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I was thinking a bit more about what we discussed in Thursday's class about the "I-function" and the way that the brain is related to the rest of the nervous system. I was really amazed by the small activity that we did in pairs; the nervous system helps us make smooth eye movements when we focus on a moving finger, but when the finger disappears, we, as the "I-function," cannot mimic this smooth movement without the finger...no matter how hard we try. I think this example tied in perfectly with our discussion about Christopher Reeve as someone who had an "I-function" and function in the rest of his body...but the two could not work together, they just coexisted.

On this line of thinking I tried to find evidence of other ways in which we can see how the "I-function" is, in fact, just a piece of the nervous system that can function by itself. While researching I stumbled on a rather interesting topic that is less severe and more temporary than Reeve's case, something called OBE (out-of-body experience) that is associated with lucid dreams and sleep paralysis: One site (http://www.psywww.com/asc/obe/faq/obe16.html) said "During REM sleep, the muscles of the body, excluding the eye muscles and those responsible for circulation and respiration, are immobilized by orders from a nerve center in the lower brain. This fact prevents us from acting out our dreams. Occasionally, this paralysis turns on or remains active while the person's mind is fully awake and aware of the world..." and this would be termed sleep paralysis.

And for a little more on sleep paralysis I checked Wikipedia, which said: "OBEs are often initiated through lucid dreaming, though other types of initiation also used. In many cases, people claim to have had an OBE, reported being asleep, on the verge of sleep, or having been asleep shortly before the experience. A large percentage of these cases referred to situations where the sleep was not particularly deep (due to illness, noises in other rooms, emotional stress, exhaustion from overworking, frequent re-awakening, etc.). In most of these cases, the subjects then felt themselves awake; about half them noted a feeling of sleep paralysis. "

With all of the above stated, I think my main observation is that the sort of coexistance between the brain and the remainder of the nervous system exists even when the "cables" connecting them are NOT cut!!!