The “body image” is a putative mental representation of one’s own body, including structural and geometric details, as well as the more familiar visual and affective aspects. Very little research has investigated how we learn the structure of our own body, with most researchers emphasising the canonical visual representation of the body when we look at ourselves in a mirror. Here, we used non-visual self-touch in healthy participants to investigate the possibility that primary sensorimotor experience may influence cognitive representations of (...) one’s own body structure. Participants used the fingers of one hand , to touch the fingers of the other . A conflict between the experience of the active and passive hand was introduced by experimenter interleaving their fingers with the fingers of the participant’s passive hand. This led to the active hand experiencing that it touched more fingers than the passive hand felt it was being touched by. The effects on representation of body structure were assessed using an implicit measure based on Kinsbourne and Warrington’s ‘in-between task’. We found an underestimation of the number of fingers in the central part of the hand specifically linked to the experience of self-touch. This pattern of results corresponds to the experience of the passive hand, but not the active hand. Nevertheless, comparable reorganisation of fingers within the hand representation was found for both active and passive hands. We show that primary sensorimotor experience can modify the representation of body structure. This modification is driven by the passive experience of being touched, rather than by the active experience of touching. We believe this is the first experimental study of effects of self-touch on the mental representation of the body. (shrink)

The orientation and leadership of the revolutionary “renewal of the German mind,” whose witnesses and participants we are, point in two directions. On, after seizing power, would like to talk the mind into helping out with internal development and promises it a golden age if it joins up; indeed it even offers it the prospect of a certain voice in decision making. The other direction, on the contrary, attests its mistrust of the intellect by declaring that the revolutionary process will (...) continue indefinitely, and has room for the mind in its task; or it might also assure the intellect that it is not needed at all because a new mind has already turned up, and that the old one might as well jump into the fire and either burn to ashes or purify itself into its elements. What has happened up to the moment these words are being written leaves no doubt that the second direction is on the march, the first its musical accompaniment. Nor can it be otherwise than that a Movement [National Socialism] that has manifested itself so powerfully demands above all that the intellect complete assimilate and subordinate itself to the Movement. But then again, it is possible that the intellect cannot do this without renouncing itself. Surely there must be some sort of boundary here, since nothing happens that is not contingent; so it is a good test for the intellect that today it has everywhere been saddled with a kind of kangaroo-court mentality that judges it not according to its own laws, but according to the law of the Movement. Robert Musil made a decisive contribution to twentieth-century European literature. Among his works available in English are Young Törless, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and The Man Without Qualities. Burton Pike is professor of comparative literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. With Sophie Wilkins, he has edited and translated a new edition of Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities, available in 199. He is the author of Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work and The Image of the City in Modern Literature . David S. Luft teaches modern European intellectual history at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1912. (shrink)