Neuron, 2004

cortices, are not directly involved. Alternatively, in ac-1 BCN Neuroimaging Centre cord with our introspective experience of "almost feeling University of Groningen the spider crawling on our own chest," a much less 9713 AW Groningen cognitively flavored explanation would propose that the The Netherlands vision of the other person being touched might automati-2 CNRS cally be associated with an activation of the cortical Institut de Neurosciences Physiologiques network of regions normally involved in our own experiet Cognitives ence of being touched. We would then understand that 13402 Marseille cedex 20 the other person is being touched through aspects of our France own experience of touch, which have been automatically 3 Centre d'Imagerie par RMN fonctionnelle activated by the visual stimulus. A testable difference CHU la Timone between these two accounts is that the somatosensory 13385 Marseille cedex 05 cortices should be systematically activated by the ob-France servation of touch in the latter but not in the former. 4 Department of Neuroscience (Physiology) Touch, though, is not restricted to the social world: 5 Department of Psychology we often witness objects touching each other. How does University of Parma our brain process the sight of two cars bumping into 43100 Parma each other? It might be that such "inanimate touch" is Italy processed by the brain in ways fundamentally different from those used to process the sight of touch occurring to another living being. In contrast, in the light of the Summary classical experiments of Heider and Simmel (1944), in which the sight of circles and triangles touching each Watching the movie scene in which a tarantula crawls other is interpreted as two people punching each other, on James Bond's chest can make us literally shiver-as one might speculate that even inanimate touch might if the spider crawled on our own chest. What neural be processed through our own experience of touch. mechanisms are responsible for this "tactile empa-This latter hypothesis would predict that the sight of thy"? The observation of the actions of others actiinanimate touch would activate parts of the observer's vates the premotor cortex normally involved in the somatosensory cortices.

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2010

The dual nature of touch has long been understood. The sense of touch seems to carry information at the same time about the external object touching our skin, and also about our body itself. However, the nature of this interaction has remained obscure. We present an analytic model of how tactile information interacts with mental body representations in the brain. Four such interactions are described: the link between the body surface and the maps in primary somatosensory cortex, the contribution of somatosensory cortical information to mental body representations, the feedback pathway from such higher representations back to primary tactile processing in somatosensory cortex, and the modulation of tactile object perception by mental body representations.

Human Brain …, 2011

Leib -Leiblichkeit - Embodiment Pädagogische Perspektiven auf eine Phänomenologie des Leibes, 2019

In this chapter, I posit the erotic and the body in close relation to the universality of touch, in an attempt to show their proximity in formative experience. To do this, I work through an essay by Ignacio Martín-Baró called “La Psicología de la Caricia” [the psychology of a caress] (1970). As Martín-Baró compellingly shows, there is a subtle dialectic through which touch and the human being shape each other. In discussing the phenomenality of this dialectic in touch, I draw both from the phenomenological tradition represented in the lineage of Husserl, Heidegger, and Marion, as well as from psychoanalytic theory. Methodologically, the study is organized in three moments of phenomenological reductions, operationalizing a “trinitarian lens” (Rocha 2015). The chapter then offers a discussion on the Freudian perspective on the drives, as lending an understanding of the phenomenality of touch by positing Eros as “the ultimate cause of all activity,” particularly including educational activity.

Husserl’s account of intersubjective recognition in the Cartesian Meditations seems to suffer from an obvious difficulty. It is based on the appearing behavior of Others, which the recognizing subject compares with his own behavior. If they are harmonious, then the recognition is successful. As Husserl writes in this regard, “The experienced animate organism [Leib] of the Other continues to manifest itself as actually an animate organism solely through its continually harmonious behavior ... The organism is experienced as a pseudo-organism [Schein-Leib] precisely when it does not agree in its behavior.” “Harmonious” means harmonious with the observing subject’s behavior: I regard myself and my Other. To the point that the Other behaves as I would in a similar situation, I recognize him as a subject like myself. The basis for this recognition is the similarlity of our appearing bodies. Yet, as Lanei Rodemeyer has pointed out, “my experience of my own body is nothing like my experience of another person’s body.” Thus, the supposed “‘natural’ similarity between the two bodies would never be automatically given” as a basis for intersubjective recognition. How, then, do we resolve this difficulty? The solution, I argue, is to be found in Husserl’s account of how we constitute the sense we have of ourselves as embodied. In this account, touch will turn out to be foundational not just for our sense of embodiment but also for our recognition of others.