Social attitudes affect unconscious sensorimotor mappings but how important are differences in skin colour for determining what is and is not part of our own bodies.
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Beyond the colour of my skin
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Expecting bad things – what are the repercussions?
Based on a recent narrative review in Neuroscience Letters from Atlas and Wager I have come away with a healthy respect for the role of expectation in pain. This review considers placebo and nocebo responses, and stimulus expectancy effects and gives a great overview of the various responses, body systems, and brain and spinal cord regions possibly involved or related to expectancy.
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Where we see it is not where it is: integrating vision and touch through a mirror
If you haven’t seen it before, I recommend this footage showing the moment when a tribe on Papua New Guinea meets a white man for the first time in 1976. Although these people had likely seen the reflection of their own body in rivers before, look at their reactions when, for the first time, they see themselves reflected in a mirror. ‘Mirror situations’ are interesting because they present a number of challenges to our brain...
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What’s in a name? Nociception by any other name will hurt, or not hurt, just as much
A while back I wrote a piece about Consciousness and Pain, in which I argued that consciousness might be the key ingredient for pain. I even tried my hand at a bit of maths, with this little equation (not to be taken too exactly): pain = nociception + consciousness.
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Sensory–motor incongruence and reports of ‘pain’
Candy McCabe and her colleagues at Bath, published an interesting paper where they induced incongruence between what one’s arm was doing and what it looked like it was doing. They did this to test a ...