For instance, the parietal cortex seems to be the neural region linked to self-perception; while sense of ownership in action execution may be located within the inferior parietal lobe and the temporoparietal junction (Farrer et al.,

2003 and Ruby and Decety, 2001). According to Jeannerod (2003) SoA and the integrated SoO implies an active organism, i.e. an agent with plans, desires, MAPK Inhibitor high throughput screening and actions. Particularly intriguing to us is the self-perception of controlling one’s own volitional actions. This statement may well be the necessary link in TBM between the idea of possessing FW and the rise of SoA and SoO. Moreover, following intentionally caused actions, the sense of agency triggers (in the subject) an interesting illusion concerning the timing of events. By means of Libet’s paradigm (Libet, 1983 and Libet, 2004), Haggard and others demonstrated that when an event is causally linked to a subject’s intentional action, the perception of the time separating the decisions from the outcomes of an action is reduced (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). This sort of binding effect between the two events is strongly correlated to the SoA (Haggard, Cartledge, Dafydd, & Oakley, 2004). Thus, the feeling of exercising FW is fundamental to the sense of self. Altered perceptions of this feeling (generated by hypnosis or

by some psychopathological conditions, for instance) may exert an anomalous control of “voluntary” acts, so that the agent reports a distorted perception of the binding effect. Elsewhere http://www.selleckchem.com/products/pd-0332991-palbociclib-isethionate.html (Bignetti, 2001 and Bignetti, 2003), the inherent excitability and firing potential of each single neuron (Katz, 1966) is understood as the intrinsic “desire to think,” motivating

the neuron to contribute to the thinking process. The expression “desire to think” was provocatively coined for those opposed to the reductionist view of the thinking process. The epistemology of Buddhism considers “desire” to be the insatiable tendency of an individual mind to extinguish Afatinib in vivo all painful stimuli of life (RadhaKrishnan, 1991); again, this can be seen by thermodynamics as any other physical–chemical system which needs to spontaneously evolve to dissipate Gibbs’ free energy. However, the question remains as to how the brain can manage the activity of so many neurons in order to be able to execute a goal-directed thought. To identify the mind’s “driver” or “organiser” we can either go back to the metaphysical idea of mind–body duality, or try to introduce some type of biophysical mechanism by sorting and integrating a bundle of coherent memories accumulated during the course of a life which may give rise to a virtual personal identity. Scientifically speaking, we prefer this second hypothesis, but from the agent’s first-person perspective, the question of self-ontogeny is irrelevant.