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This feels like my ordinary nighttime routine: yellow light, static screen, wooden chair, pins and needles. Needles and pins? My foot has fallen asleep again – and yet, as that thought comes to me, I immediately question it: has my foot itself really turned off, or is it just that my mind has stopped registering the foot? Is my foot ignoring stimuli from the outside world, or is it simply unable to deliver the stimuli it does receive to my brain? I wonder what the relationship is between numbness and neurology. If I don’t feel a body part, does that automatically mean the part isn’t working? What if no “part” even exists outside of my

“Blind since birth, Marie-Laure Martin had always thought that candle flames were big balls of fire. The 39-year-old woman couldn’t see the flames themselves, but she could sense the candle’s aura of heat. Last October, she saw a candle flame for the first time. She was stunned by how small it actually was and how it danced. There’s a second marvel here: She saw it all with her tongue.”

"You don't need the body to feel the body"

Biology 202

Web Paper 1

The human brain is a complex organ to study. In studying it, we cannot help but be subjective, as the studying of the brain is simply using the brain to look at itself. Necessarily our interpretation of what we see is colored by the brain’s own abilities and interpretations. Some people have equated this with looking into a mirror (1). Often times when we think of objectively studying something, such as our brain, we think that we must use logic reasoning and leave out those things which we perceive to be more subjective, such as intuition and emotions (2). However, in my exploration of the topic of emotions, I have discovered

Throughout history, mankind has struggled with the epic question: “who am I?”, and each time this question has been posed, we have been presented with the same troubling answer: “I am a thinking body. I am soul, in the flesh.” At first, this statement seems to satisfy man’s burning desire to know himself, but upon further reflection, this proposed solution may pose more questions than it provides answers. After all, what does being a thinking body really mean? Is the existence of such a paradox in a single entity even possible?