Goal(s) in the NOM
Investigate the role of bodily (minimal) self-consciousness in contemplative practice, including Nature of Mind.
Education
Neurologist, cognitive neuroscientist
Experience
My research focuses on the neuroscience of the sense of self and its role in hallucinations and cognition. Integrating methods and approaches from neuroscience, engineering, and medicine, my research investigates a fundamental property of consciousness: its link with the sense of self or with the subject of conscious experience. Catalyzed by my earlier clinical research on altered states of self-consciousness (i.e., out-of-body experiences and related mental states) in neurological patients with invasive brain recordings and stimulation, I pursued neuroscience research on self-consciousness by reverse-translating these clinical findings to the investigation of neurotypical individuals, using a variety of engineering methods such as virtual reality and robotics as well as brain imaging.
Investigating the brain mechanisms of how “the self” is experienced as localized within a body, which is felt as one’s own (self-identification with a body), and as occupying a specific location in space (self-location, peripersonal space), my work introduced the concept of bodily self-consciousness, impacting work across a broad range of academic fields, including neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, virtual reality, neurorehabilitation, philosophy and psychology. We have recently started to apply these insights and methods to contemplative practice, especially so-called deconstructive practices of the sense of self (see Dahl, Lutz et al., 2015), aiming at subject-oriented or non-dual oriented insight.
Select Publications
Blanke, O., & Metzinger, T. (2009). Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1), 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003
Blanke, O., Slater, M., & Serino, A. (2015). Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Principles of Bodily Self-Consciousness. Neuron, 88(1), 145–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.029
Moon, H.-J., Albert, L., De Falco, E., Tasu, C., Gauthier, B., Park, H.-D., & Blanke, O. (2024). Changes in spatial self-consciousness elicit grid cell–like representation in the entorhinal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(12), e2315758121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315758121
Yang, H., Herbelin, B., Ngo, C., Vuarnesson, L., & Blanke, O. (2025). Meditation in the third-person perspective modulates minimal self and heartbeat-evoked potentials. NeuroImage, 314, 121265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121265