[6] Thought insertion is a common symptom of psychosis and occurs in many mental disorders and other medical conditions.
Although normally associated with some form of psychopathology, thought insertion can also be experienced in those considered nonpathological, usually in spiritual contexts, but also in culturally influenced practices such as mediumship and automatic writing.
'[5]I look out the window and I think that the garden looks nice and the grass looks cool, but the thoughts of Eamonn Andrews come into my mind.
Most philosophers define a sense of agency as a subject's awareness that they are initiating or controlling one's own actions.
Many have argued that the standard approach does not explain the details and the unusual pathology behind thought insertion.
[9] As a result, other theories of thought insertion have been proposed in order to try to explain the complexities behind the phenomenon.
[3][10] Swiney and Sousa (2013) conducted an experiment to investigate thought insertion in a normal population.
[11] They attempted to create situations in which nonpathological populations would have the ability to make sense of agency misattributions in their thoughts.
Therefore, most of the findings in this field come from cases of normal people under hypnosis, as evidenced in an experiment by Walsh and colleges (2015).
Thought insertion is associated with reduced activation of networks that support language, movement, and self-related processing.
An altered functional connectivity between the supplementary motor area and brain regions involved in language processing and movement implementation was also found.
It has been proposed that the loss of sense of agency results from a disruption of feedforward inhibition of somatosensory processing for self-generated movements.
An experiment by Walsh and colleges (2015) did not support the theory behind the forward model of thought insertion.
[2] They found that thought insertion was not associated with overactivation of somatosensory or other self-monitoring networks that occurs in movement.