The Danger of Illusion
What is often left unnoted, however, is the degree to which the real body is affected by the inattentive and split focus of conscious prioritization and unconscious impulse. How does the body matrix—“the complex network of brain areas sustaining a multisensory representation of peripersonal space, and, in particular, the space directly around the body” (196)—respond to a contrived absence. Science fiction—and especially cyberpunk, for example, with William Gibson’s “meat puppets”—has long warned of the enforced mind/body split. In cognitive neuroscience, “a large body of research…has revealed that body disownership can be associated with a disruption of homeostatic functions, such as thermoregulatory control” (194).
If touch is the primary sense through which we establish the boundaries between inside and outside, between the self and the other, between the point(s) at which I am and the extensive space in which I am not, then body disownership would seem to present particular problems for the body beyond its mere spatial dimensions. What is opened up is a fundamental rift in the body matrix inclusive of the mind, a multisensory, organic apparatus with an implicit and explicit sense of time and space.