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By Tim Lundeen  Beginning Noozer
Published: 24 September 2007 01:46 pm

- The Body Has a Mind of Its Own is a new book by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, a mother-son partnership with a history of writing good science books and articles. I found this book from an article they wrote for Scientific American's Mind magazine.

The book is a fascinating summary of current research on how the brain and body interact, well-written and enjoyable.

It starts with the brain map that processes incoming touch signals and the motor map that sends out signals to your muscles. We all have much larger areas for our fingers, lips and tongue relative to the rest of our bodies, because accurate input from these areas is so important.

These maps change dynamically with use, so that pianists have much larger area for all their fingers, violinists have a much larger area for just their left hand. When two fingers are taped together, their maps merge; when they are untaped the maps revert to normal. Improper overlapping of these sensory/motor maps can cause performance problems, such as the "yips" that some golfers develop that make them jerk erratically on some strokes.

Mental practice can be as good as physical practice in some circumstances. When you have something down, and know how to do it, mental practice has the same effect on your mental body maps as physical practice. So at a certain level, you can cut down on wear-and-tear on your body and continue to improve by phasing in some mental rehersal.

Your brain has a tremendous degree of flexibility in how it integrates what it sees into your sense of reality. In a virtual-reality world, you can be given longer arms, or lobster arms, or a tentacle in the middle of your stomach, and your brain will accept what it sees and you will feel as if these changes are "natural". Jaron Lanier, who coined the phrase "virtual reality", calls this "homuncular flexibility" (from the old idea of a homunculus in your brain, a little man who drives your body).

Mirror neurons are a recent discovery: when someone lifts a cup to their mouth, your mirror neurons will fire, and you can learn something new just by watching someone else do it. Mirror neurons respond to actions, to intentions, and also react to other people's emotion: when someone is sad or happy or angry, your mirror neurons give you the same feeling. When someone feels pain, you feel the same pain via your mirror neurons. Mirror neurons help babies and children develop and pick up the things they need to know in their culture. Autism may be cause by problems with mirror neurons, where autistic people don't produce the right brain signals to recognize other people's intentions or emotions.

The insula is the part of your brain where all of your internal sensory input comes together, from your heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, and so on. They signal needs such as thirst, hunger, and the need to breathe. The insula also gets input from a separate set of receptors on your skin and mouth: temperature, pain, itch, ache, and touch. Many inputs, such as being pinched, will signal both the insula and your body touch maps.

The insula is a critical part of what it means to be human, to have "sentiment, sentience, and emotional awareness". Of all the mamals, only humans and other primates have this rich set of input into the insula. "It is here that the mind and body unite. It is the foundation for emotional intelligence."

The insula plays a key role in pain management. Pain is handled in the same way as an emotion, both of which result in elevated activity in the insula. This is why meditation and biofeedback can both be effective ways to deal with chronic pain. By helping someone learn to turn down the activity in their insula, they can learn to reduce the ongoing sensation and stress from pain. The same kind of learning can help people who are anxious, and have a generally high level of arousal in their insula, to be less anxious and stressed.

Highly recommended.