Disturbing the Body Image

These findings fit perfectly with the current view of how the brain constructs a mental representation of the body. In the case of supernumerary phantom limb, the parts of the brain that relay body image-related sensory information to the SPL have been starved of oxygen. Cell death occurs, so the SPL is deprived of some the information it normally processes. This perturbs SPL function, and so distorts the body image. In this particular case, the brain's representation of the left arm has been duplicated, and incorporated into the mental scheme of the body.

In BIID, the situation is apparently reversed: the body image is missing a representation of the affected limb. This body image distortion is almost certainly congenital—the body image is probably “hard-wired” in the brain during development, because children born with missing limbs sometimes experience phantom limb syndrome. Thus, the brains of apotemnophiles apparently fail to generate a representation of the affected limb, because of some aberrant developmental mechanism. The limb has never been a component of the body image, so the afflicted person grows up thinking that it feels "wrong.”

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3 Comments

1. 1. Blue Fire 11:16 PM 4/15/09

   Wow, I guess there's something to be said for Mind over Matter, eh? Great article on the perplexing states and functions of the brain. I suspect that further light shed on these conditions will be a significant breakthrough in understanding not only our brains but also how the development of artificial intelligence might proceed in robotics since robots would need to generate models of their limbs ultimately.

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2. 2. onn01 03:10 AM 8/11/09

   I think this article is in favor of materialism. Since what was once thought to be of psychological nature, has in fact a neurological origin.

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3. 3. sacrednature 02:53 PM 10/14/09

   Oh yes, I agree that this article supports materialism. How ironic that the scientific realism movement, loyal as ever to dualism, would push us away from the concept of magic, only to have it circle back with the "magic" of mind-over-matter concepts.

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