Mateusz Wozniak

Have you ever felt like you were watching yourself from the outside — detached from your own thoughts, feelings, or body, as if you were a spectator of your own life? This experience is called depersonalization. Most people have a brief taste of it at some point (often from fatigue or stress), but for some it becomes a chronic, distressing condition. In our research, we use depersonalization as a lens to understand how the self is built — because when something breaks down, we can learn a lot about how it normally works.

LOCKDOWNS, SCREENS, AND THE FEELING OF NOT BEING REAL

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, billions of people abruptly shifted the bulk of their social lives onto screens. We ran a large survey to ask: does living through a screen change how real you feel to yourself?

The answer was yes. People who increased their time on video calls, social media, and online gaming during lockdown reported significantly higher levels of depersonalization and derealization — that unsettling feeling that the world around you isn't quite real either. The more people lived through digital interfaces, the less they felt anchored in their own bodies and their physical surroundings.

Ciaunica, A., McEllin, L., Kiverstein, J., Gallese, V., Hohwy, J. & Woźniak, M. (2022). "Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown". Scientific Reports, 12(1), 3888.

DEPERSONALIZATION DISRUPTS THE BODY-SELF, BUT NOT THE MIND-SELF

But what exactly is disrupted when people depersonalize? To find out, we used a well-established laboratory phenomenon: the self-prioritization effect. Normally, we are faster and more accurate at processing information associated with ourselves — whether it's our own face or an abstract symbol we've been told is "ours".

We compared two types of self-associated information: participants' own face (bodily self) and an arbitrary geometric shape labelled as theirs (abstract self). People with higher depersonalization scores showed a markedly reduced advantage for their own face — it no longer felt as prioritized by the brain. But the advantage for the abstract self-symbol remained completely intact.

This clean double dissociation reveals that the self is not one unified thing — it has at least two separable layers. Depersonalization selectively targets the bodily layer, while leaving the more conceptual, abstract sense of self unaffected. The body feels unfamiliar; the mind still knows who it is.

Woźniak, M., McEllin, L., Hohwy, J. & Ciaunica, A. (2023). "Depersonalization affects self-prioritization of bodily, but not abstract self-related information". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49(11), 1447–1459.