Mind-body-brain problem: Scientific adventures around the body

Abstract

This paper reviews past research on bodily consciousness and its neural representations, as well as current research on the body, self, and brain. In the early 20th century bodily consciousness was first conceptualized as body schema and body image. Empirical findings on phenomena such as phantom limbs suggested that body consciousness could be reduced to body representations in the brain. Body schema and body image have firm foundations in related brain areas including somatosensory and motor cortices, although they cannot be completely reduced to neural processes. In addition, the body image can be better categorized into two aspects (body semantics and body topology) that correspond to different streams of neural processing. Finally, we explored the self that emerges through interactions between the sense of body ownership and the sense of agency. The subjective sense of the self could well be the result of the bottom-up integration of multiple body representations.