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Updated: Apr 28, 2026
Extracting Visual Evoked Potentials from EEG Data Recorded During fMRI-guided Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Published on: May 12, 2014
Self-face hallucination evoked by electrical stimulation of the human brain
Jacques Jonas1, Louis Maillard2, Solène Frismand2
1From Service de Neurologie (J.J., L.M., S.F., H.V., J.-P.V.) and Service de Neurochirurgie (S.C.-C.), Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nancy; CRAN, UMR 7039 (J.J., L.M., H.V., J.-P.V.), Université de Lorraine and CNRS, Nancy; Faculté de Médecine de Nancy (J.J., L.M., S.C.-C., H.V.), Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France; and Université Catholique de Louvain (J.J., B.R.), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique. j.jonas@chu-nancy.fr.
Objectives:
Self-face hallucination (autoscopic hallucination or AH) has been reported in patients with widespread brain damage or retrospectively after epileptic seizures. The neural basis and the self-processing operations underlying AH remain unknown.
Methods:
We report the results of intracerebral electrical stimulations of the right medial occipitoparietal cortex (right precuneus and occipitoparietal sulcus) in 2 patients with epilepsy who underwent a stereo-EEG.
Results:
Immediately after the onset of the stimulation, the 2 patients reported seeing their current own face, facing themselves, in their left visual field.
Conclusions:
Our study shows that the medial occipitoparietal junction has a key role in generating AH. This region has been shown to have a central role in various self-processing operations and especially in self-face recognition. Our observations further reveal that this region is involved in a visual representation of our own face, which is generated during the pathologic phenomenon of AH. This visual representation of our own face may be useful for self-face recognition and social cognition processes involving judgment of self-facial resemblance to others.
