Brain Maps: What You Might Not Know About Your Brain and Your Body
Am I Cockeyed?
My back is lying against a carpeted floor in a relatively new building. The floor should be level, but it feels like it slants dramatically to the right like one of those optical illusion houses. Only it doesn't. Remember, it's new construction. Put a level down and it would tells us there's nothing wrong with the floor.
Maybe it's me. I feel the slanting sensation very clearly. Could I have a cockeyed back all of a sudden? No, I'm not really cockeyed, but it sure feels that way. What's really going on is not in my body, not literally. I'm sensing myself as cockeyed because of what's happened in my brain as a result of performing half of an exercise in something called the Feldenkrais Method. And that's given me the illusion that the room is tilted.
Ironically, the sense of embodiment that let's you feel like, well, like you is in your brain. More specifically, it's in the maps of your body that reside in the brain. I've had experience working with these maps since I became a Feldenkrais Method practitioner almost ten years ago.
Evidence of these maps dates back to only the 1930s. And science being done today is turning up even more stuff about them and the way they work.to make us who we are, or at least feel like it. I've always wanted to know more about them. But not being academically inclined, material on the subject has been hard for me to find. Until now.
Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee's The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help Your Do (Almost) Everything Better, is a new book that clearly explains what body maps are and how they work.
What are body maps?
The book is too rich with information about the maps to write about in one blog post. So let me spin a helicopter view here: what are body maps and how do they work?
Body maps are representations of the various parts of you in brain tissue and in a number of different brain locations at that. There is not just one type of map. The basic types are maps for touch and movement. Another type sends and received information to the viscera.
Touch maps represent the sensations corresponding to parts of you - one for each hand, arm, leg and so on. When something touches one of these parts or a part moves in space, it activates one or more of the corresponding touch maps in the brain. Your brain kindly puts all this information together to give you a sense of your embodied self that changes as you and your environment change.
Touch maps (or homunculi) were uncovered in the 1930s by brain surgeon Wilder Penfield. To do this, Penfield would probe a part of the brain and then have the awake patient report what they felt. (Curiously, there aren't pain receptors in the brain itself, so the awakened state was possible for this procedure.)
Now days, we have fancy scanners that let us peer into the brain in real time without the need to open up the skull. That makes all sorts of research possible, which the Blakeslees present clearly.
Movement maps send messages to the muscles to have them do your bidding. These movement maps are separate from the touch maps, but work intimately with them.
Body maps are changeable!
The most amazing part of this is the plasticity the body maps repeatedly demonstrate. That is, the maps can change, sometimes dramatically, and not always for the better. (Think of strokes or other types of brain damage.)
But they can also change from experience or practice. Practice playing musical scales long enough, and your touch and motor maps adjust accordingly: your playing become smoother, maybe easier to listen to.
My own sensation of cockeyedness after a Feldenkrais session is another example of plasticity in the brain maps. Only this time it was produced by novel experience, small and highly unusual movements that I was careful to sense as accurately as I could as I was making them.
I think the Blakeslee's book really fills a void for accessible information about this fascinating topic. Check it out.
I plan on writing much more here about brain map plasticity. Look for posts like:
Why intelligence depends on brain maps.
How tools can become part of your brain maps
How some athletic or performance motor skills can go awry and what you (may be able) to do about it
Out of body experiences and brain maps.
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