Suppose this were true:
Pain and body image are closely related. We always experience pain as projected into the body. When you throw your back out, you say, “My back is killing me!” and not “My pain system is killing me.” But as phantoms show, we don’t need a body part or even pain receptors to feel pain. We need only a body image, produced by our brain maps.
Norman Doidge M. D.
In the thread to follow I’d like to explore what I consider a major shift in my thinking. As usual, this shift wasn’t the result of a single experience, bit of reading or event in the clinic. I think that shifts of this sort are the consequence of many things, and not all of these events have anything at all to do with therapy – unless you think everything actually does. And I do.
The two books leading to this shift are The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee and The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge.
These books are written in a conversational manner and both contain leading edge neuroscience, or, perhaps more accurately, brain science. I feel that what they teach us has enormous implications for both our theory and practice, and that’s what I want to explore here.
More soon.
Pain and body image are closely related. We always experience pain as projected into the body. When you throw your back out, you say, “My back is killing me!” and not “My pain system is killing me.” But as phantoms show, we don’t need a body part or even pain receptors to feel pain. We need only a body image, produced by our brain maps.
Norman Doidge M. D.
In the thread to follow I’d like to explore what I consider a major shift in my thinking. As usual, this shift wasn’t the result of a single experience, bit of reading or event in the clinic. I think that shifts of this sort are the consequence of many things, and not all of these events have anything at all to do with therapy – unless you think everything actually does. And I do.
The two books leading to this shift are The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee and The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge.
These books are written in a conversational manner and both contain leading edge neuroscience, or, perhaps more accurately, brain science. I feel that what they teach us has enormous implications for both our theory and practice, and that’s what I want to explore here.
More soon.
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