Vision and body representation: Insights from blindness

Body representations arise from the integration of multiple sensory signals that provide information about the body’s size, posture, and internal states. Vision often plays a dominant role, calibrating and aligning signals from touch, proprioception, and interoception. Yet, individuals born without sight still construct coherent and functional body representations, suggesting that the role of vision in building these representations may be more flexible than previously thought. Here, we synthesize recent behavioral and neuroimaging findings on body representations in blind individuals. We argue that blindness offers a powerful case study in how body representations can emerge through non-visual pathways, revealing the brain’s capacity to flexibly reorganize the sensory inputs supporting its internal models of the body. In doing so, we highlight the broader relevance of visual loss for understanding the plastic and multisensory nature of body representation.