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An almost obsessive interest in the human body in literary and psychological theory over the past ten years has uncovered not just the physical body but the body as metaphor, political emblem, social construction, and symptom. The Wounded Body builds on this recent interest in the body by providing an ambitious interdisciplinary exploration of the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison. Guided by insights from phenomenology to Jungian archetypal … More >>

The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh

Human Body : Pushing The Limits – Brain Power ( Part 2 ) The video is owned by Discovery Channel and this is only for educational and entertainment purposes. If you are interested in purchasing the video go to discovery’s website for more details: shopping.discovery.com

If you were asked, “Does your hand belong to you?” you would naturally say, “Of course.”

But ask neuroscientists the same question and they will turn the question back on you: How do you know it’s your own hand? In fact, how do you know that you have a body? What makes you think you own it? How do you know where your body begins and ends? How do you keep track of its position in space?

Try this little exercise: Imagine there is a straight line running down the middle of your body, dividing it into a left half and a right half. Using your right hand, pat different parts of your body on the right side — cheek, shoulder, hip, thigh, knee, foot. With your finger, trace a line over your right eyebrow and over the right portions of your upper and lower lips.

You are able to tell these body parts from one another because each is faithfully mapped in a two-dimensional swath of neural tissue in your left brain that specializes in touch. The same thing goes for the left side of your body: All its parts are mapped in a similar region of your right brain. Your brain maintains a complete map of your body’s surface, with patches devoted to each finger, hand, cheek, lip, eyebrow, shoulder, hip, knee, and all the rest.

A map can be defined as any scheme that spells out one-to-one correspondences between two different things. In a road map, any given point on the map corresponds to some location in the larger world, and each adjacent point on the map represents an adjacent real-world location. The same holds broadly true for the body maps in your brain. Aspects of the outside world and the body’s anatomy are systematically mapped onto brain tissue. Thus the topology, or spatial relationships, of your body’s surface is preserved in your touch map to a high degree: The foot map is next to the shin map, which is next to the thigh map, which is next to the hip map. Whenever someone claps you on the shoulder, nerve cells in the shoulder region in this map are activated. When you kick a soccer ball, the corresponding part of your foot map is activated. When you scratch your elbow, both your elbow region and fingertip regions are activated. This map is your primary physical window on the world around you, the entry point for all the raw touch information streaming moment by moment into your brain.

This touch information is collected by special receptors throughout your body, funneled into your spinal cord, and sent up to your brain along two major pathways. The more ancient of these pathways carries pain, temperature, itch, tickle, sexual sensation, crude touch — sufficient, say, to know that you bumped your knee and not your shin, but not acute enough to tell a penny from a dime — and sensual touch, which includes the gentle maternal caresses that were vital for your body map development as a baby.

The evolutionarily newer pathway carries fine touch information — the kind you need in order to thread a needle or leaf through a book — and position-and-location information from receptors embedded in your joints, bones, and muscles.

Once these many channels of sensory information reach your brain, they are combined to create complex, composite sensations such as wetness, hairiness, fleshiness, and rubberiness. The same goes for the many varieties of pain. Through a combination of pain — and touch — related signals, you have access to the rich diversity of unpleasant experience that includes the smarting pain of a sunburn, the shooting pain of carpal tunnel syndrome, the piercing pain of a stab wound, the dull throbbing pain of an abused knee, the itchy pain of healing, and so on.

You also have a primary motor map in your brain for making movements. Instead of receiving inputs from your skin, this map sends output signals to your muscles. Just like the touch map, this movement map is also found in both sides of the brain. It is vital to your ability to guide your body parts to make fine-tuned movements and assume complex positions in space — like doing the hokey-pokey, playing hockey, or assuming a poker face in a high stakes card game. When you wiggle all your toes, the toe and foot regions of your motor map are active. When you stick out your tongue, the map’s tongue and jaw regions are active. Thanks to this map, all the low-level, mostly unconscious tasks of coordinated movement unfold smoothly without a glitch.

Elsewhere in your brain you also have a very different but no less critical body map of all your body’s innards. This is your primary visceral map, a patchwork of small neural swatches that represent your heart, lungs, liver, colon, rectum, stomach, and all your various other giblets. This map is uniquely super-developed in the human species, and it gives you a level of access to the ebb and flow of your internal sensations unequaled anywhere else in the animal kingdom. You feel lust, disgust, sadness, joy, shame, and humiliation as a result of this body mapping. These visceral inputs to the psyche are the wellspring of the rich and vivid emotional awareness that few other creatures even come close to enjoying. The activity in this map is the voice of your conscience, the thrill of music, the foundation of the emotionally nuanced and morally sensitive self.

The Embodied Self

The idea that your brain maps chart not only your body but the space around your body, that these maps expand and contract to include everyday objects, and even that these maps can be shaped by the culture you grow up in, is very new to science. Research now shows that your brain is teeming with body maps — maps of your body’s surface, its musculature, its intentions, its potential for action, even a map that automatically tracks and emulates the actions and intentions of other people around you.

These body-centered maps are profoundly plastic — capable of significant reorganization in response to damage, experience, or practice. Formed early in life, they mature with experience and then continue to change, albeit less rapidly, for the rest of your life. Yet despite how central these body maps are to your being, you are only glancingly aware of your own embodiment most of the time, let alone the fact that its parameters are constantly changing and adapting, minute by minute and year after year. You may not truly appreciate the immense amount of work that goes on behind the scenes of your conscious mind that makes the experience of embodiment seem so natural. The constant activity of your body maps is so seamless, so automatic, so fluid and ingrained, that you don’t even recognize it is happening, much less that it poses an absorbing scientific puzzle that is spawning fascinating insights into human nature, health, learning, our evolutionary past, and our cybernetically enhanced future.

Your body is not just a vehicle for your brain to cruise around in. The relationship is perfectly reciprocal: Your body and your brain exist for each other. A body that can be moved or stilled, touched or evaded, scalded or warmed, frozen or cooled, strained or rested, starved, devoured, or nourished, is the raison d’être of the senses. And the sensations from your skin and body — touch, temperature, pain, and a few others you will learn about — are your mind’s true foundation. All your other senses are merely added-on conveniences in comparison. After all, human beings can get by just fine in life without vision or hearing. Even people like Helen Keller who lack both these senses can thrive both mentally and physically. The brains of people born deaf don’t develop auditory maps, and the brains of congenitally blind people never form visual maps, but even deaf-blind people have body maps. In contrast, vision or hearing without a body to relate sights and sounds to would be nothing but psychically empty patterns of information. Meaning is rooted in agency (the ability to act and choose), and agency depends on embodiment. In fact, this all is a hard-won lesson that the artificial intelligence community has finally begun to grasp after decades of frustration: Nothing truly intelligent is going to develop in a bodiless mainframe. In real life there is no such thing as a disembodied consciousness.

The sum total of your numerous, flexible, morphable body maps gives rise to the solid-feeling subjective sense of “me-ness” and to your ability to comprehend and navigate the world around you. You can think of the maps as a mandala whose overall pattern creates your embodied, feeling self. All your other mental faculties — vision, hearing, language, memory — hang supported in the matrix of this body mandala like organs on a skeleton. Developmentally speaking, it would be impossible to become a thinking, self-aware person without them.

Copyright © 2007 Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee

The above is an excerpt from the book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee

Published by Random House; September 2007;$24.95US/$32.00CAN; 978-1-4000-6469-4

Copyright © 2007 Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee

Author

Sandra Blakeslee is a regular contributor to The New York Times who specializes in the brain sciences. She has co-written many books, including Phantoms in the Brain with V.S. Ramachandran, On Intelligence with Jeff Hawkins, and Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce with Judith S. Wallersein. She is the third generation in a family of science writers.

Matthew Blakeslee is a freelance science writer in Los Angeles. He represents the fourth generation of Blakeslee science writers. This is his first book.

Systemic Thinking versus Linear Thought

Instead of focusing solely on the “cause and effects” of the client’s disease or health condition, physician’s taking a systemic perspective might focus more closely on the systemic factors revolving around the client’s condition such as their living and working environments; their relationships with the people around them; and their relationship with their self physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and spiritually.

The first and most important step on the path of healing, when taking a systemic approach is to have the client or patient clearly imagine how he would like to be in his desired state of health and well being. Setting an outcome will facilitate the change process because of the brain’s ability to function as a cybernetic mechanism. This means that once the client or patient is clear on his outcome, the brain’s natural response will be to organize itself towards whatever images or beliefs he has created in his mind about getting better. The client will begin to automatically get self corrective feedback and the brain will systematically trigger the necessary immunological responses to guide him towards the goal of health and well-being.(1)

According to NLP developer Robert Dilts, systemic models are different from statistical or linear models in that they deal with the feedback of total systems, systems in which events at any position in the system may be expected to have effect at all positions on the system at later times. A particular cause or effect cannot be isolated from its context. Therefore, each part must be considered and measured in terms of the whole. Human behavior, health conditions and experiences in general are undoubtedly the result of such a system. Therefore, any satisfactory model of human experience, behavioral, physiological or epistemological, must be systemic.(2)

Greek philosophers first turned their attention to linear thought in the 5th Century B.C. Since then, it has been almost universally accepted that everything that has a beginning must be caused by something else. The Scottish philosopher David Hume disagreed with the early Greeks. Hume held the idea that the causal relationship between two events occurring in sequence is nothing more than a habit of mind. In 1739, he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature which is an analytical rejection of the commonly established ideas of causation. Hume rejected the idea that everything that has a beginning must be caused by something else.

“All we can justly say of causality is that what we take to be a cause always precedes what we take to be its effect and that there is always contiguity between the two. Beyond this nothing an be claimed,” said Hume.(3)

Established ideas of causality among evolutionary biologists support Hume’s analytical rejection. For example, how can we describe the evolution of the reptilian egg in terms of cause and effect? According to evolutionary theory, the reptilian egg is the result of the random mutations. Numerous events must have occurred for the development of the reptilian egg to succeed. Between the mutations that produced the eggshell and those that produced the embryos heart, there could be no causal connection; all of these events occurred randomly. And if there were no such connections, then how was the whole process orchestrated? From this point of view, the reptilian egg appears as the result of a culmination of improbably and random coincidences. Hence, the most logical answer to the primordial egg dilemma is to view it through the lenses of systemic thinking.

The point of all of this is to note the difference between systemic thinking versus linear though; which is geared more towards the concept of cause and effect. Keep in mind that we are a system of interactions and we are also a system within a system within a system. The interactions that happen within a human being, between human beings and their environment are systemic and respond to certain systemic principles. Our bodies, our interpersonal relationships and our societies form a kind of ecology of systems and subsystems, all of which are mutually influencing each other.(4)

The interactionary process between all of these systems plays a key role in our personal health and well being. In the following sections, the interactionary process between mind and body will be further explored.

How Do Mind Maps Effect the Body?
One of the basic presuppositions of NLP is that the map is not the territory. Everyone on this planet has their own personal filters of reality and thus, their own map of reality. The filters that we wear through life influence our personal map of reality. Everyday we trek through similar territories, but because we wear different filters and use different maps, those territories appear different.

As human beings, we can never know reality because we have to experience reality through our five senses, and our senses are limited. Therefore, we don’t tend to respond to reality itself, but rather to our own maps of reality. We all have our own worldview and that view is based upon the sort of neurolinguistic maps that we have formed. It’s these neurolinguistic maps that will determine how we interpret and how we react to the world around us and give meaning to our behaviors and our experiences, more so than reality itself. Thus, its’ generally not external reality that limits us or constrains us or empower us, but it’s rather our maps of that reality.(5)

One of the primary constituents of our personal maps of reality is that of imprints. An imprint is basically a memory that is formed at an early age, and can serve as a root for both the limiting and empowering beliefs that we may form as children. Some of the limiting beliefs that we may develop at these early ages are not always healthy, and are created as a result of a traumatic or confusing experience that we forgot. How we unconsciously and consciously view the world in terms of health is generally based on those beliefs.

Having an imprint laced with unhealthy beliefs can create serious problems for the immune system. Keep in mind that the brain is systemic, meaning that if you’re creating unhealthy beliefs in your life based on unconscious imprints, the brain will attempt to self correct those images or beliefs in the form of an immunological response. Even if the limiting beliefs are repressed or forgotten, the brain is still capable of serving as a catalyst for undesirable health conditions because of its systemic capabilities.

Many unhealthy immunological responses are the result of limiting beliefs that were created through confusion or traumatic experiences. These types of limiting beliefs contain two aspects and those aspects exist within the imprint or memory. One aspect is the way you perceived the trauma/confusion as a child, the memory or feelings of the younger you still exist inside the imprint.

The other aspect that we incorporate when we experience a trauma as a child is the point of view of the other people who were there at the time of the event. Some of those people might include family members, teachers or friends. It is during the formation of these early imprints that the limiting beliefs are formed. These limiting beliefs are capable of systemically manifesting in the form of a disease or ailment in later years.(6)

How Do Beliefs Effect the Territory?
The notion of beliefs and health is a concept that goes hand in hand with maps and territory. If the mind is the map and the body is the territory, then the unconscious and conscious beliefs that we have about our personal health are going to effect us systemically; as well as throughout the neurological levels of change (i.e. environment, behavior, capabilities, beliefs and values, identity and even spiritually to a certain extent).(7)

Unresourceful physical manifestations and psychosomatic problems, which are generally based on beliefs, are made apparent through the interactions of the brain’s cerebral cortex, limbic system and hypothalamus in correlation with the autonomic, endocrine, immune and neuropeptide systems. And in the same breath, the ability to heal ourselves from such conditions by creating healthy beliefs in exchange for the old ones – is also made apparent through the same cerebral interactions.(8)

At the center of all of this amazing activity is the hypothalamus which receives signals from all parts of the nervous system so that it functions as a central information exchange concerned with the well-being of the entire body.

The hypothalamus lies in the very middle of the limbic lobe. Although is a relatively small structure (comparable to the size of a pea and weighing no more than a few grams) it is an important structure. It controls the autonomic nervous system which is made up of the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems, creating physical excitatory and inhibitory responses within the body; and it controls the endocrine system and organizes behaviors that are related to the body’s basic regulatory and survival systems (hunger, thirst, fighting, fleeing and sex). The hypothalamus thus, integrates the sensory-perceptual, emotional, and cognitive functions of mind with the biology of the body.(9)

The most recently recognized regulatory function of the hypothalamus is its influence on the immune system. According to Earnest Rossi, author of The Psychobiology of MindBody Healing, there are actual psychophysiological mechanisms whereby the hypothalamus can alter both cellular and hormonal immune activity within the limbic system.(10)

Moreover, because the immune system is within the limbic lobe and the limbic lobe is basically the center for our emotional and cognitive functions; and certain emotions and beliefs are attached to various imprints within the unconscious mind, then it is possible to see and understand how we can become susceptible to unresourceful health conditions and diseases.

Rossi further states that the autonomic nervous system has been regarded traditionally as the major means by which therapeutic hypnosis is capable of achieving it’s biological effects.(11) If this is true, then it seems apparent that the autonomic nervous system would serve NLP interventions in the same way.

Based on all of the aforementioned information, it is only logical that if you change a person’s beliefs, then it is possible to change their physical state of being from an unresourceful state to that of health and well-being – given that the new state is ecological throughout the systemic and neurological levels of change.

Using NLP to Create Systemic Change Within the Mind and Body,
Neuro-Linguistic Programming can help a person through many of the roadblocks that keep them from healing themselves. One of the more common roadblocks for many people to overcome is their inability to believe in their own healing process. If someone believes that they aren’t going to get better, then they won’t take the necessary steps to get better.

In Robert Dilts’ book, Changing Belief Systems with NLP, he states that most people who have a difficult time recovering from an illness or condition usually adopt one of the following beliefs about their recovery process.

Hopelessness: If a person is hopeless he feels or believes an outcome is just not possible. A typical statement would be. There is no hope.

Helplessness: If a person is helpless he feels or believes that he does not have the capability of getting better. Some typical statements would be, I am not good enough, I don’t have the capability to heal myself. Healing is possible, but I’m not capable.

Worthlessness: If a person feels or believes he is worthless, then he thinks that he doesn’t deserve to heal. A typical statement would be, Maybe I don’t deserve to be healthy.(12)

When working with any limiting belief such as the ones mentioned above, the NLP Practitioner’s primary goal is to move the client from his present state of discomfort to the desired state of health and well being. This can be done by helping the client create appropriate beliefs for the way he’s chosen to heal from his condition. There are many NLP processes that can be used with the client to help him achieve his outcome.

Case Example
NLP trainers and co-authors Tim Hallbom and Suzi Smith used NLP methods to help a woman who had a cancerous thyroid. The woman had two biopsies and tested positive for cancer both times. Hallbom and Smith spent 4 hours working with her in two different sessions. When the woman went back to her doctor, he told her that the cancer on her thyroid seemed smaller than it did before, but that he wanted to go ahead and operate on her anyway because waiting could be dangerous. When he operated he found that it had, in fact, shrunk up and it was no longer malignant.(13)

During that 4-hour session, the NLP trainers did some reimprinting (14) with the client and they helped her to integrate some deep-rooted unconscious conflicts that she had within herself. They did this by assisting her to identify the positive goals and intentions behind her conflict.

One of the NLP presuppositions is that there is a positive intention behind every conflict, limiting belief or problem. This means that some aspect of the person is benefiting in a positive way from their limiting behavior, otherwise they would not be demonstrating the behavior.

(A classic example would be of the teenager who starts smoking to gain attention. Even though smoking isn’t positive or healthy, the mind might deem the attention that is gained form smoking as positive).

It was observed that the woman’s goals were in conflict. When there is a goal that is in conflict with another goal, you begin to fight yourself. One way of fighting yourself is by developing a disease such as cancer, according to Hallbom.

While working with the woman, Hallbom assisted her in re-identifying and integrating her goals. Once her goals were integrated, they were then able to assist her in moving towards her desired outcome of health and well being. Until you know what the positive aspect of the limiting beliefs or conflicts are, you can’t do that and that’s why NLP and systemic thinking are such valuable tools for helping people with health issues. (15)
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References
( 1) Dilts, R., T. Hallbom and S. Smith, Beliefs: Pathways to Health and Well-Being, Portland, OR: Metamorphous Press, 1990.
( 2) Dilts, Robert, Roots of Neuro Linguistic Programming, Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications, 1983.
( 3) Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, London, England: Longmans Green, 1874.
( 4) Based on an essay that Robert Dilts wrote on NLP Presuppositions and Creativity.
( 5) Ibid.
( 6) Hallbom, T. and K. Johnson Hallbom , Future Medicine Now, Beverly Hills, CA: The Holistic Book Project, 1993.
( 7) Robert Dilts is the primary developer of the Neurological Levels of Change.
( Carlson, Neil, Physiology of Behavior, Newton, Mass: Allyn and Canon, Inc., 1986.
( 9) Rossi, Earnest, The Psychobiology of MindBody Healing, Makham, Ontario: Penguin Books Eanada, 1986.
( 10) Ibid.
( 11) Ibid.
( 12) Dilts, Robert, Changing Belief Systems with NLP, Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications, 1990.
( 13) Dilts, Hallbom, and Smith, Beliefs: Pathways to Health and Well Being.
( 14) Reimprinting is an NLP process that was developed by Robert Dilts.
( 15) Hallbom, T. and K. Johnson Hallbom, Future Medicine Now.
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Bless Your Body – Megan Buzan

The Regions of the Brain The brain has three major functional and anatomical parts–the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain consists of the cerebral hemispheres, thalami, hypothalamus and limbic system. The top inch of the brain stem is the midbrain. The hindbrain includes the cerebellum, the pons and the medulla. Other parts of the brain’s anatomy include: the cerebral cortex, a thin layer of nerve cells on the surface of the cerebral hemispheres; the cerebrum, composed of many …