Asia (Ksenia) Shcherbakova will present research at the 8th Annual BRNet (Body Representation Network) Meeting in Padova, Italy. BRNet is an international annual conference dedicated to the science of how the brain constructs and maintains a sense of the body — attended by researchers, neuroscientists, and clinicians specializing in body perception.
The presentation is titled “Three Trainable Components of Body Representation: Evidence from a Decade of Naturalistic Perceptual Skills Training.”
The 2026 edition features keynote speakers Olaf Blanke (EPFL, Geneva), Michela Bassolino (HES-SO Valais Wallis), and Jamie Feusner (University of Toronto).
The Research
Body representation research has largely focused on what happens when the brain’s model of the body breaks down — through neurological conditions, psychiatric disorders, or injury. The BRNet conference this year centers on “The Uncanny Body,” exploring distortions in body perception and what they reveal about bodily self-consciousness.
Asia’s presentation approaches body representation from a complementary direction: not where it breaks down in clinical populations, but where it is systematically underdeveloped in healthy, untrained individuals — and what structured training can do about it.
The framework was developed through reverse-engineering of the Baseworks methodology — a movement system refined over ten years with over 10,000 learners across diverse populations. It identifies three components of body representation with distinct neural substrates, distinct failure patterns in learners, and distinct training approaches:
Proprioceptive awareness — the conscious detection of spatially specific sensations arising from muscle activation. Survey data from non-practitioners (n=48) reveals large individual variation: some people have detailed access to this category of sensation even at rest; others have none at all, and many have it but no language to describe it.
Spatial awareness — the ability to encode, maintain, and reproduce body configurations without visual feedback. Recent research (Proske & Weber, 2026) points to a “central memory” and prediction mechanism underlying this capacity, rather than peripheral sensory readout. Predictable failure patterns in naive learners suggest this component is systematically undertrained in healthy populations.
Interoceptive awareness — conscious awareness of internal states including breathing, metabolic load, and physiological stress. In the Baseworks framework, this supports the conditions under which sensory discrimination in the other two dimensions becomes possible — by keeping effort and arousal within the range where subtle sensory signals remain accessible.
The ten-year dataset represents a naturalistic record of what consistently breaks down in movement instruction when communicability — the reliability with which a movement instruction produces the intended movement across a diverse group of learners — is used as the primary design constraint. The presentation formalizes that record into a framework that is experimentally testable.
Body representation research — how the brain constructs and maintains its model of the body — is the direct scientific frame for the Baseworks findings. General movement neuroscience tends to address the mechanics of motor execution; clinical body awareness research has focused primarily on interoceptive and attitudinal dimensions. The Baseworks data speaks to a complementary question: what limits body representation in healthy populations, and what structured training can do about it. The BRNet meeting brings together researchers and clinicians working across the full range of body representation science — from clinical populations to methods and mechanisms — and it is the audience for whom this work is most directly relevant. Baseworks is presenting there because we are interested in where the questions overlap, and in what collaborations might develop from that.
About BRNet
The Body Representation Network (BRNet) is an annual meeting that brings together researchers and clinicians working on how the brain models the body. Topics covered include body representation in psychiatric and neurological conditions, methods for assessing body perception (behavioural, neuroimaging, virtual reality), and approaches to altered bodily awareness. The 2026 meeting is hosted at the University of Padova.
Previous Presentations
BRNet 2026 is Baseworks’ third research conference appearance. Asia Shcherbakova previously presented at the 26th Annual Neuropsychology Day at the Montreal Neurological Institute (May 2025) and at the International Conference on Neuroscience and Neurology (ICNN 2025, Astana, Kazakhstan).
