Depersonalisation (DP) involves a distressing feeling of being detached from oneself and a flattened sense of time. This study examined how DP experiences affect perception of peripersonal space (the space near the body) and time. Using an audio-tactile task, no difference in peripersonal space perception was found between people with high versus low DP experiences. A mental time travel task revealed that individuals with high DP experiences performed worse overall at locating events in time relative to their present reference point, while those with low DP experiences showed significant variation in performance for past events. The findings link altered self-awareness to disrupted egocentric spatiotemporal perception.
Synchronous stroking or movement of a virtual body seen in front of a person can create an out-of-body experience, making the virtual body feel like their own. The effect of synchrony on explicit feelings of embodiment was stronger when the virtual body moved in sync with the person's own movements (visuomotor) than when it was stroked in sync (visuotactile). How far people drifted when walking after the experience depended on their interoceptive accuracy (IA), measured by a heartbeat counting task. For visuotactile conditions, the synchrony effect was larger in people with low IA, suggesting they relied more on visual information. For visuomotor conditions, the synchrony effect was larger in people with high IA, suggesting they relied more on feedback from their own movements.
Anaesthetic drugs alter the subjective experience of time. Ketamine makes time feel slower, while GABAergic drugs make time feel faster. For very short intervals, time perception becomes more variable but does not consistently shift. When timing longer durations, people tend to estimate them as longer than they actually are. Motor timing tasks also become more variable under anaesthetic agents. The review of 36 articles highlights the need for more systematic research on how anaesthesia affects time perception and whether unconscious events can still be timed.