Homunculus

I’d been having pain in my hands. Aches, sometimes sharper pains, but not like getting stabbed — nothing debilitating, I could still write and type, pick things up, work like I always do.

It felt like I’ve been climbing or playing guitar the day before, but I haven’t been. At first, I thought it was that I was clenching my fists while I was sleeping, but my partners don’t report seeing that.

Now I think I know what it is: referred pain.

From phantom limbs.

Except in this case, the limbs are wings.

I’ve talked before about doing hooking energy pulls and how useful it is for me to engage my spiritual self through corporeal trauma. Well, one of the things that happens in the process of that is that the hooks pull out my wings. A set of non-corporeal energetic limbs that have been there all along, but aren’t usually accessible to my waking self-image.

I take the hooks in my upper back, just under the scapulae of each side. When I’m undergoing a Pull, I don’t just feel sensation in the representation of my upper back, I feel wings all the way out to where the ends of their bones would be, with heavy feathers weighing on those bones, and can move them, and can sense proprioceptively where they are in space as I move them.

It is extremely important to understand what happened here as an adjustment of self-image. I mean, whether my Force Ghost self has wings or not is beside the point. The point is, my self-image of them is so strong that my brain is convinced that I have them, and it has allocated real estate for them in motor and somatosensory cortex.

Real-estate allocation of motor and sensory body functions happens in the brain somatotopically. Meaning, the areas of your brain that control or receive info from various parts of one part of your body are next to brain areas that control/sense that body part’s neighbors. There is a map on your brain of your body. A representation of it in neural architecture that aligns with how your corporeal form is. This map is called the cortical homonculus. What do we know about homunculi?

Importantly, it’s a distorted map. The areas of the body that need more fine motor control and that supply more fine sensation discrimination get more real estate than the others.

Also importantly, it’s a mutable map. The area of the brain devoted to managing your thumb grows in size after you start regularly using a smartphone. But if you lose that thumb in battle, the cortex set aside for managing it does get re-purposed, but it’s a painful process. Literally.

Phantom-limb syndrome is super fascinating to read about, and you should, but the TL;DR is that despite having no thumb anymore, you still feel pain from it as though it were there. But! Massaging the empty air around where it would be, or massaging the areas on the body adjacent to it sometimes relieves the pain.

The studies around this syndrome, largely led by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, have led to some reeeeeeeeally interesting insights into how brains work. Notable for this particular essay is the work on substitute limbs in people who haven’t lost one.

Turns out, mutable real estate allocation is a necessary part of being a vertebrate. It’s how we consider the end of the sword “part of you” and can pick up a tool and do stuff with it effectively. But to the extent that a tool looks like or behaves like a body part — to the extent that you treat it like one — then smashing it, cracking it, or cutting it produces pain in the wielder, in a way that it doesn’t for non-integrated tools.

So okay, it makes total sense that my brain has allocated real estate for my wings in motor and somatosensory cortex. But what I wasn’t understanding properly was their map location in the homunculus. I had been thinking of the wings as back-attached, which … I mean, they are, but my homunculus apparently has set aside room for their representation next to my hands, not my back.

(Honestly, this makes sense given the phylogenicity of wings/hands. They occupy the same evolutionary slot, and are generated from the same neural crest progenitors developmentally.)

 

So. How do I know about the location of my wings representation on the cortical map? Because teaching myself to flex my _wings_ when I have the hand pain takes the hand pain away. It seems my wings are therefore adjacent to, or overlapping with the real estate allocated to my hands.

…

Now, this is all a nice story, but let me be clear that it’s entirely possible that it’s bullshit.

I’m a scientist by training so I’m hesitant to accept a hypothetical mechanism for something just because it fits a neat narrative.

But I’m also practical as fuck, so I’m perfectly willing to accept ‘treatments’ for things that are accompanied by bullshit explanations if the treatment works clinically.

There’s always the possibility that the treatment works by an alternative mechanism completely different from the suggested one, and that the more you engage with and analyze the recovery patterns, the better you can be at discovering the true mechanism.

I mean, I think this is right, but it might not be.

Still, potential bullshittery aside, it is worth considering; because if I am right, “wings-as-hands” has several really important consequences:

Firstly, this may mean that cultures have more agreement about celestial iconography than I had previously thought. Celestial beings might all have variously an “extra set or two of manipulable limbs” which for certain Hindu deities/demigods is extra forelimbs and for angels in other traditions is wings. The extra limbs in Centaurs might be forelimbs or hindlimbs depending on how you parse the horse half. I understand that it is problematic to just mush up random cultures beliefs like this, but it has at least made me curious.

Secondly, for energy-work professions like acupuncture, Reiki, and energetic massage therapists, you should consider whether your client may be presenting with referred pain from non-corporeal phantom body parts. If other things aren’t working, talk to them about this possibility. Help them conceptualize their body to acknowledge the presence of their bird wings, their snake’s tail, and their Centaur forelegs, and then to re-imagine those wings as a second set of hands, that snake-tail as an extension of the coccyx , those centaur forelegs as a second pair of arms. Help them couple their human form’s voluntary movement to the movement of the phantom limbs to cope with the pain themselves, and then help them distinguish how the phantom limb operates differently and be able to de-couple them for independent motion.

Thirdly, for wings to be hand-like means I need to think about wings as more than just appendages used for flying. Wings can do some of the things hands can do, too: Gesture. Make signs/words. Evoke. Ugh, the number of times I wished I could be saying three things at once, and I had the ability. This is game-changing levels of useful.