Various physical/mental disorders lead to changes in the brains body representation and these changes can have a tremendous impact on daily life and function. Establishing effective rehabilitation techniques to overcome these dysfunctions are of great importance. At present, many rehabilitation techniques are primarily inspired by learning approaches based on experimental and/or clinical studies. However, these interventions show large interindividual variations in response. The key to solving this problem is to elucidate mechanisms of how human brain adapts to changes in body representation. Body representation consists of body schema, sense of ownership, and sense of agency based on frontoparietal network and these senses synergically output via motor cortex, cerebellum, basal ganglia, and spinal cord. Information about the systematic dysfunction between nervous system and body is invaluable for accurate, valid assessment of disabling neurological deficits and for developing treatment methods with new levels of efficacy. It is noted that neural maladjustment of body representation and/or abnormalities in asomatognosia can occur independently with dysfunction. These indicate that creating and maintaining body representation are essential for appropriate function.

The purpose of this research topic is to elucidate the neural mechanisms of the body representation in the brain and the mechanism of the long-term changes in representation for applying rehabilitation interventions. These approaches are also potentially “personalized intervention,” because they can be targeted to specific impairments and needs. Studies concerning different etiologies of neurological deficits and studies focused on the behavior of healthy subjects are welcome so long as they serve the primary goal of advancing a theoretical and translational framework for neurorehabilitative practice. Organically combining brain science and rehabilitation medicine by using systems engineering can be anticipated to yield the translational research.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Mechanisms of asomatognosia and motor control based on computational theory
• Dynamic models of body representation
• Innovative rehabilitation program based on both experimental and clinical data of body representation
• Pharmacological or physical methods of enhancing brain plasticity underlying body representation
• Integrating rehabilitative prognosis markers with a model of the body representation
• Impact of sensory experience of brain circuit function or structure
• Differential regulation of body representation for developmental and adult plasticity
• Identification of potential negative impacts of body representation