Orphan Vaccines - Bridging the Gap Symposium, Palm Cove, Queensland, August 2001: Proceedings, Vol. 110 Book

FAAAASCINATING. Honestly, I kept pestering Kent, "Listen to this..." and then reading a paragraph or two. It's about the science of how the brain and body connect. We have "body maps" in our brain, that tell us exactly where our body parts are, and how they are doing. (This is why we can touch our nose with our eyes closed.) It doesn't sound interesting, until you read what this means, in practical applications. And the stuff about how our homonulcus (body maps) go awry is just astonishing.

Body mapping accounts for why we can ride a horse, why we duck a little when we drive our cars into a garage with low clearance, why we feel afraid in scary movies, and also things like autism (mirror neuron defects).

Here's an example: if you took a perfectly healthy kitten, and then carried it around with you wherever you went, exposing it to many sights and sounds, but not allowing it to interact with it's environment, that kitten would be blind. It would still "see" colors and shapes and everything, but it's brain would have no context for interpreting that input, so the cat would be just as blind as a cat with no eyes. Bizarre, huh? Here's another: the women in Mali think it's important for their children to have straight legs so several times a day, from birth onwards, they massage and pull on their infants' legs, pulling them straight. Guess the average age of walking? EIGHT MONTHS. Because those kids' body maps of their legs got so much stimulation from the environment as they were developing. Contrast that with kids in orphanages in the Eastern Block countries who are left alone in their cribs for days on end. Those kids are unable to stand on one foot without toppling over. Why? Because their leg body maps are so woefully undeveloped because there was no opportunity for interaction with their environment.

Anyhow, it's really an interesting read, runs a gamut of really diverse topics, all having to do with our body maps, and it's not very long (about 200 pages.) I really recommend it.