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

Abstract

‘All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body. He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without touching it. He felt the dozing cat’s purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridescent brilliance of his vesicles, he felt the humming blood in his arteries.’ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera Since Berlucchi and Aglioti’s seminal review ‘The Body in the Brain’ in 1997, research into the representation of the body has expanded and new experimental paradigms and approaches have been developed. This special issue of Experimental Brain Research has emerged from a series of workshops on Body Representation over the past 4 years, which have taken a broad view of what constitutes body representation. This breadth reXects the multiple purposes and eVects of representing one’s own body, and those of other people. To illustrate this, the quote above describes how a doctor’s perception of his own body is inXuenced not just by current sensory input, but also by his knowledge of his own body and the symptoms he has observed in other people.