Your parallel universes… Growing, sustaining and controlling your operations in ALL of your brain Worlds
For the classical description of the loss of cutaneous sensation in oxygen-deprived skin, see Head et al., Studies in Neurology, Oxford Univ. Press (1920)
The neurologist Antonio Damasio has written extensively about some of the most interesting aspects of the corporeal You, in his The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (2000).
Much of what is written about the innervation in the human body in this Chapter would be a subject of any Human Physiology 101 course. In my view, body senses are still best-treated in the now-dated Medical Physiology, Volume 2, because its editor (my professor Vernon Mountcastle) was focused over a lifetime on the study of this great brain system.
Proprioception and kinesthesia (which we’ll talk about in practical terms later) is a difficult scientific subdiscipline to reference on a level that confers understanding because treatments of it for the non-expert are (in the author’s view) pretty scattered. Again, begin with Mountcastle’s Medical Physiology, Vol. 2; then, for a more up-to-date perspective with more information about mechanistic bases of functional organization and control, go to Kandel et al’s Principles of Neuroscience. To get down to the details in your understanding of pain science, begin with The Science of Pain (Basbaum A and Bushnell MC, eds) (2009).
There are many books documenting the history of Buddha and Buddhism (which, like Christianity or the Muslim religion, has been marked by the differentiation of specific beliefs by different sub-groups of followers). I’ve read several, but don’t know where they sit in terms of critical stature. I recommend that you just begin with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism because it provides links to many other aspects of history and thought, and is therefore a good starting point for your developing an understanding.For a demonstration that we sharpen our minds through meditation practices, see, e.g., Barinaga M (2003) Buddhism and neuroscience. Studying the well-trained mind. Science 302:44; Davidson RJ, Sutton SK (1995) Affective neuroscience: the emergence of a discipline. Curr Opin Neurobiol 5:217; or Slagter HA et al (2011) Mental training as a tool in the neuroscientific study of brain and cognitive plasticity. Front Hum Neurosci doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00017.
