The minimum neurobiological processes for self-awareness identified in the search results are:
1. Interoceptive processing: Interoceptive information, particularly concerning physiological states and bodily actions, is at the core of self-representation and contributes to a sense of self-presence and internal agency[1].
2. Multisensory integration: Self-awareness emerges from dynamic cross-modal integration of multisensory information, which provides redundancy and resilience to damage of underlying neural substrates[1].
3. Comparator mechanisms: Impaired self-awareness may result from failures in attentional mechanisms responsible for comparing recently registered self-related information with previous self-knowledge[2].
4. Sustained task control and attention: Atrophy in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions, involved in sustained task control and attention, is associated with overestimating one’s competency[2].
5. Reward-related processing: Modality-independent regions mediating reward-related processing consistently appear across self-awareness subdomains, suggesting a superordinate role in domain-general processing[2].
6. Cortical midline structures: A paralimbic network of medial prefrontal/anterior cingulate and medial parietal/posterior cingulate cortices, linked by ~40Hz oscillations and regulated by dopamine, is correlated with self-awareness[3][4].
In summary, self-awareness relies on the integration of interoceptive and multisensory information, comparator mechanisms for self-evaluation, sustained attention and task control, reward-related processing, and the coordinated activity of cortical midline structures.
Citations
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11910-021-01155-6
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4107746/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763416300410
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372627/
[5] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00296/full
