Food Chains

On perusing the internet I came across an interesting article which I think has huge implications for our body image and perception of ourselves.  I was reading about the parietal lobe, which is a lobe in the brain that is responsible for integrating sensory information and amongst other things is where your sense of body image comes from. Im talking about if you are looking out the window you know where your arm is and what it looks like because of the parietal lobe.  Without this structure you would essentially be a floppy mess (Im not kidding there is a case study where this happened).  One of the most interesting aspects for me is the important role it plays in how a person perceives him or herself. Studies have shown that people who have damaged the parietal lobe can honestly believe that a part of them is completely overinflated, bloated or enlarged. If asked to draw pictures of themselves they will always draw themselves with the body part overinflated. 

I bring up this point because since our sense of body image is tied up into the parietal lobe and the parietal lobe has the capacity to change your perception of yourself then this could have consequences for the more general person. It is clear that the parietal lobe has the capacity to make you see yourself as completely different than what you actually are. So this is my point – could it be that people with terrible body image issues dont just think they are bigger than everyone else they actually see themselves as much bigger than they actually are. Now I know people are going to say “oh I already knew that I know I have terrible body image issues and I know I am bigger than I really am”. But there is a subtle but rather larger difference. It is quite different thinking that you are bigger and believing it than actually SEEING your body as different than what it actually is. 

I think a quick fire test would be to think of how many times people may have told you – your not as big as you think you are. If you have heard this a lot they might not just be being ‘nice’ but there might actually be an element of truth to it. Because obviously the brain has the power to make us see ourselves much more differently than what is the reality. Unfortunately, this is probably driven by the brain washing we go through everyday when we read mags, watch TV and are constantly reinforced about being fat. So it would probably take some major deinforcement (in front of the mirror) to change that back.