Why do we touch ourselves? A Hypothesis on How We Maintain the Bodily Self

Why do we keep touching ourselves? Here, I propose the hypothesis that recurrent self-generated sensations may contribute to maintaining embodied self-experience by providing reliable evidence about the body as a source of action and sensation. Self-touch generates predictable sensory consequences of one's own actions, thereby potentially reinforcing bodily agency, ownership, self-location, and self-other-distinction. Within this account, sensory attenuation follows from successful prediction. Social touch extends this process beyond the individual, as sensory and affective signals are regulated between interacting bodies, highlighting the relational character of self-other-differentiation. The framework predicts that destabilizing bodily self-experience should increase self-evidence-generating behaviors, that reliable self-generated feedback should accelerate recovery, and that disrupting action-sensory contingency should abolish this benefit. Autism and schizophrenia illustrate how altered sensory and social conditions may interact with such self-maintenance processes.