Can you feel your brain?

Post Reply New Topic

No, I can't.

I can sense or perceive the inertia of the brain inside my head with a shaking of said vessel.

That's what I do! And sometimes when it's coming from a blob of brain that's too big to be pointed out in this way I need to move my fingers around in circles of certain sizes or whatever to indicate the size of it on this axis and the size of it on that axis.

No.

I feel every bone in my body, however; I feel my skull, for example.

It's mediated by how "Autistic" I am at the time; sometimes, I can't lie or sit down due to such because it hurts too much.

I can feel something in my head when I shake it.


It must be painful for a baby when he or she gets shaken.

When I have a certain sort of headache sometimes I get a sensation that makes me feel like my brain is pressing against my skull. A sort of wave of tissue travels from the right mid section to the back and I hear a sort of crunchy/squishy noise.

I'm sorry if that's a little unclear, it's hard to describe.

Edit:was searching for something when i came across this, an unintentional necro.

There are many sensory neurons in the brain. However, all of them receive their data from other parts of the body. In other words, you cannot feel your brain. Therefore, if you experience this, there can be only two explanations:

1. The feeling is based on real data, but coming from some other part of your body. You could be misinterpreting the data or perhaps cross-communicating, as in synesthesia. Basically, perceptual distortion.

2. The feeling is not based on real data. It is an hallucination. The possible reasons for this are too numerous to be listed here.

This is true, but you can feel your skull. I suppose it would be more correct to say "I can feel my brain moving" then it would be to say "I can feel my brain".

So I should have started with no. Alas, if you start(or end) with a simple answer people usually don't read the rest of what you have to say, regardless of how short your next(or former) statement is.

This topic is what brought me to this website. My wife has been trying to diagnose our 4 year old with Autism or Asperger's, and I have a tendency to reject it. However, I have always had some oddities myself and some issues in social situations. The reason I searched for "feel my brain" is that I've had a sensation like this many times in my life. I have been an actor/musician and songwriter for much of my career. In the moment where I am "in the zone" or in my most creative state, I tend to get into patterns or repetitive movement, pacing, swaying, and such. Also, I get a very strong sensation in the back-center of my "brain". It pulses or throbs. It's somewhat pleasing. Often when I'm in this state, it's very difficult for me to talk to someone else. My language is broken and I stutter or have long breaks in my sentences.

I admit that there is a strong possibility that I'm "feeling" something other than my brain, but I do find it curious that others have similar sensations.

Yeah, I can feel it brushing up against the sides of my skull. And it goes in different parts of my brain depending on what I'm doing. The front part of the right side of my head goes off when I'm doing something arty. The front and left side of my head goes off and math. These two sensations are entirely different from each other, they both feel like a kind of a tickling but the one for math doesn't feel good at all. It doesn't hurt, but it doesn't feel right. The right side is always going off, but the left is only when I'm doing specific things like math. Most of the time the left just feels kind of absent and dead.

The sensation itself starts near the back of the inside of my head and 'shoots' towards the front. If I'm deep in thought, it kind of 'pools' at the back and stays there, always more balanced to the right then the left. It also responds to things like music, people's voices, saying specific things like large words or numbers, looking at brightly colored things,ETC.

I don't know if it's actually feeling my brain or some strange form of Synesthesia, but I'm not lying or exaggerating when I say I can feel myself think.

Do headaches count?

ruveyn

That's actually a good question. With just a brief google, it seems that there are indeed pain receptors inside the cranium, which could explain everything we are talking about. I'm almost embarrassed to have such a sophomoric discussion, but it is something I have thought about. I would love to find out more about exactly what is causing the sensations though. I'm guessing it is along the same lines as how and why you feel headaches.

No. I think I feel the blood vessels of the brain though...they drain when I stand and my blood pressure falls.

Just because a sensation isn't coming from a physical nerve signal doesn't mean the sensation isn't real. After all, a physical nerve signal isn't necessarily the direct cause of the pain sensation. A nerve is only a messenger. The subjective sensation comes from activity within the brain itself.

So while you probably wouldn't ever be able to feel a brain surgeon touching the inside of your brain, I think it's possible to sense activity within the brain that doesn't originate from typical nerve signals. Of course, the location that you sense the feeling in might not be the actual location of the activity. The point is that the physical brain activity (neural electrical activity) is still the causing the sensation.

No you can't feel your brain, you can feel where blood vessels flow over certain nerves, the brain
its self has no way of registering pain, as some procedures on the brain are done while awake.

The subjective sensation of an hallucination or perceptual distortion can seem very real. I did not dispute that. To be clear: I did not intend to insult anyone by using the term "hallucination". That is the technical term. Hallucinations can have real causes. A simple fever is very real, and can cause hallucination or perceptual distortion. This means only that there is a true cause. Not that the interpretation is true.

What would be a non-physical nerve signal? I've already discussed and categorized the possible causes of sensation.

Yes, and without a messenger, there can be no communication. Obviously, it is the brain that interprets these messages. And it is because of subjective experience that some people here are misinterpreting the data, or lack thereof. This is the reason why I offered objective, evidence based explanations for their experiences. I am trying to help elucidate, not invalidate their experiences.
[Emphasis mine.]
You are using opinion and conjecture as evidence. It is not. And I do not understand what you mean by "typical nerve signals".

Yes, we agree that location is easily confused (see my original explanation #1). It is possible to receive sense-data from many areas around the brain: blood vessels, sinuses, surrounding muscles, and so on.

This statement is unclear. Are you trying to say that the brain is causing the sensation? If so, you are confusing cause and effect. We receive data (input) from nerves. The nervous system relays the data to the brain. The brain interprets. The subjective sensation is the effect.

If you mean that thinking about something can cause a sensation of the brain working, that is worth further explanation. Blood flow increases to areas of the brain as needed. This is how a fMRI works. It is certainly possible that people are feeling the blood vessels doing their job (due to nerves surrounding those vessels). This is not the same as actually feeling the brain.

consider this example: You recall an event from last year. You may receive sense-data from the surrounding blood vessels supplying blood to, but not any sense-data from within, the hippocampus. You could say (and believe) that you are feeling the "activity" of the brain, but this would be semantically imprecise and technically incorrect. It is still perceptual distortion.

I hope this has helped everyone to understand the nature and possible causes of this phenomenon.