The body in the brain revisited

Abstract

Corporeal awareness is a difficult concept which refers to perception, knowledge and evaluation of one's own body as well as of other bodies. We discuss here some controversies regarding the significance of the concepts of body schema and body image, as variously entertained by different authors, for the understanding of corporeal awareness, and consider some newly proposed alternatives. We describe some recent discoveries of cortical areas specialized for the processing of bodily forms and bodily actions, as revealed by neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and lesion studies. We further describe new empirical and theoretical evidence for the importance of interoception, in addition to exteroception and proprioception, for corporeal awareness, and discuss how itch, a typical interoceptive input, has been wrongly excluded from the classic concept of the proprioceptive-tactile body schema. Finally, we consider the role of the insular cortex as the terminal cortical station of interoception and other bodily signals, along with Craig's proposal that the human insular cortex sets our species apart from other species by supporting consciousness of the body and the self. We conclude that corporeal awareness depends on the spatiotemporally distributed activity of many bodies in the brain, none of which is isomorphic with the actual body.

Bodily ownership and self-location: Components of bodily self-consciousness

“…Pouget, Deneve, & Duhamel, 2002). In addition, the consequences of PPc lesions strongly suggest that the PPc is a crucial brain structure for combining several reference frames (see Berlucchi & Aglioti, 2010 for a review). Patients with PPc lesions are strongly impaired when performing tasks requiring on-line coding of body posture (Schwoebel & Coslett, 2005), when attending to body parts on the left in the case of a right lesion (i.e.…”

“…A renewed interest in this topic in the neuroscientific community has led to the identification of the insular cortex as a key area for sensory self-monitoring. The posterior insula has primarily been involved in interoceptive representations of the body (Critchley, Wiens, Rotshtein, Ohman, & Dolan, 2004), and the anterior insula has primarily been involved in integrating bodily signals with environmental, emotional and motivational representations (Berlucchi & Aglioti, 2010;Craig, 2009). A PET study by Tsakiris, Hesse, Boy, Haggard, and Fink (2007) suggests that the insula also underpins bodily self-consciousness during the RHI because activation of the right insula was positively correlated with the strength of the RHI.…”

Body ownership: When feeling and knowing diverge

“…The authors examined three persons with xenomelia and found a reduced responsivity of the right superior parietal lobule (SPL) for tactile stimulation of the affected limb compared to its healthy counterpart, or the limb of control participants. Interestingly, another locus of altered brain activity was the insula, an area traditionally associated with higher-order body representations (Berlucchi & Aglioti, 2010). In accordance with these functional correlates of amputation desire, Hilti et al recently demonstrated structural differences in the right SPL, the right primary and secondary somatosensory cortices, and the anterior insula when comparing individuals with amputation desire with control persons (Hilti et al, 2013).…”

Introduction to special issue on body representation: feeling, seeing, moving and observing

“…There are still many challenges for this area of research, in particular, in establishing agreement about common concepts and terminology. There are also many unanswered questions and areas just beginning to receive widespread attention by researchers, such as interoception, the perception of the inside of the body (Berlucchi and Aglioti 2010).…”