Sensory incongruence leading to hand disownership modulates somatosensory cortical processing

The sense of body ownership is based on integration of multimodal sensory information, including tactile sensation, proprioception, and vision. Distorted body ownership contributes to the development of chronic pain syndromes and possibly symptoms of psychiatric disease. However, the effects of disownership on cortical processing of somatosensory information are unknown. In the present study, we created a “disownership” condition in healthy individuals by manipulating the visual information indicating the location of the subject's own left hand using a mirror box and examined the influence of this disownership on cortical responses to electrical stimulation of the left index finger using magnetoencephalography (MEG). The event-related magnetic field in the right primary somatosensory cortex at approximately 50 msec (M50) after stimulus was enhanced under the disownership condition. The present results suggest that M50 reflects a cortical incongruence detection mechanism involving integration of sensory inputs from visual and proprioceptive systems. This signal may be valuable for future studies of the mechanisms underlying sense of body ownership and the role that disrupted sense of ownership has in neurological disease.