Brain Maps: Not Always Accurate

It's the Things You Don't Know...

I once worked with a professional athlete with an unusual problem. Not a serious injury-related problem, mind you, but one serious enough to limit athletic performance. .

Simply put, this golfer suddenly found it difficult to hit the ball where she was aiming. That's pretty much true all the time for a duffer like me, but for a pro, it's not so cool

As we worked together, it became apparent that she was tilting her head slightly to one side. But she didn't realize it. The tilt wasn't pronounced and most people wouldn't notice it. But for someone needing precision aim and alignment, it was troublesome.

As we worked during a Feldenkrais Method lesson, the head tilting was revealed clearly to her. Once she was able to sense the tilt herself, she was able to use her athletic abilities to incorporate that fact into her movements. The wayward aim became a thing of the past very soon.

Body Schema Out of Wack

It would be tempting to explain the head tilt as a structural problem in need of adjustment. But the problem wasn't so much that she was tilting her head, or that the tilt produced a series of consequences in her skeleton.

The problem was one related to her body schema, the body maps in the brain that represent how we're sensing and moving ourselves. I've been writing a series of posts about the body schema, and this story fits in with it.

As miraculous as these brain maps are at giving humans a sense of embodiment and the ability to use it to sense and move around the environment, sometimes things get twisted around. In one sense, a tilted head sensed as straight is an athletic problem. But looked at another way, it's an illusion, a trick . Trouble is, it's a trick the head's owner isn't in on.

There are plenty of kinesthetic illusions that come from inaccurate brain maps. Some are funny parlor tricks, while others are very serious indeed.

i-eclectica.org gives some examples of both kinds, even offering a YouTube demo of one of the most famous, the rubber hand illusion:

If you'd like to experience this sort of kinesthetic illusion yourself, try this from the post:

I do remember the crossed-hands illusion: holding my arms out in front of me and crossing them over, rotating my hands so my palms face each other, then meshing my fingers together, and slowly rotating my hands up between my arms so I’m looking at my knuckles. Then either asking someone to point to one of my middle or ring fingers or to touch on of them with the tip of my nose and attempt to move it. It is rather hard not to move the wrong one or, in other words, to avoid minor failure of my body schema.

All Will Be Revealed

So what can explain such illusions? In the crossed hands example above, it's pretty simple. We've all looked at our right and left hands millions of times as they reside on their proper sides of our bodies. But in the crossed hands illusion, things get reversed. And not being used to seeing things reversed, the brain gets confused. You think you're moving a finger on one hand when it's actually on the other.

The rubber hand gets placed in a position where it could belong to you. Then the simultaneous stroking combines with the visual sense to produce a kinesthetic illusion. There's even an illusion that leaves you feeling you nose growing longer, as you're touching it, ala Pinocchio.

But Seriously

Those are fun, but illusions connected to the body schema can also be very serious. There are some described at length in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. Body Dysmorphic Disorder and phantom limb phenomena are two of them. (There's even a clearly written book: Phantoms in the Brain)

Even anorexia, usually described as an eating disorder, owes its persistent illusion of the body never feeing slim enough to body schema. For much more on that see The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.

Clearly, we need much more research into how this body schema stuff works, gets out of wack and how we can work with it. In the meantime, though, developing a keener awareness of how we sense and act is a good way to work with many such body schema-based inaccuracies.

After all, you want to hit the ball straight, don't you?