It’s Movement all the Way Down: Broken Rhythms and Embodied Selfhood in Depersonalization

From the moment we are born, and even before, in the womb, and until our last breath, our bodies move all the time. Adaptive behaviors necessarily depend not only on successful integration of multisensory bodily signals but also on how we move our body in the world. This paper considers the notion of embodied selfhood through the perspective of dynamic and rhythmic coupling between bodily movements and bodily actions. We propose a new theoretical framework suggesting that the dynamic coupling between bodily movements and bodily actions in the world are fundamental in constructing and maintaining a coherent sense of self. To support this idea, we use the Predictive Processing (PP) and Active Inference framework as our background theoretical canvas. Specifically, we will focus on the phenomenon of somatosensory attenuation in relation to dynamic selfhood, and argue that rhythmic bodily signals such as heartbeats, breathing, and walking patterns are predictable and thus, can be smoothly attenuated, i.e. processed in the background. We illustrate this hypothesis by discussing the case of Depersonalisation Disorder as a failure to self-attenuate self-related information processing, leading to feelings of unreality and self loss. Because living systems such as human bodies are finite systems resisting entropy, it is crucial to strike a balance between what sensory information to ignore, and what sensory information to prioritize on the fly. Hence the vital role of the phenomenon of somatosensory attenuation linked to dynamic embodied selfhood, which is designed precisely to deal with this fine balance between attending and dis-attending self- and world-related information in time. When this fragile balance is disrupted, instead of fixing the self alone, or the individual per se, one needs to address the relationship between the individuals’ sense of self, bodily movements and bodily actions in the physical and social world. We conclude with potential implications of our hypothesis for therapy.