Somatosensation and the sense of self

Our own body is the constant accompaniment of our waking mental life, and the seat of all our sensory experience and responses. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the body is a key component in individual self-consciousness, in addition to other, psychological components such as autobiographical memory and explicit self-construal. The experiences that we have of and through our body are a good way to understand this basic bodily self. All these experiences begin with the excitation of sensory receptors in the body, which send somatosensory afferent signals to the central nervous system (CNS).