Where exactly in your body are YOU?

Posted on March 14, 2014

Although you probably consider all of your body is yours, if you're like most people, you also have a feeling that your very essence, your self, is more localised. Past research has turned up mixed findings for where exactly this spot is. In some studies people say they are located in their head, near the eyes. Other research has found that people consider the self to be located in the chest. The varied results are probably partly due to the different methods used. Some studies have focused on people's judgments about their own essence; others have involved participants marking the location of another person's self on a drawing of the body.

Although participants showed a clear bias for the upper chest and upper face, they tended to be inconsistent and to vary their choices between the two. "Each of the two regions has a high degree of functional salience which explains their status as natural candidates for self-location judgments," the researchers said.

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Source material from British Psychological Society