It Is 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 the successful integration of multisensory bodily signals but also on how we move our bodies in the world. This paper considers the notion of embodied selfhood through the perspective of dynamic and rhymical 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 frameworks 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 Depersonalization Disorder as a failure to self-attenuate self-related information processing, leading to feelings of unreality and self ‘loss’. We conclude with potential implications of our hypothesis for therapy.