QUESTION 1

Our mind and bodies always seem to be in synch, but what if we covered our eyes, would our brains and our bodies still be in synch? In class we watched a demonstration of two students. One student was blindfolded and touched the second student's nose. The second student touched the first student's nose at the exact same time the blindfolded student touched the second student. This made the first student think that he was touching his own nose and that his nose had gotten longer because the blindfolded student could feel the touch of the second student, thinking it was his own finger. This demonstration's purpose was to show the class an example of temporary representations and to show that they only have to do with increasing or decreasing the size of a body part, not completely removing it. Our minds can change the representation it has of our body parts by making them grow or shrink, but it is hard for our minds to take out the representation of that body part. This demonstration relates to the phenomenon of “phantom limbs” because they both have to do with the minds map of its body. Phantom limbs happens when you loose your hand and you still have feelings of sensation in a hand that you no longer have. When you loose your hand, the hand area in the homunculus does not go away. During this demonstration, half of the people who have performed this study have thought their nose is 2 feet long. Our minds stretch out to incorporate the tool that we are using, they change to fit the situation. There is a sense of permanence in the way our minds see our bodies. There are patients who have lost their hands and even years after surgery, they still feel sensation from the hand that is not there. The existence of our body parts in our mind does not change easily, if at all. This demonstration also has to do with Ramachandran's “mirror box”. This is just a box that that has two mirrors in the center, one facing each way. This box was suppose to help reduce the phantom limb pain that occurs in patients who still feel like they have a limb after its been amputated. It is speculated that the reason they feel this pain is because it feels like the limb is in an unnatural position and they cannot move it. With the mirror box, the participant places the good limb on one side and the stump on the other. When the participant looks into the mirror on the side with the good limb, and makes symmetric movements like clapping their hands. This fools the participants mind into thinking that they have moved the mirrored limb and it allows the participant to feel unclenched from painful positions. With long-term use it seems that this phenomenon occurs less often and there is improvement. All of this tells us that our brain's representation of our body effects the performance of, or lack there of, our limbs. This shows us that while our minds are flexible and able to adapt to situations like loosing your arm, the representations of our bodies remain. We are not able to easily forget that we had an arm, even in the depth of our subconscious mind. Experiencing phantom limb is extremely common in people with amputations, and even people who are born without body parts experience sensations like pain in limbs that have never been there. As we move from the temporal to the occipital regions of the brain we become far more visual, more somatovisual. We fire visual information from every body part. In monkey,s the visual part becomes part of the hand and the tool in the hand. There is an evolutionary system in our brains that gives us the brain power to be able to use a tool. If our visual system cannot treat a hammer, for example, as part of the body it will not be able to use the tool properly. The visual system must recognize a tool in order to establish how to use it. In conclusion, the mental map that our minds have of our bodies is very specific. It is hard for it to change this mental map because the homunculus has a part for every body part, for every movement and it does not just delete that part of the brain when we loose a limb, that part of the brain remains and so do feelings of sensations in that lost part.