(no subject)

[proximoception]

Too much wasabi makes a section of my scalp tingle unpleasantly (feels like my brain, as with headaches, but it's the scalp). Way too much and I get this bizarre reflex where I bend my head down and rub that part of it with my palm. It's genuinely reflexive, I can't not do it and it happens the same way each time--quite close to when you tickle that specific chest spot on many dogs. I love wasabi anyway, probably still more from that danger of humiliating and darkly instinctive behavior. Combined with the mercury and rawness, makes sushi quite an exciting meal.

Wonder what's up with that, the tendency to ascribe deep scalp sensations to the brain itself. Might lend something to the theory that we're wired to think of our bodies in a certain way: if certain headskin sensations are bottomless, maybe it aids the philosophically iffy notion that we're "in" there, therefore encourages special protective attention for the...organ? What is a head. Not a limb, certainly, and not just in the weak way that a thumb isn't a finger. Its being in its own category may also support a theory of locative self-concept. Foucault thought it was acculturated, didn't he? I guess there must be plenty of evidence of what different isolated cultures made of the head. Egyptians, Greeks, Christian Europeans etc. all had bad ideas of other internal organs' affecting thoughts (some of which we retain metaphorically, e.g. the role of the heart), but I can't remember any of them actually locating thinking outside the head.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I think the Greeks thought they were thinking they thought it was the liver with the liver. (Sorry.) I know Aristotle thought the brain, with all its folds and huge surface area, was a radiator to get rid of excess body heat.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That astonishes me almost as much as the evidence that human beings didn't know that copulation was a reproductive act until c. the dawn of agriculture. And the Greeks wore helmets! You've seen the pots, sometimes all they had on at war were those stupid helmets and a miniskirt. Astonishing.