Body Swapping Experiment
(hat tip Nicholas)
—
This reminds me of a New Yorker article that my friend Jason told me about the other day.
The article tells the story of a woman who contracted HIV, then got shingles, and eventually developed an insatiable itch on her head:
She simply felt itchy, on the area of her scalp that was left numb from the shingles. Although she could sometimes distract herself from it—by watching television or talking with a friend—the itch did not fluctuate with her mood or level of stress. The only thing that came close to offering relief was to scratch.…
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
Doctors, having tried all kinds of other stuff, decided to sever the remaining nerves to the itchy region on her head.
The itch went away for a while but eventually returned.
In the end, the itch was not a sensation rooted in her body. It was rooted in her brain.
The article goes on to discuss a new way of looking at how our brain relates to the body:
The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.
I’d argue that all of this is evidence that the mind and do not run in sequence, they run in parallel. The mind keeps it’s own representation of the body, separate from the actual nerves in our flesh.
A mental avatar of sorts.
—
Just as the swedish study demonstrates how our bodily perceptions are very malleable, the story of this lady’s itch shows how the mind maintains a separate representation of the body which can sometimes get messed up, or possibly even hacked.
I was disappointed with AP’s treatment above.
The philosophical and metaphysical ramifications of this research are pretty rich and it’s lame that AP didn’t pick up those threads.
National Geographic’s treatment was a lot more in depth…
—
Radiolab did a really good show called ‘Who am I‘ on some of these themes of the mind-body connection and what happens when wiring gets off.
In the show, they talk to U.C. San Diego Neurologist, V.S. Ramachandran who has done some really awesome research and treatment with people suffering pain in their phantom limbs.
