an apparent location of the self outside one's body.
  • impression of seeing the world from an elevated and distanced visuo-spatial perspective
    Perspective (visual)
    Perspective, in context of vision and visual perception, is the way in which objects appear to the eye based on their spatial attributes; or their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects...

     or extracorporeal
    Extracorporeal
    An extracorporeal medical procedure is a medical procedure which is performed outside the body.-Circulatory procedures:A procedure in which blood is taken from a patient's circulation to have a process applied to it before it is returned to the circulation...

    , but egocentric visuo-spatial perspective .
  • impression of seeing one's own body from this perspective, (autoscopy) .


Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.The school was founded by the Swiss Federal Government with the stated mission to:...

 , Lausanne
Lausanne
Lausanne is a city in Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and is the capital of the canton of Vaud. The seat of the district of Lausanne, the city is situated on the shores of Lake Geneva . It faces the French town of Évian-les-Bains, with the Jura mountains to its north-west...

, and Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva , Switzerland , have reviewed some of the classical precipitating factors of autoscopie . These are sleep, drug abuse, and general anesthesia as well neurobiology. They have compared them with recent findings on neurological and neurocognitive mechanisms of the autoscopy. The reviewed data suggest that autoscopies are due to functional disintegration of lower-level multisensory processing and abnormal higher-level self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction. The researchers argue that the experimental investigation of the interactions between these multisensory and cognitive mechanisms in autoscopies and related illusion
Illusion
An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. While illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most people....

s in combination with neuroimaging and behavioral techniques might further our understanding of the central mechanisms of awareness and self-consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

.

Disorders

A related autoscopy disorder known as negative autoscopy (or negative heautoscopy) is a psychological phenomenon in which the sufferer does not see his or her reflection when looking in a mirror. Although the sufferer's image may be seen by others, he or she claims not to see it. This was briefly and scientifically referred to as "Maartechen Syndrome" due to comments resulting from experiment that illustrated this disorder

External links

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