Body image means different things to different people. To many
it refers to how one feels about one’s body. To us, it refers to
how one’s body feels to oneself and how one perceives its shape,
orientation, agency and ownership. Hopefully you can see that
body image is critical to pain, because pain is, we reckon,
necessarily felt in one’s body. Anyway, one of the really top
shelf researchers in this area is a fellow called Manos Tsakiris
who is at Royal Holloway in London. He has very generously taken
the time to quickly run us through one of his recent
experiments: We perceive our own bodies in many different ways.
We can look at our bodies, feel touch on our bodies, and also
feel our body from within, as when we experience our hearts
racing or butterflies in our stomachs. One way to check how good
people are at perceiving their body from within is to ask them
to count their heartbeats over a few seconds, but without taking
their own pulse. Neuroscientists believe that the more accurate
people are at this ta