Neural correlates of the first-person-perspective.

Human self-consciousness depends on the metarepresentation of mental and bodily states as one's own mental and bodily states. First-person-perspective taking is not sufficient, but necessary for human self-consciousness. To assign a first-person-perspective is to center one's own multimodal experiential space upon one's own body, thus operating in an egocentric reference frame. The brain regions involved in assigning first-person-perspective comprise medial prefrontal, medial parietal and lateral temporoparietal cortex. These empirical findings complement recent neurobiologically oriented theories of self-consciousness which focus on the relation between the subject and his/her environment by supplying a neural basis for its key components.