 If I would ask you to tell me something about yourself you would probably tell me something like your job, your name, your age, your hobby, something you did in the past or something you want to do in the future. This is what philosophers call the narrative self. It's your personal identity over time and it's a story that you tell others about you and it's probably what you think of when you figure the self. But it's not what I will be talking about today. The narrative self is very difficult to test. Everyone would make up a different story with a different focus. But there is one part of the self that is more similar between all of us. It's a more body self. It's what we call the minimal self and it's the very basic experience of yourself in the here and now. It's what you feel of yourself right in this moment that you are once sitting here and hopefully listening to me. Most of the time we're not even aware of this concept. But today I want you to actively experience your minimal self. It consists of two parts and you can experience both of them with only one action. And to do so, I would ask you to please all clap your hands once. Clap your hands to produce the sound. This is you who hears that sound through your ears. And this already is one part of the minimal self. It's what we call the sense of ownership and it's the feeling of a body that is able to feel what happens around us. Clapping your hand before the sound, there was the clap, the action. And you would probably all agree that it was you that clapped your hand and thereby produced the sound. And this is the second part of the minimal self. It's called the sense of agency and it's the feeling of control over your actions and their consequences. Now we already know both parts of the minimal self. On the one hand there is the sense of ownership. We feel the body that senses what happens in the environment. And we can summarize this as I heard the sound. On the other hand there is the sense of agency, the feeling of being in control over our actions. And this we can summarize then as it was me that produced the sound. Together there is the sense of ownership and the sense of agency for the minimal self. How do these senses come about? So let's focus on how the sense of ownership works first. The sense of ownership comes from the integration of different senses. Most of you will probably know the five basic senses from school. Vision, taste, touch, hearing and smell. Apart from those basic senses there are actually many more senses in our body of which one is very important for the sense of ownership. It's called proprioception and it's the sense of the location of your body. One example of your proprioception working perfectly fine is when you're eating something with a spoon. Most of the time the spoon will make you from the plate to your mouth without you needing a mirror to know where your hand is or where your mouth is. You just know where they are and you know where you need to be. Okay besides proprioception, vision and touch are most important for the sense of ownership so let's forget about the other senses for now. How your sense of ownership is computed let's take your hand as an example. If you see your hand in one location, if your hand touches something in the same location and if you feel your hand being in the same location then you can assume that this is your hand because all of the information says the same. There is my hand. Consequently you feel a sense of ownership for your hand. So if all the information that we have about different parts of our body says the same then we feel a sense of ownership. To test the sense of ownership a group of researchers came up with an experiment. The experiment is called the rubber hand illusion. Participants are told to place their hands behind a high wall so they definitely don't see it and instead in front of them lies a rubber hand. Now the experimenter starts to stroke both hands at the same time. After some time in this video the experimenter asks how does that feel and the man answers it feels as if this rubber hand was my hand now. This experiment makes people replace their own hands by rubber hands. Of course explicit questions are Joe Fulton's measure. Maybe the participant just knew what the experimenter wanted to hear and said exactly that. So there is a different method to test this illusion. The experimenter some people saw the hammer and she takes the fake hand with it. And as the fake hand gets pinched with the hammer you can see the woman screaming. She's so much into this illusion that she's afraid to feel the pain. That's a very surprising finding. Probably if I would have asked you before no one would have guessed that you could ever think that the rubber hand is your own hand. So how is it possible that our brain is screwed like this? As I said if all of the information we have comes from the same place we feel a sense of ownership. So if you would see your own hand being screwed you would see where your hand is. You would see the brush touching your hand. You would feel the brush touching your hand and you would feel where your hand is right. In the rubber hand illusion touch and from the assumption still come from your own hand. So you still feel the touch of the brush and you still feel the location of your hand. But the visual information says something else. You see the rubber hand in the location where your hand could usually be and you see the brush touching your hand. That you now feel a sense of ownership tells us that not all of the information is similarly important when computing a sense of ownership. We trust our eyes much more than we trust our sense of touch or proprioception because our eyes are more reliable. It is so unlikely that our eyes are wrong that they override the information from touch and proprioception and we start to think that the rubber hand must see our own hand. Now we know that we feel a sense of ownership because we combine all of the information from the different senses. And by this we trust our eyes more than the other end of it. So let's have a look at how the other part of the bit of itself, the sense of nature, works. It comes from the correct prediction of the consequences of your action. Let's go back to the clap you were having. While I told you to perform this action, you already knew what was going to happen. Meaning you could predict the result of this action. You knew that people were going to hear the clap. Now your brain compares the actual information so the sound you heard was the one you predicted. If they match, you feel a sense of agency. So if you would have not heard the clap but see a lightning for example, the actual sensory consequences and your predicted ones would not match and you would not feel a sense of agency. Evidence for this mechanism can be found in our brain. And to see what happens in our brain we use a method called EEG. That's what sits on my head there. It's a cap with a lot of electrodes that measure the electrical activity of your brain over the time. If you hear a sound, your brain produces a wave to show that it processes the sound. If the sound now is the result of your own action, let's say you're clapping, the wave is smaller. This is probably the case because your brain already knew what was going to happen and therefore needed less effort to process it. So whenever we cause something in our environment, our brain is perfectly prepared for what is going to happen and if our brain is perfectly prepared, we feel a sense of agency. Saying it the other way around, whenever our brain is not perfectly prepared, as in this case, then it is very unlikely that we were the cause of this event and we do not feel a sense of agency. And the sense of agency is actually much more present in our everyday life than the sense of ownership. And one example from everyday life is that you cannot tickle yourself. I don't know if you've ever tried it, if you've never did, if you're free to do so. You don't feel a strange sensation, but it won't be comparable to someone else tickling you. And no matter how tickling you usually are, it will definitely not make you laugh. And the sense of agency is the reason for it. When you start to tickle yourself, your brain already knows what is going to happen and as we have seen before, the reaction to it will be smaller. In contrast, when someone else wants to tickle you, you cannot perfectly predict the intensity or the location of this attack and this surprise will make us tickle. Another example of your sense of agency actually not being right all the time is our dust bottles. You properly know them, you have to press them for the light at cross-box to turn green. Actually, most of the time during the day they don't work. The light just works on a timer, so it will turn green after 90 seconds, but nevertheless they make you have a feeling of control. This is when you press the button, you will predict that the light will turn green. And after some time the light will turn green, your actual and your predicted consequences match. You feel a sense of agency and the city is actually also happy because they have a happy pedestrian that feels like being able to control the traffic. Okay, so we know that there is a tar of our self that we use to describe our self to other people which is called the minimal self and there's a more bodily self which is the minimal self. We have learned that the minimal self is the sense of ownership which is the feeling of our body and the sense of agency which is the feeling of control. But what is this all good for except for the sake of knowledge? One possible application of our knowledge are processes. Protheses replace a body part of an empty that someone who lost a limb. Even if prostheses get better and better, amputees still have a problem that they cannot really feel them as a part of their self. If we now study the minimal self and healthy people, we can find out the requirements something must be fulfilled to be integrated into our minimal self. So for example it would be beneficial if all the sensory information that the amputee has from the prosthesis stays the same so they can feel the sense of ownership. This trend would probably improve the lives of apart from bodily diseases there are actually also mental diseases that could benefit from our knowledge about the minimal self. In some mental diseases people do not have a sense of agency for their thoughts they don't think that they are their own but that someone else implanted them into their hands. If we now study the sense of agency and healthy people we can find out how it actually works, compare our knowledge to the behavior of the people with these mental illnesses and see what's different and this might eventually lead us to approaches for therapies for those people. A totally different and maybe more far-fetched application about our knowledge about the minimal self, our robotics. Self-possession is something that is very beneficial to our independent human life. It makes us being able to identify actions as our own or to distinguish us from other people. If we could know how this exactly works in humans and what our brain exactly does to feel that way it would make us able to program robots in a more safer and flexible way. We would not need to tell the robot to be able to identify every possible other in every possible situation but we could just make the robot able to say that is not me and in the very beginning knowing how the minimal self works can make it help us to understand how the reactor self works and how we make a consistent story of ourselves over time. Thank you. I hope that the gyms and microphones are around so if you have questions you want to ask it's your time now. Okay, can you hear me? In the press it's talked by the way. I'm really happy to see that topic. And my question will be what about the humans? You're not talking about how it looks like, it doesn't, it's important for that how it looks like or not. And the question was whether it is important how something looks like to be integrated to the minimal self, I think. I mean if you have, I mean it's you, it's you in the mirror, it's you, you are a fan song or you are ugly, I don't know, whatever. How do you integrate that into your song? So the Rubberhand illusion for example has been tested with a lot of different objects. So it doesn't work only for objects that look like a hand or doesn't work for objects like you wouldn't think and there are actually contradictory findings. So some people say it would work for something like a stick but most of the studies actually say that you need to have something like a hand appearance that the Rubberhand illusion actually works. And this also applies for diseases for example so they look more like the parts that they need to replace or more like this makes it more easy to integrate. There is another question on this side. Hugh is coming to you. Should I wait for the interview? Okay, thank you for the lecture. I'm still very shocked about the lives. So I was going to ask, do they still, you know, on the lights they have things for people and for blind people and people that, yeah, for blind people mostly. And when you press the button underneath it it should show the green light faster. Is that an example for the blind people? Are they really blind people as well? The question is actually related to the buttons and the crosswalks so there are special buttons for blind people that the blind people need to press and the question was whether the city is also filling the blind people and no, they are actually different. So those for blind people I think they do make sense or something that blind people can recognize to know that the light is green and that they can cross safely. No, no, it's just for the sounds. It doesn't have anything to do with the lights. And actually at night time those buttons do work. Okay, let's go for one last question. Do you still want to speak? Thank you for the great talk. And in the end you said that the minimal self would help us to understand modern heritage self and I personally didn't really get this part so in which way can this understanding of sense of ownership and sense of entity help us to identify ourselves with our job and our past and future in this sense, for example? And the question is how exactly would the minimal self help us to know something about the narrated self because there's a very huge gap between this bodily self that I now talk about and how we identify ourselves with jobs and hobbies. And if I can come up with examples and there's an easy answer there. So the research about the minimal self actually started because people thought the narrated self is something that is very interesting how can we know that we are the same person than as we were a child? Although we look different, we think different, we feel different. But as I said it's very, very difficult to test. And so the start is to get rid of everything that we cannot test right now and start with the minimal self because these are the very basic requirements that you would need to have to identify as your self and write in this moment. And of course this is the basis where all of this very high level stuff starts from. So it's going to be probably a very, very long journey to come up with the narrated self in the end but there we need to start somewhere and at least that's the motivation to start with the minimal self. Thank you very much.