Abstract

What are the epistemic bases of the knowledge of the reality of our own body? Proprioception plays a primordial role in body representation and more particularly at the level of body schema. Without proprioception people can feel amputated and the mislocalization of proprioceptive information through the remapping of the Penfield Homonculus induces illusions of phantom limbs, illusions that contradictory visual feedback cannot erase. However, it turns out that it is not as simple as that and that vision also intervenes in body knowledge: vision of one's own body allows deafferented patients to move and phantom limbs to disappear. Finally, the existence of phantom limbs in aplasic patients as well as studies on neonates provide evidence of an innate component of body representation.