The brain's representation of the body surface integrates external sensory and internal visceral information to create a representation of self.

“the connections from those brain neurons are sent into the body but it's about internal information what we call interoception our ability to look inside or imagine inside and feel what we're feeling inside so the way to think about this accurately is that our representation of our self is a represent ation of our internal workings our viscera our guts everything inside our skin and the surface of our skin and the external World those three things are always being combined in a very interesting complex but very seamless way”