The human body is one of the most ubiquitous and over-learned objects in our visual world and perceiving and recognising the body seems to be an effortless process. Within only a few hundred milliseconds we can categorise, identify and to make reliable judgements about the appearance and actions of others. Much past research has emphasised the role of the face in this process, however recent studies have identified two areas of the occipitotemporal cortex which are selective to visual depictions of the body itself: These are the extrastriate and fusifonn body areas (EBA and FBA). I have used fMRI and ERP to study the functional tuning of these regions, with the goal of understanding how they may each contribute to our percept of the human fmm. The thesis is organised into three overarching sections. The first considers the representation of whole bodies and body parts. I report new evidence for a part-wise processing bias in EBA and for discrete representations of the intact body and its parts in EBA, but not FBA. EBA is also shown to be the most plausible neural substrate of the body selective N l ERP component. The issue of the viewpoint invariance is considered in section two. Three £MRI-adaptation studies are reported, examining how EBA and FBA respond to changing views of the same body and how these responses emerge over an extended duration. Provisional evidence is also provided for category-independent viewpoint tuning in the Inferior Temporal Sulcus. In the final section, I consider the body in the broader context of object representation. Specifically, the close spatial proximity of body, face and object selective cortical areas and the possibility that common principles sub-serve the representation of multiple object categories.