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.

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging indicates that observation of the human body induces a selective activation of a lateral occipitotemporal cortical area called extrastriate body area (EBA). This area is responsive to static and moving images of the human body and parts of it, but it is insensitive to faces and stimulus categories unrelated to the human body. With event-related repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, we tested the possible causal relation between neural activity in EBA and visual processing of body-related, nonfacial stimuli. Facial and noncorporeal stimuli were used as a control. Interference with neural activity in EBA induced a clear impairment, consisting of a significant increase in discriminative reaction time, in the visual processing of body parts. The effect was selective for stimulus type, because it affected responses to nonfacial body stimuli but not to noncorporeal and facial stimuli, and for locus of stimulation, because the effect from the interfering stimulation of EBA was absent during a corresponding stimulation of primary visual cortex. The results provide strong evidence that neural activity in EBA is not only correlated with but also causally involved in the visual processing of the human body and its parts, except the face.

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