TY - JOUR TI - Decreased motor cortex excitability mirrors own hand disembodiment during the rubber hand illusion AU - della Gatta, Francesco AU - Garbarini, Francesca AU - Puglisi, Guglielmo AU - Leonetti, Antonella AU - Berti, Annamaria AU - Borroni, Paola A2 - Culham, Jody C VL - 5 PY - 2016 DA - 2016/10/20 SP - e14972 C1 - eLife 2016;5:e14972 DO - 10.7554/eLife.14972 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.14972 AB - During the rubber hand illusion (RHI), subjects experience an artificial hand as part of their own body, while the real hand is subject to a sort of 'disembodiment'. Can this altered belief about the body also affect physiological mechanisms involved in body-ownership, such as motor control? Here we ask whether the excitability of the motor pathways to the real (disembodied) hand are affected by the illusion. Our results show that the amplitude of the motor-evoked potentials recorded from the real hand is significantly reduced, with respect to baseline, when subjects in the synchronous (but not in the asynchronous) condition experience the fake hand as their own. This finding contributes to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between body-ownership and motor system, and provides the first physiological evidence that a significant drop in motor excitability in M1 hand circuits accompanies the disembodiment of the real hand during the RHI experience. KW - body ownership KW - primary motor cortex KW - magnetic transcranical stimulation- JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -