The felt-presence experience: from cognition to the clinic

Barnby, Joseph M; Park, Sohee; Baxter, Tatiana; Rosen, Cherise; Brugger, Peter; Alderson-Day, Ben

Abstract

The felt presence experience is the basic feeling that someone else is present in the immediate environment, without clear sensory evidence. Ranging from benevolent to distressing, personified to ambiguous, felt presence has been observed in neurological case studies and within psychosis and paranoia, associated with sleep paralysis and anxiety, and recorded within endurance sports and spiritualist communities. In this Review, we summarise the philosophical, phenomenological, clinical, and non-clinical correlates of felt presence, as well as current approaches that use psychometric, cognitive, and neurophysiological methods. We present current mechanistic explanations for felt presence, suggest a unifying cognitive framework for the phenomenon, and discuss outstanding questions for the field. Felt presence offers a sublime opportunity to understand the cognitive neuroscience of own-body awareness and social agency detection, as an intuitive, but poorly understood, experience in health and disorder.

Citation

Barnby, J. M., Park, S., Baxter, T., Rosen, C., Brugger, P., & Alderson-Day, B. (2023). The felt-presence experience: from cognition to the clinic. The Lancet Psychiatry, 10(5), 352-362. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366%2823%2900034-2

• Journal Article Type: Review
• Acceptance Date: Jan 19, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Mar 26, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-05
• Deposit Date: Mar 25, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 3, 2024
• Journal: The Lancet Psychiatry
• Print ISSN: 2215-0366
• Electronic ISSN: 2215-0374
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 352-362
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366%2823%2900034-2
• Keywords: Biological Psychiatry; Psychiatry and Mental health
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1898275