Proprioception :: Oh Mia oh my-a :: Esprit d'escalier

[pne]

This morning I had an interesting experience: I woke up and didn't know where my hands were.

Usually, people know where their body parts are in relation to each other due to proprioception, but since I had been sleeping, I hadn't had any updates and so I didn't have any reference.

If I had started moving my hands, I would have become aware of their position since they would start transmitting sensory input, but it was kind of fun lying there for a short while and being aware of the fact that I had no idea where my hands were.

It also reminded me of a story I heard; as I recall, it was a woman who was given an epidural during childbirth while her legs were up in stirrups. Later, a nurse moved her legs down onto the bed, and she saw that with her eyes but she still "felt" her legs up in the air—since that was where they were the last time she received any sensory input from them before the nerves were blocked from the epidural.

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Stella said that she used to like the name "Mia" but has had second thoughts due to the ambiguity with "mir" in German... for example, "das gehört Mia" and "gib das Mia" sound like "das gehört mir" and "gib das mir".

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Every now and then, I think back to the situation in the tourist information office in Santa Maria Val Müstair, where the lady there didn't understand my attempt at Rumansh... and I think of what I could have said instead. Lots of new ideas. "Let me rephrase" or "I'd rather speak English than German" or "What did you just say? Please repeat it more slowly as I'd like to try to understand it."or "...". But it's all rather pointless since I can't go back and change the situation :)

Ah, esprit d'escalier.

Comments

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

That's freaky. *L*
I had an uncle who, thanks to a landmine, lost his legs in Vietnam. He sometimes 'felt' his missing limbs though and would try to scratch his ankle or whatever when it hadn't been there for YEARS.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yes, if your brain keeps getting the exact same signal, it starts to ignore it. This is how a lot of visual illusions work like the after-images of the opposite color.

If you don't move your hands for a while, things start to feel weird. As a child, I used to take advantage of this. You lie in bed very still and your hands will start to feel like they are floating, because you stop feeling the bed. If you move them, then this sensation immediately goes away. But if you let it continue then it stays that way for a while. Then I'd try to reorient my brain such that instead of lying on a bed, I was standing against a wall. Then after a bit, I would mentally remove the wall and allow myself to fall backward as I no longer really felt the bed. Then the bed would shake as I would fall but I was already lying down and was immediately caught by the bed. A very weird sensation.

I suspect that what I did deliberately is often unconsciously and non-deliberately a contributing factor to why flying dreams are so common.