Each individual is a body and has a body. Until recently these relations were an object for study only for philosophy and psychology, but now physiology has something significant to say about them as well. The body is represented in the human brain in various ways, and such representations are utilized in the perception of static and moving bodily parts and in the understanding and imitation of motor acts. The complex of these representation constitutes the body schema, a construct that in the adult comprises the sense impressions, perceptions and ideas about the dynamic organization of one's own body and its relations to that of other bodies. Imitation of movements by neonates suggests an implicit knowledge of the body structure that antedates the adult body schema. Dynamic aspects of the body schema are revealed by spontaneous sensations from a lost body part as well as by orderly phantom sensations elicited by stimulation of body areas away from the amputation line and even by visual stimulation. The mechanisms involved in these activities can be inferred from experiments in neurally intact observers, in patients with unilateral lesions of the cerebral hemispheres, and in callosotomized epileptic patients, as well as from repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation causing selective, fully reversible cortical dysfunctions during the processing of body-related information. Specific cortical substrates of the perceptual or semantic processing of bodily parts can thus be identified, and the classic concept of the body schema can be revisited on the basis of such physiological evidence.