Mind the body: How the brain perceives our bodies

Each one of us is born with one body, a body that is experienced as ours throughout life, a defining feature of who we are. But as cases of patients with neurological damage or mental health issues reveal, the ways in which our brains represent our bodies rely on an intricate and delicate web of connections across different brain areas and also different bodily organs. Thinking about and experimenting with the different ways we have at our disposal to become aware of our bodies reveals the elusive yet inescapable origins of who we are.

Emotion is an essential part of our everyday life. When we communicate with other people, we use facial expressions to show our emotions and to perceive the emotions of the other person. We have associated different bodily sensations (e.g. high heartbeat or butterflies in the belly) with different emotions. How exactly do our brains perceive emotions though? Are we all equally skilled in emotion perception? Or do specific characteristics and personality traits influence our understanding?

What happens inside our brain when we are exposed to art is a question that fascinates neuroscientist. Whether we are actively searching for an aesthetic experience, or mesmerized by the beauty of the art in front of us, the brain is in the centre of these experiences. Here we tell a story about how our brain perceives other people in arts, such as a dancer in the theatre or a body in a painting. We explore the concepts of aesthetic embodiment and discuss if aesthetic experience is different from feeling any other emotion.