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    The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better
    The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better
    The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better

    Written by Matthew Blakeslee and Sandra Blakeslee

    Narrated by Kate Reading

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Why do you still feel fat after losing weight? Why do you duck your head when you drive into an underground parking garage? Why are your kids so enthralled by video games?

    The answers to these questions can be found in a new understanding of how your brain interacts with your body, the space around your body, and the social world. Every point on your body, each internal organ, and every point in space out to the end of your fingertips is mapped inside your brain. Your ability to sense, move, and act in the physical world arises from a rich network of flexible body maps distributed throughout your brain.

    The science of body maps has far-reaching applications. It can help people lose weight, improve their ability to play a sport, or assist recovery from stroke. It points the way to new treatments for anorexia and phantom limbs. It helps explain out-of-body experiences, auras, placebos, and healing touch. It provides a new way to understand human emotions from love to hate, lust to disgust, pride to humiliation.

    With scientific discoveries from every corner of the globe, Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee have written a compelling narrative that is positively mind-bending and that will appeal to readers of Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 2, 2007
    ISBN9781400174973
    The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better

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    Reviews for The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

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    • 4/5
      This book ties together a lot of current brain research in a very readable form. Although I had read of most of the research before in New Scientist magazing and in other books on the brain, this book was excellent in tying it all together and making it entertaining.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating summary of the many years of research into how the brain has "maps" for its interactions and relationships with the world, starting with the work of Wilder Penfield in the 1930's and concluding with the notion that our brains are not directed by some central "homunculus" but rather we{you} "...have the irreducible illustion of being the conductor of your life's music in all its coplexity, emotional nuance, crescendo and diminuendo - the ballad that is the you-ness of you."Our brains have "maps" of neural circuitry that adjust to our circumstances and surroundings - the Blakeslees provide NUMEROUS fascinating examples of how our brains can incorporate even the tools we use into our "body maps" such that our brain "sees" the tools as extensions of our bodies. One might be tempted to conclude, after reading this book, that the Blakeslees are suggesting that our consciousness is the sum-total of the interactions of these maps.Whether or not such is the case, the descriptions they provide of the ongoing scientific research are fascinating as are their inclusions of some of the bizarre illusions that one can safely try for oneself regarding sensations of one's own body (and even mentally incorporating someone else's body part(s) into one's one map)!