Post 21: Me, Myself, and My Proprioception

(my body, my... eh, whatever)

Home Is Where The Head Is |

Terry Gross, America’s favorite interviewer once said in an interview whose link I cannot for the life of me find, that she lives mostly inside of her head… that she isn’t the type of person to walk into a room and ‘own it’, and I recall those words as being profoundly relatable — I am also not that person who walks into a room with any desire whatsoever of wanting to own it; in fact if there are more than five strangers in the room, I would rather not walk into that room at all. I also don’t care to control things that lie outside of my head — on road trips, I don’t want to be the one in charge of planning, or the driving, or even the navigating if I can help it, and thankfully a handy excuse that I can legitimately carry around like Jack Handey’s sacks* is my utter and complete lack of a sense of direction… so much so, that the day I bought my first GPS thingy with the GO HOME button counts as one of the best days of my life: Go HOME little Jetta, I remember whispering to my Garmin, go home to where the head is.

*To me, it's always a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?" you can say, "Sorry, got these sacks." — "Deep Thoughts" By Jack Handey on Saturday Night Live.

Proprioception |

Proprioception is the reason we are aware of the scope and extent of our physical bodies, of how they exist in the context of the space around us — it comprises of numerous sensory receptors located all through the body that allow the brain to create a mental image of our physical selves, which in turn lets us not only to understand our physical boundaries, but to also respond to external stimuli appropriately.

That is until it doesn’t…

Like all other things, proprioception can also go awry — it can happen as simply as when one is really tired e.g. one might trip more easily… or then there are the more interesting, more permanent, and therefore more tragic ways in which it can break down. Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), the most famous of neurologists of the Awakenings fame describes a case in his most excellent book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat of a woman named Christina who lost her sense of proprioception so completely that she couldn’t even get a sense of her arms and legs unless she very intentionally stared at them… and even then, she would ‘lose’ them often, she would think they are in one place, but find them in another: This “proprioception” is like the eyes of the body, the way the body sees itself. And if it goes, as it goes with me, it’s like the body’s blind,” she says in the book.

Oliver Sacks and Robin Williams who plays him, sharing a laugh on the set of Awakenings:

Source: The Oliver Sacks Foundation’s Facebook page.

And for no particular reason, the strangely similar logos of book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the 2024 Paris Olympics:

Side note: Indian men (in particular) seem to have a magically widened sense of proprioception that extends beyond their physical selves… one which allows them to not just manspread, but to generally claim more space than is either warranted or necessary… especially if that space was previously occupied by a woman — I call this superpower: improprioception.

Phantom Syndromes |

The most common manifestation of these syndromes is the phantom leg syndrome in which people continue to sense, and to even experience pain in their missing limbs — but what you probably didn’t know is that this type of thing can even happen with the eyes! In PES, phantom eye syndrome (did this really need an acronym?), people experience pain, and even visual hallucinations after their eyes have been lost or removed; nature can be cruel.

These phantom syndromes happen because the brain senses significant gaps in its inputs, and then needlessly tries to compensate for these gaps by fabricating things… it’s a classic example of the brain being “oversmart” (as they say in India) — very much like my iPhone these days… no, iPhone, I would not like to start sharing my location with my mother now!

My Body, My Mirror Image? |

Another somewhat related syndrome, only it’s not a medical condition, is dissociation or depersonalization. Often the result of trauma, a person with this condition doesn’t quite “really” see or recognize themselves in the mirror — I know, because I’ve been there, and not seen that… and strange as that may sound, Bessel van der Kolk discusses this quite extensively in his very famous book The Body Keeps the Score, so apparently it is not that uncommon of a thing.

What does make for an actual medical condition though is something called prosopagnosia, or face blindness, in which people simply lose to various degrees, the ability to recognize any and all faces, including their own! This is the famous titular case in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but get this, just recently (yesterday in fact), I found out that Sacks himself suffered from prosopagnosia, the fallouts of which I imagine I will read about shortly in his autobiography On The Move, a book that I have just started reading, and which although is not the best of literary writings, but still — my god, what a man, and what a life!

A Lack of Situational Awareness |

Many of my cousins, my sister, and I, all suffer from a “condition” that we have self-labeled as ‘Lack Of Situational Awareness’ — LOSA, for short. There likely is a genetic element to it, and there’s definitely a comedic element…. that is unless you are at the receiving end, in which case I hear it’s not that much fun.

Here’s case in point: a cousin of mine returned home from a conference after many days during which her husband had replaced one of those big old CRT TVs that one used to have with a flatscreen, no doubt expecting her to be filled with glee at the upgrade — but my cousin had no reaction at all… not because she didn’t care for the sleek new TV, but because she simply didn’t notice it — not even after her husband asked her to carefully look around the living room!

On the flip side, I do believe that this makes all of us very adjustable creatures since our surroundings really don’t matter that much: put us anywhere, and it’s all the same for the LOSA lifestyle… obliviousness is bliss!

Addendum |

I published an addendum to this on Jun 12, 2025 about Piezo proteins. You can read the addendum here: