Wednesday, December 13, 2017

The body as process

When I returned from India early 1998 I went around telling people they are not their bodies ( or their minds ). Some people were receptive to this idea, others were threatened by it. My source for this was the aempirical discourse of advaita (non-dualism), which has no need of the evidence game, but while reading Norman Doidge's book on neuroplasticity "The Brain That Changes Itself" I found "scientific" corroboration for this truism.

In the chapter titled "pain" Doidge reviews the brilliant work of neurologist V.S.Ramachandran on the phantom limbs of amputees, and on the difference between the body ( which is itself an abstraction, assembled out of episodic flashes of sensation) and body image.

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