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Sam Beebout's picture

body and self

I really like the new observation that there is no central source of authority in the brain. Thinking about the brain as a coordinated system does make more sense. I'm really interested in the impact of the body on one's mood and one's sense of self. Ideally everything in our body is connected, and I think that everything is in communication, but we don't need to be conscious of all of it, and we don't always realize that we are conscious of it. Although Christopher Reeves still had his I-function I would guess that losing access to his body also dramatically altered his sense of who he was. This seems obvious because his was a dramatic case, but we are also always conveying ourselves in many ways simultaneously. Our body language is a double reflection, sometimes an opposing expression, of what we are putting out into the world. When we are stressed out, our bodies are also stressed out, and vice versa. Its not that any of this is a new observation, but I am just realizing how seeing the body as a divided between many authorities in conversation with one another makes our sense of self a dynamic and often uncontrollable. 

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