20210507 : does the body have a mind of it's own

-


My right hand fingers sometimes fold and become rigid and its impossible to straighten them till it relaxes on its own .. some of you who have battled with it know what i  am talking abt.
It has increased a lot nowadays, both frequency and intensity.

The nurses try to battle with it often... 

Now , i have 2 nurses. One is very sloppy with everything she does and the other is ok.

 When the sloppy one tries to make it straight, she just can't. On the contrary when she tries, the fingers shrivel up further and close up tighter. It doesn't happen so with othe other. It just gives a usual fight, wins some and loses some...

Now i know what we feel, that I'm mentally biased and so the hand behaves accordingly.. that's the logical explanation.

However, the signals are not even making it to the mind/brain. If it did, i'd be able to move it voluntarily... My MEP test established that .

So who is making the decision for my hand on how to react? Does the body have a mind of its own?

"Gut instinct" is different.. Malcom Gladwell has explained it well in "Blink", where our mind processes a lot of information and past experiences and arrives at a conclusion in the blink of an eye. Since we don't have the step wise explanation, it manifests itself as a feeling. Hence, we say my gut says so or my heart say so. But it's still mind stuff.

This is different. A more local decision devoid of brain.

I am not sure if animals know this more. Why does a dog bark its head off on some and not others.
Why does a Cat easily go to some folks but run away from others..

What if there is more to the saying "to know it in my bones..."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20231208 : Privilege...

-
  Before my stroke, I had enough and more work to do - both on the work front and home front. I had reasonably ok health, reasonably good eating habits, reasonably good physical activities. Money is not enough for anybody, but it was reasonably ok as well. The only thing I had very less of (almost none) was time! Free time specifically. I keep sharing video recommendations to many folks regularly - most of them,  long talk show formats (1½ - 2 hours sometimes). Very interesting and informative pieces in my opinion. In today's world filled with over information and disinformation, it is almost impossible to understand most things if we don't spend the time and either read and research ourselves (which is a very far shot) or spend time going through secondary sources who have done it for us and can present it in an unbiased way.  Without it, it is very easy in today's world to get biased, subscribe to misconceptions, get misled, manipulated, etc.  However, often I get the res
Read more

20240124 : balancing the equations...

-
It is fascinating to read and understand how muscles work. For all my life, (since I had not given it any thought earlier), I simply had assumed a muscle is 1 muscle. Ex, if we say bicep muscle, it was one muscle in my mind (I don't know why I imagined so, but so it was). The truth is very far from it . Each muscle is made up of hundreds of strands (maybe thousands). And the best part (I have practically understood, not backed by any medical stuff) - is that each strand is connected separately to the brain and not as one.  For mechanical enthusiasts, each strand works like a sort of rack and pinion arrangement, operated by a chemical reaction, triggered by the brain. Each strand has two separate connections to the brain - one to work the rack and pinion arrangement each way (to contract the muscle strand and the other to release it or relax the muscle strand). In short, that's how it achieves any movement. By selecting the set of muscle strands to activate (how many most probab
Read more

20240402 : Transducers...

-
Transducers Came across this word recently when I was reading something. Hadn't come across it for a while. Its a word and concept I learnt in my electronics course (either in 12th or my 1st year engineering course I am not very sure now) A transducer, very plainly speaking, is something which helps bridging the analog world with the digital world.  For example, take the very simple digital thermometer in our homes. They can't directly measure temperature in digital form. They have a transducer inside which converts the temperature from a analog/ real world scale to a digital world scale so it can be displayed. Generally speaking, we can say it helps bridge the real world with the digital world. When I had my stroke and I was told I will struggle for balance, I was not able to understand why. My understanding (based on my school learning) was that balance is maintained by the inner ears. Of course we were not told how and I never bothered to ask. I just knew balance was maintai
Read more