Were people utterly inaccurate at judging their body state and reporting on it, clinical medicine would be deprived of a critical tool. Evidence has accumulated that in certain circumstances, some people are evidently able to access information about the physiological processes inside of their bodies, and to report on it. Experiments seem to demonstrate that [...]
Body-knowledge: what is it?
I use the term“body-knowledge” in my dissertation research primarily to refer to the experience of knowing about one’s own body, and especially embracing perception and assessments of the body through the body. It is meant to straddle the classic cognitive psychology distinction between explicit knowledge that is verbalizable, and implicit knowledge that may only be [...]
The brain and the internal state of the body
Hugo Critchley et al. (2004) state that (pg.189) “the internal state of the body is conveyed through a dedicated lamina-1 spinothalamocortical pathway that converges with vagal afferents”. These afferent nerves are noteworthy for the smallness of their diameter in comparison with the larger afferents that apparently deal with proprioception, the perception of the body in [...]
Modularism vs. globalism in cognitive neuroscience: implications for a science of body-knowledge
Models of how people are able to access physiological state information should take into account a long-running divide in cognitive neuroscience about to what extent explanations, models, and purported mechanisms privilege local, reductionistic, and/or modular theories, as opposed to global and holistic theories that emphasize connectedness with and interdependence of particular systems to the entire [...]
symptom verbal reports and existential-physiological discrepancy
While the anatomical basis of how nerve projections enable perception of the body is rather well known, physicians confront situations where patient verbal reporting about symptoms does not match models based on neurophysiological mechanisms. For instance, the Merck Manual Medical Library (2009) states:
“Painful stimuli from thoracic organs can produce discomfort described as pressure, gas, burning, [...]
