An Overview of the Bodily Awareness Representation and Interoception: Insights and Progress in the Field of Neurorehabilitation Research

Abstract

In the last two decades, the scientific literature on so-called body representations has been increasing, and the notion of body awareness (BA) is particularly interesting for neurorehabilitation. In this article, we present results derived from recent studies on this representation, considering the different definitions and explicative models proposed as well as the empirical settings used to test it, providing an extensive overview of these issues. This article discusses the challenge of understanding how we integrate the sensory experiences of proprioception (knowing where our body is in space) and interoception (sensing internal bodily sensations, like hunger of thirst) with our perception of self. This is a difficult problem to analyze because our awareness of our body is inherently linked to our perspective, since the body is the means through which we interact with the world. Presenting the different viewpoints offered by recent theories on this concern, we highlighted that the neurorehabilitation and psychiatric settings offer two important fields useful for the study of BA because in them it is possible to analyze bodily representations by inducing/observing a controlled discrepancy between dysfunctional content and sensory inputs.

Keywords: body awareness; interoception; rehabilitation; sensory inputs.