Agency and Psychopathology
Marc Jeannerod proposed that the process of self-recognition operates covertly and effortlessly. It depends upon a set of mechanisms involving the processing of specific neural signals, from sensory as well as from central origin. Researchers have used experimental situations, in both healthy participants and schizophrenic patients, where these signals can be dissociated from each other and where self-recognition becomes ambiguous. These situations reveal that there are two levels of self-recognition, an automatic level for action identification, and a conscious level for the sense of agency, which both rely on the same principle of congruence of the action-related signals.
Investigation of the sense of agency is important to explain positive symptoms of schizophrenia, like thought insertion and delusions of control. The core of the problem met by these patients is a disturbance of their sense of agency: the first rank symptoms, which represent one of the major features of the disease, are nothing but a loss of the ability to attribute their own thoughts, internal speech, covert or overt actions to themselves. Nonattributed or misattributed thoughts and actions then become a material for delusional interpretation and delirium. A study has shown that in schizophrenic patients the feeling of alien control (i.e., delusions of control) during a movement task is associated with an increased metabolic activity in the right inferior parietal cortex.
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Famous quotes containing the word agency:
“It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)